I wake early and lie there for an hour while the words surge through me, demanding to be heard, demanding to be captured, to be written down, displayed, presented, though I don’t believe that anyone will take any notice, except myself perhaps, two years from now, or whenever, reading them again and marvelling and thinking, ‘that’s how I felt, but what happened next? It didn’t take me anywhere; I’m still here, still fighting with those same words’. Thick and fast they come, riddled with cliché, falling, tumbling over themselves. How can I ever remember them?
Sometimes they line up in my head, waiting to be transcribed, transferred from the world-in-there to the world-out-here (though this is really just another ‘inside’ world, just inside somewhere else and slightly more accessible to others, if others there be who care to access it). Sometimes I have no idea until I sit here what they will be or where they will come from. Sometimes the same ones come back again and again, and I type them out again forgetting that I’ve already said them some other time in some other way, or maybe in the same way.
How was I feeling, when I lay in bed, listening to the birds singing, and a cat crying (was it one of my mine? What did it want? Was it just passing through? I didn’t hear it for long) And Hubby’s gentle breathing, so close beside me yet so far from my heart (what was I saying about clichés?).
I feel gauche and unlovely, yet I know that doesn’t define who I am, that I can be so much more, that I can be admired, desired even, if I knew how to capture the essence of that person, the one that seems to be liked and admired and desired. But she runs away and laughs at me, I can’t keep up with her, I sigh, I think ‘why can’t I be happy just to be a good woman and love my husband and my kids and my house and my job, and take my happiness from that?’ though I know I never will, and there will always be something more out there that I can never quite grasp.
And those other ones, the ones who look at me (if they see me at all) as though I were something unmentionable sticking to their Manolo Blahniks (whatever they are, my favourite footwear comes from Primark), do they feel the same inside, well, not the same, but do they have their own insecurities? I’m quite sure they do, though it doesn’t help to remember that, not as it ought to.
And I bounce back and forth, I think about walking through Brussels on the first afternoon, the last time, alone with my words, unable to get in touch with anybody, so I walked alone through the city streets, across the Grande Place, through the elegant arcade thinking, ‘What do I do now?’ I didn’t have a book or notebook with me, I could have sat in a café alone with a hot chocolate, but without a book in front of me, without the comfort of words, either ones to read or some way of writing my own, I felt bereft and horribly alone. And I thought, is this how it would be, to be alone? Though I knew the answer, that it might be some of the time, but it wouldn’t be all of the time. And I thought of Seal’s song ‘Don’t cry, You’ll always be loved’, and I thought, yes, surely there would always be someone, if I made the leap, I’m not so unlovely, after all, and there is one love in my life that I will never lose and that is my daughter, not so much my son, though I know I have his love too, it’s not a love I can do anything with, too much like his father’s love, it is a massive, solid, impenetrable thing which I cannot fall into and embrace and make my own.