The silence is an echo, is an echo.
I haven’t been well. I was a mess on Monday with a face full of tears and hay fever. My limbs felt heavy and I napped as soon as I returned from work until a later dinner and a quiz with friends. I made it through and then I went back to bed.
By 5.30am I looked like a picture from an ill advised google search on swelling and I felt awful. My shoulders are so heavy, all my nerves on edge. I think I’m grief tired. I spoke to a pharmacist and a doctor – I took the steroids and am looking forward to my recovery. I’m not going to get any better, just differently well.
I am not myself and I am wandering. Why do we seek to go back to something we were a period of time ago? Everything else outside seems content to look forward and for things to just be so.
I watched a show on BBC Four where Chris Packham and some excellent experts from the Natural History Museum looked at the biodiversity of four gardens on the same street in Welwyn Garden City, filmed over the course of a year. I admired the creatures and the way they all held each other in place. The symbiotic nature of nature. I felt amused by the mating frogs and a centipede running hamster wheel like; trapped in a glass as the presenter showed it to camera. I felt like a wild creature and a dormant moth.
Sometimes I have to pull up a chair and sit in the grief, wrap the sadness blanket around me and surrender to it. It is the absolute worst feeling. It is massively inconvenient. Here is some sad, and second and third helpings of misery. Thing is; in those moments there isn’t much on the other side of it. I feel blind to anything other than the moment I’m in. There has been so much silence around today I could have stopped existing.
I realised I just wanted my companion back. That person who lived with me and went through it all alongside. Sometimes being thoughtful and supportive, other times a bit less great- but still here. My someone. The person who opted in to the worst of me.
It is good to have a person you can frustrate and then redeem yourself with; over and over again. I miss him.
The trouble is; when I am doing things, I notice the silence and sadness less. Then when I have to stop I am cloaked in it. I am desperate for today to end.
This loneliness reminds me of something I wrote last September- it stands. It is almost 7pm and the drugs are kicking in now. I am waking up 12 hours too late.
The Vanishing
I have come to use the hoover
But it is broken
That tube that you taped
That I taped- again
Then googled just to see
If it could be replaced
Has collapsed to the floor
In sympathy for us
I have cause to use the shower
The head still partly crusted
With the limescale which you swore
Had fallen free on its own
After I had tired of awaiting your attention
And pushed at it myself with a wet rag
And was surprised by its desire to yield
I have considered placing used mugs about the surfaces
To tut at as if were yours
To leave the bath mat sodden
And the bloody light-switch
Your circuits drawn about our house have broken
I make the trail like our little detective did
on the day you disappeared