Empty

February always gets me in the end. Even when I don't think I'm thinking about my Dad, or not about his death anyway, then I suddenly recognise that thoughts about suicide are bubbling to the surface. Irrational fears that other loved ones will do it, or that maybe it's my inevitable fate. This is not not not a good time for me. The days are grey, damp, foggy and cold. The sun made a kind of momentary semi-appearance through the clouds this morning and my friend A and I, out walking, stopped our conversation, turned towards it, and absorbed its much-filtered rays, like people in a desert finding drops of water on a cactus. I have no work this week, and am falling hard through the cracks in my life. I read, I go for a walk, I cook. There are times of respite, of absorption in something beyond myself, but every time there's a gap, a lull, a question about what to do next, I begin to flounder. I obsessively check my inbox for replies from people I've emailed, and become enraged by the silence. Empty empty empty. And the old refrain in my mind of my mother's voice in my childhood telling me, when I used to say I don't know what to do, that I can't possibly be bored when I've got all those lovely books to read and toys to play with. Marinaded for years in all my parents' unspoken unhappiness, whilst frequently being told how happy we all were, I could never find words or reasons for my misery.

I remembered this evening the time we were on holiday in the Dordogne when I was nine, and there was a fire in our hotel in the middle of the night, and we had to escape in our nightclothes. Lucky that my mother was a light sleeper, and was woken by the sound of slates crashing to the ground from the burning roof, otherwise we might have been burned in our beds (this at least was the family myth thereafter). We stood across the road, watching the upper storey of the building consumed in roaring orange and yellow flames, sparks flying. The patron ran up and down in front of the building wringing his hands and exclaiming que faire? que faire? There was another hotel in the village and eventually we were accommodated there for what remained of the night, and in the morning my father went into the damaged but now safe original hotel, and retrieved our wet but otherwise undamaged possessions. My beloved owl Wol with the white furry tummy was never the same again, all his stuffing clumped together by the water from the pompiers' hoses.