Sometimes in life you have to trek through figurative mountains.
Right now that’s what I am doing, swimming through a thick tide and to be honest there is no end in sight. No shore to reach for. I will say though that there are posts, and each post is promising me, when I hold on to it to catch my breath, that there will be another one soon, that there is hope to look forward to.
But no shore yet. No end in sight. No light at the end of the tunnel.
The thing is, though, I am so certain that it will come. It can’t not. It can never always be like this. This is temporary, help will come, this will end!
That’s what gets me through these dark, dark days.
I am doing NanoWrimo – but the blogging version, again. NanoPoblano – right? I didn’t sign up properly this year. But this has been the hardest year in my life so far. I have moved across the globe – which is stressful in itself, trying to settle in a new country. And now my mother is going through something so shocking, terrifying and confusing for us all. It’s taking a toll on us mentally, mainly because we just don’t understand it and don’t know what to do. Normal illnesses are understandable because at least the patient is coherent, and not saying awful things or wailing or in a pit of despair. Mental illnesses are ugly, and it’s so difficult to watch your mother become alien.
I would usually call my mother up and ask her what to do in this situation, but I can’t do that, because she IS the situation!
And so in order to achieve something, and to distract myself, because Lord knows I need the distraction right now, I am going to write a post every single day in November.
Weaving through silky straight roads. Malevolent when they want to be. Reckless intent in the blaring horns. Arrogant confidence in the nose-to-rear jostling, small skinny limbs operating over half a tonne of machinery, music ricocheting around an empty skull. Move, move, move out of my way.Move, move, move, move. Nudge the car forward then brake, to the beat of the music. The stragglers scramble to get out of the way. Bullies bully the bullied.
A small man’s gargantuan car on the immense roads of Arabia. A camel against the dunes? Something far more sinister. High rises soaring above the roads, reflecting, reflective, twinkling lights and LED displays larger than life and devastatingly distracting.
They’re monsters, these little humble men with their generosity and hospitality. Beasts on the roads, in their imported cars. Larger than life, always have somewhere to go, teasing drivers, playing with them like a predator with its prey. Hooting horns, flashing lights, move move move, threading through the lanes like serpents.
A drunk driver won’t take you out here, it’s the reckless risk of the youth growing up in a world that tells them they will live forever.
This was Day Five of my Short Story Challenge. The why of which is outlined here, and the challenge of which is outlined here.
I think we are all ‘f****d up’ because the world is so fragile, and the human mind cannot deal with fragility. It fragments our existence and sends everything we ever knew tumbling away from us.
We lose control and are haunted by existentialism, and then check ourselves into therapy because we can’t make sense of it and somehow that is so deeply depressing.
We distract ourselves with loud music and funky interests, with books and words and lives that don’t exist. With colour and people and loud, buzzing laughter.
But when the lights go off we lie awake, fearful and fearing, because the darkness brings those thoughts to life again and there is noting we can do to stop them.
Where did we come from? We think. Where are we going? Everybody is going to die, so what is the meaning of life then? How is it that we are so intricate and full of depth and feeling and then suddenly one day we are stone cold and dead? WHAT WAS IT ALL FOR?
Sometimes the thoughts that spring upon us on those rude midnight awakenings have to do with our families. Or our other loved ones. Or our failed attempts.
I think the world is one big fat distraction. I deal with these thoughts with some kind of iron strength inside of me. When I lie awake, fearful, I think, Well, we are all born to die anyway. And dying doesn’t mean the end of everything. Dying is a part of living.
Also I believe there are reasons we live on earth, and it truly is not all for nothing.
this looks like haze and grey cloudy days. fog some mornings. maybe frost.
but it’s damp now. the dampness rises from the ground and it would have been a steamy dampness had the heat been trapped in england’s atmosphere. but it isn’t. england is cold. you would not know the belly of the earth is molten lava, you would suppose the ground was cold, and coldness rises from the ground, but really…
really the cold that england enshrouds herself in comes from space.
comes from her perpetually facing towards the inky blackness of the universe in this season of her circumvention around the sun.
towards the cold harshness of the world beyond this world, absent from the warmth of the burning star that is the sun.
So November starts with fireworks. She knows she has a lot of work to do, dragging the unwilling folk through GMT, when they are suddenly thrust into early sunsets, and a black night, so unlike the perpetual twilight of summer nights.
I am thirty. Thrifty at thirty. Mind-drifty at thirty.
I look old but my mind is still 12. Isn’t that what everybody says? My daughter, who is 3, asks why I am so old, and my son enquires about the technology in ‘my time’ – which I don’t think is old at all, but I now slowly realise is redundant. Landline telephones? Redundant. In my home they are anyway. Which is awful. My children ought to know how to pick up the telephone and dial a number to the dial tone in the speaker and call their grandparents. Landline in my parents’ home? Redundant also. Non existent! Everybody has a mobile phone now.
And don’t get me started with mobile phones. We used to call them ‘mobiles’ but now we just call them ‘phones’ since they have replaced the real phones we used to use. The thing with our phones today is that they suck our faces right in, so we exist in two planes. The virtual plane where information seems to be pounding us at twenty million hits per second, and the real life plane where days plod on as usual and sunrises and sunsets are not as exquisite as those curated by the professional photo-editors of the virtual plane, and yet when we manage to extricate ourselves for a moment or two, the wind smells so fresh and the grass so green.
And people still watch DVDs? Use CDs? Videos?!
I am thirty and I feel terribly ancient and almost desperate, clinging to several threads but not knowing which one to pull on. I feel dragged in many directions, like that corporate punishment of yore, only the pain is in my mind. It manifests as a fear. It rises only in the dead of night, beyond the witching hour and in the moments of suspense before dawn puts her gentle, yet creeping fingers on the edge of the horizon. When there is a stillness in the atmosphere and a heaviness in the limbs and when oxygen seems scarce. It tells me I am nothing, a speck, will not amount to anything, will never have a legacy, will never achieve like I so desire to. And then the sun rises and so do the responsibilities and I shoulder them again like a rucksack only there are metal chains and financial worry.
But time is dashing madly along, pulling us all with it, backwards through hedges, bumping our heads on the bare autumnal branches of our lives. And some of us learn to enjoy the ride, and others become upset that the bumps are causing valuable things to fall out of our pockets.
Like memory.
I took both my kids for their vaccinations yesterday. The nurse there said to me, well lady your older child is all up to date on his vaccinations.
Am I going mad?!
He certainly isn’t, I told her, I brought him over and he was poorly so we said we would rebook! No, I can categorically say he has absolutely been vaccinated. It’s all written down here on our system, the batch number of the vaccine and the date.
Oh my goodness me! I put my hands on my face, how on earth do I not remember this?!
I don’t know, she said, her eyes still trained on her computer screen.
Is this thirty? Memory loss?
Anyway. Happy NanoWrimo. I am determined to do it this year. Adding another thread to my already filled hands.
It’s bluebell season, or rather, the start of it. My son wanted to hunt for a carpet of bluebells under a canopy of sparse spring foliage so off we went. Meandered through several villages, stopped by a couple of cafes and village shops in the sloping hills of the cheshire countryside to ask if anybody knew where we could find bluebells.
One kind lady drew us a map and we parked our car next to a quaint little church and made our way over a stile and into a pine wood. My kids moaned and complained about the steep climbs and the many holes in the ground – badger setts? Fox dens?
Oh they WHINGED and it got on my NERVES and I told them so! My son was afraid of a little fluffy white dog and I told him not to be such a baby which was really mean in hindsight, given that he was attacked by some dogs when he was two and still harbours a (sensibly healthy!!!) fear of canines. I feel awful about it to be honest. The frustration with the moaning, the lack of patience with the fear….
But we found bluebells. Carpets and carpets of them, flowing and rippling in the wind over little slopes in the wood. My son picked a bunch and said they were for me because I was the most beautiful and best Mama ever. See? So much guilt. Why can’t I just be what he says I am. Why do I have to be such a witch sometimes!
Then when we had our fill of bluebells we drove to the ruins of a castle, climbed up a steep hill to the top (more moaning, more whingeing), and then the children’s screams of laughter and joy on the windy summit, the glorious view of sunny Cheshire all around us, oat crackers and grapes in hand – and suddenly it was all worth it.
Is it all worth it? I asked my five year old.
He asked to sit on my lap and I said no, but you can lean on me.
So he leant on me and I stoked his hair and he said it was so amazing up here.
There’s guilt and joy and sadness and regret and guilt and then so much joy and love in their presence and being and existence… and then there is me promising myself, after they are in bed, to be more patient, more kind, more lenient, more validating, more wholesome….
Tomorrow we walk to the library (I expect more whingeing but they must learn to walk long distances!) and then to the hospital for an appointment, and then perhaps stop at the shops on the way home for some seeds and laundry detergent.
Hopefully my phone will be out of sight and mind, I will be more patient (despite knowing i will need to nag a million times to get their toys put away and their shoes put on), and I will be more accepting of my children as they are in their own precious little spaces.
I watched the moon rising over the sea and it was as though I had never seen the moon in my life before. I have never seen the moon like this. A great golden orb, bigger than I have ever seen the sun, and my eyes followed it hungrily as it edged its way over the watery horizon, up up up in the black starlit sky. Huge, emitting its pale warm glow, reflecting over the silent and calm sea as it rose further into the sky that spanned my place on earth.
My place on earth.
Earth swimming with the sun and the moon in the vacuum we call space.
Space because it stretches on and on and out, forever reaching the unknown infinity.
When I look at the world this way, and I think of my place in it, and the hum of life and humanity and the machines we have created of materials and ourselves, my mind stills for a moment and I realise the noise is there to distract us from the truth. Of our being. Our existence. Us on this earth, with space spinning above our heads and under our feet.
We are here.
And we won’t be soon.
So where will we go?
Where we will go.
And it’s a glorious feeling because even though we all argue here on earth about our existence and the inevitability of the end, deep down we all know the truth. Our cells and bones and souls know the truth. You call for the truth in the depths of your fear. In your deepest slumber, you know the truth.
Why, the truth is as inevitable as your beautiful death.
Oh dear. Ugh. I hate this one. But I’ll answer it anyway. The past, probably. Cringefest in my brain, all the embarrassing things I said and did. And the dumb things I chose to do. And the downright idiotic psychopathic people my lonely lost self chose to associate with. Starved of affection? Validation? God knows. Couldn’t smell the real deal when it was shoved in my face, so chased after something bogus, and harmful. Eurgh. It reeks.
I don’t think about that a lot anymore though. It rears its ugly head every so often but I soon snuff it out.
I am scared of the future. Always have been. I feel somehow I don’t deserve it. Like it’s too good for me. Or the good in it is too high for me to reach. Like I am not worthy. But when I question it I don’t understand what I have ever done to be unworthy?
Hmm, maybe making a stupid choice at 16? I was told often enough it ruined my life and made me the most evil villain to ever exist.
But the rational almost 30-year old me knows this cannot be true.
Then I try to psychoanalyse it and it presents itself clear as day but I am terrified to take it and let it speak to me.
It says ‘you never felt you deserved good things as a child.’
Now, THERE is some unpacking for me to do. Do it I must, before my kids get older, and think they too don’t deserve good things in life, so don’t go chasing better.
I began this month feeling hopeful; we had just emerged from a particularly warm October. Indian summer. Evenings shorter but not quite cold enough to realise the inevitability of the hibernation season. Then as November progressed, I succumbed to the misery of short evenings and lack of vitamin D. It was mostly due to not getting out as often as I would like. It’s being too cold, my worry over bundling children up, a myriad of things. But we have reached the end of November, and are hurtling towards the middle of winter, and I find myself resigned to the season. Not just resigned, but gathering some hope in it. Seeing the beauty in the darkness.
Like how the stars glitter in the black sky.
Like how bright the moon is on clear nights.
Like how beautiful the icy crystals of frost as they decorate everything the sun does not touch.
How the water has frozen in the watering can, and what a beautiful pattern icicles make on the shed windows. How the leaves crunch when they’re frozen as opposed to when they’re dry. How the birds still find a way to chirp when the very air feels laden with cold.
How the mornings are hazy, clouds of mist billowing over the grass, ice in the atmosphere, in our very breath. The landscape is magical when the sun chooses to reveal herself.
But even when it is cloudy, the scenery revealed by the lack of dense foliage on trees can be breathtaking.
November has been kind to me this year. Patient with my tantrums. Holding space for my impatience. Much kinder than I have been to her – to winter in general – heck, even to my family.
I leave November a little sombre. Deep in reflection. Hoping to be more kind of spirit as December knocks a cold fist at the door.
Ocean Bream 