Waking at 2:30, I take myself downstairs to the sofa, folding my body into a semi-foetal curl, wrapping around my thoughts. The cat comes in, mews a greeting and settles herself into the hollow, against the curve of my body. She presses against me as tenderly as did the children when they were babies, her furry elegance curled into a perfect circle of contentment, face against my legs. I feel and hear her purrs, so loud in the quiet house.
The words beat themselves against the inside of my forehead, trapped just above my eyes, trying to escape. My notebook isn’t here, I left it by the computer when I was transcribing yesterday, they will have to wait where they are for now.
I will be so tired in the morning, yet I will have to get on and deal with the day. Writing class, writers’ group, and then an evening meeting, the first of three this week, when I will be the faithful recorder, concentrating, tracking the discussions, the words flying through my brain and out of my fingers, later to be retrieved again and confined to bits and bytes, reassembled in logical and coherent sequences, and fed back to their originators. A word processor, that is what I am, that is what I do.
I remember telling the Crazy Frog about my inability to sleep, how I feel permanently exhausted, his reply ‘you don’t look it’, casual, gentle words that mean nothing, really, and yet something in the way he said them still nestles in my mind like the cat in my lap. I remember him sleeping on the bus to Nicosia, resting against me as casually and confiding as she is now, and me being happy just for that, hoping he wouldn’t wake and pull away. Simple, ridiculous things.
Monday’s realities drive out Sunday’s fantasies. What I want seems so very little, pathetic really, something that happens to people everyday, and yet so hopelessly unattainable for me. How could I even hope to find someone to share those feelings with? The answer, I know, is to rise above the wanting, to see the fantasy for what it is. I don’t dream of winning the lottery, why should I dream of this?
Ran thinks I interpret the word desire too literally, but the smaller meaning is subsumed into the larger. Desire for love, desire for wealth, desire for change, for things to be different from how they are, right here, right now, all come from and go back into the same place, I can’t help it if the way my mind is working lately leads me to focus on that one interpretation.
My poetry mocks me, all about roses rotting in water, moths caught on pins, cranes circling, boats drifting, all trapped in their different ways. The fisher king sits in his castle in the middle of the waste land, waiting for the perfect knight. But will the perfect knight ever find his way to me?