Non-Leap

The end of February - always a bit like being pulled through a hedge backwards for me, and this year I even look a bit like that, having missed the moment for a much-needed haircut over half term, what with being ill and my hairdresser being something of a vortex (a major component of turbulent flow), and not appearing to me a useful part of my recovery process.

February stumbling towards March as only February can. These unmistakable harbingers of spring, the snowdrops and crocuses, the busier birds, the increased light - mingling uneasily with the temperature, the ice  in the puddles, the snow along the field sides. As a time for suicide it always strikes me as a moment, when if only he could have waited just a little longer, everything might have begun to look different. Or who knows, maybe the early breath of spring was more than he could bear.

The elusive spring and the elusive 29th disappearing together forever hand in hand.

Often I don't even think about it that much (last year yes this year not so much) but then my body feels it in the season, in the light, in the approach of another phase of our lives, another arrival at the end of winter. And the calendar always goes on about it - the truncated month looks so different - I get paid sooner, the date and day in February is echoed by the day and date in March in these non-leap years. And for some reason there are always suicide synchronicities - Sylvia Plath all over the radio this year. And I always find myself worrying about someone close to me killing themselves - unexpectedly, needlessly. I am thinking about other things, but my father's death is always nibbling at the edge of consciousness, a counterpoint to the rest.

Time

If I had to write a poem to save my life
it probably wouldn't be this one
that wildly points at the daffodils in the vase on the table,
swings round to include the dark logs
and flying flames in the fire box.

Instead the poem that's on the back of the tip
of my tongue when I wake up
and don't know the time
would suddenly spill out of me
onto the page - loud
like rubble from a tipper truck.

Nine

Prayer

Now I sit in something like an attitude of prayer, elbows on the table, palms pressed together, index fingertips to my nose, and search for words, or the right words. There's a thing about impermanence that my mind cannot leave alone every day just at the moment. A thing about the passing of time, and how I see it in the faces and bodies of those close to me, and those around me. The idea that we are all marching towards the grave. Nothing new about these thoughts, for me, for anyone, but a particular tone to my current preoccupation. A sense of something slipping away from me, a sense of inevitable ending... to everything. A sense of unreadiness.

Something too about woundedness. About hurt and how we work out ways to survive it and go forward to the next thing. And how I have always tried to hide my hurt. How hiding it has not made it go away. How again and again in the twists of my story my hurt has returned in different disguises and tried to make me listen, tried to make me unmask it, let it live in the light. How I've tried to do that but still always ultimately believed that the end goal of all that was to leave it behind, to get beyond it. How I now glimpse a way forward that is inclusive of all my hurts, and all my griefs and all my fears, all these parts of my experience I have thought I had to leave at the door when I went to work especially, but even when I went into the social world, into love and friendship.

I am three and I am eight, I am fifteen and I am twenty-five, I am thirty-seven and I am fifty. My losses and hurts have pierced my heart with unimaginable pain, have floored me, have left me feeling I have lost everything and will never get it back. They have shaped me, have limited and expanded me, they have shut me down and sometimes they have opened me up. They invite me to open up.

Interrupted

The steady snow outside the window and a cup of tea beside me. I try to reclaim my mind from the rubbish tip where flu has hurled it. I have only been outside the house twice in 12 days - once to move my car last Saturday when snow threatened last time, and I knew I'd need to be able to get it out easily on Monday to go to the surgery; and then on Monday to go for my doctor's appointment, main purpose to secure a sick note for the week. I need to go for a little walk but it will keep snowing and blowing an icy wind not conducive to my recovery. The doctor seemed a little out of step - when I mentioned my aching legs (still!) he said Why are your legs aching? Err, it's a symptom of flu I ventured I was just surprised it went on so long... And when I mentioned this was my first trip out of the house for ten days, he said Why haven't you been out of the house? Err, because I've felt too ill... Just as well all I needed was the sick note for work, I'd have been disappointed if I'd been hoping for anything else. He did listen to my chest, and declare it free from infection, though, which is good to know as I still have a hacking cough. And frankly am still not well - weak and bleak, and jelly-legged, my head still congested. I breathe steam two or three times a day and every time I do I blow my nose vigorously (not too vigorously obviously) and my ears crackle and pop encouragingly, only to revert to the partial deafness as if swimming under water that has been the norm for so long.

But the worst is the depression. My mind is easily hijacked in that direction at the best of times, and the monster has got a stranglehold on it - everything feels like a problem, and mostly the problems are my fault. I am useless and am letting everyone down. Nothing's any good any more and never will be again. So tedious, I just can't find anything loud enough to counter it. Sometimes Radio 3 or Radio 6 Music or Radio 4 works for while. If this is what never doing anything, hardly ever going out, and not having enough to think about does to you, I feel very sorry indeed for my mother whose pretty much permanent situation that is.

Monster

In bed on day 6 of a winter flu whose power and persistence has caused me to dub it Monster Flu. Never had one quite like this, though I've survived a couple of evil ones over the years. Or perhaps I have forgotten. Little energy for describing the aches and the sweats and the shivers and the restlessness, the headache and earache and swollen glands and the cough. The cough now in the ascendant as the other symptoms wane a little, has me sounding (but hopefully not looking)  like a forty a day octagenarian.

L has been looking after me like an angel. Hot water bottles, drinks, cuddles, home made soup, reading to me, and so much patience...