Goodbye

The saddest light coming into my kitchen, reflecting in the laptop screen where I see my left shoulder, and a little bit of the sky framed by the window, birds occasionally flying across.
Every time we say goodbye I die a little. The daffodils are beginning to curl at the edges. Late afternoon, the slowest time of the day. Friday. The end of another week. And almost the end of the saddest month. The month with no true end this year. Truncated at 28 days, suddenly it will be March, and this is good, always, but something will have been lost again.

I'll be with my Mum this weekend and we probably won't talk about it much, and it has seldom been planned, but it's amazing how many times we have ended up together at the end of February. Just keeping company as it goes by. My father so long gone now - 23 years - it is hard to find out what the anniversary might be. The danger of suicide is it becomes the most memorable thing a person has done. But I'll read the letters to my Mum, and perhaps we can remember some good stuff together, though this is of course not uncomplicated territory.

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.

Ladies Who Lunch

Hormones and weather hounding me - the wind huffing down the chimney, my mood as grey as the fog-laden sky sinking onto the drenched hills. Vestiges of the snow that fell on Saturday morning cling here and there. Most of the daffodils have struggled open, after looking for a time like the heart-breaking kind that never do. Their bright yellow star and trumpet cheerfulness offers a small sign of hope. The weather forecast is quite abysmal for the next three days, but at least it is set to get warmer again, and Thursday is billed as the one sunny day in a long stretch of drizzle, cloud, light rain, heavy rain.

I met the therapists on Saturday, which is always very heartening, and I feel my struggles are understood and not judged. Right now I feel if anything more lost than before, though I am certainly not ungrateful for the work at the school. Quite the reverse. But half a day's work does not solve the overall problem, good start though it is. I have no money. Hoping to be interviewed for the teaching work in Leeds, where they seem to have changed their minds about not hiring til the autumn. But no date set yet, and no guarantee I'll get it either.

I confess I'm rather dreading the Census work, with all its fiddly record-keeping, codes, barcodes and the like. And the admonishment not to wear sunglasses. I wear light sensitive glasses, which frequently darken even when you don't think it's bright, and I need them. Too bad if householders are offended, I can't do my job without glasses, or without them darkening. Then there's the small matter of toilets. I shall go scouting before I start work, but it seems to me unlikely there are any public ones in the very rural areas where I'll be collecting, and I'm not one who can go hours at a stretch without going. I'm sure we'll be advised not to ask householders for the use of theirs. I'm sure that is exactly what I'll have to do (selectively of course.)

In a little while I shall go and pick L up from her Pilates class (I always think of Pontious Pilate when I see it written), and we shall go for a little jaunt to Todmorden, taking in the tip to deposit cartons and cardboard, the garden centre to look at cordless strimmers, lunch at the wholefood shop cafe, and Lidl! At the wholefood shop I shall buy some slippery elm bark for my stomach, as recommended by friend H. I'd said I wanted to go out for dinner to celebrate signing the contract with the school, but by the time L had pointed out it's only ten weeks' work, and I'd pointed out my stomach is iffy, and we'd both realised I'd better save the little bit of money in the savings account I was all set to spend, for the rainy day that is definitely already here, we decided that lunch out would be nearer the current mark. So lunch it is.

Cold Spring

The first daffodils in a vase on the kitchen table, bought yesterday on the market, the yellow of petal now beginning to emerge slowly slowly from the fine brown tissue sheath enclosing the bud.

Outside it is windy and foggy, something I used to think a contradiction, but which happens relatively often up here, and so cold again, eye-watering and nose-dripping as I walked down the field this afternoon, with sleet and even snow forecast over the weekend and into next week. As I write and it grows dark, the fog seems to be closing in bluish grey, the distant shapes of the tops gone, the nearest stand of trees just a dark tangle.

Unconfined

I have just received a letter from the school which says
We have now completed our pre-employment checks and are pleased to enclose two copies of your contract for services.
I shall be signing them, and returning one forthwith with great pleasure.

I met the two young people I'm going to be working with yesterday, so everything is in place now for after half term.

The Census people have invited me to classroom training, so I assume they are happy with my reference too!

Let joy be unconfined... Though sadly I'm sleeping badly again and feel rather raddled. However, I have time now to rest and enjoy some peace of mind.

11.08 To Manchester Victoria

Grey railings with sharp ends march along the top of the railway cutting. There's a draft on my left shoulder as we pull into Rochdale, though I can see no open windows. Too many people get on at Rochdale and I feel hemmed in and oppressed, pray no-one needs to sit beside me. The sky is watercolour grey, trees determinedly bare and two young men are talking about Chelsea. I assume it's the football team they mean, though I can't really pick out any other words amid the rattle of the train and the heaviness of the Rochdale-Asian accents. Suddenly I hear Arsenal. Yes, football. Two huge pylons at an electricity sub-station. A long narrow pile of used red bricks like an embankment. A pale yellow bus. This is Castleton where a man leans against the shelter on the platform, chewing hard, looking sideways at me or maybe just at my train, wearing a black knitted hat with a red stripe round the edge. Green metal steps up from the platform, with white handrails. Another pile of bricks and rubble. Looks like they've been demolishing the terraces of Castleton. The railway line crosses the M62 or possibly the M60. I glimpse lines of fast-moving traffic, giant trucks. Lichen-green fence panels. Allotments with greenhouses and polytunnels. A procession of mighty pylons taking electricity to Manchester or possibly bringing it from Manchester. I see the Rochdale Canal, and we are at Mills Hill. A washed out sign saying Princes Drinks. A development of dark red brick box houses with brown rooves. Inflite Engineering Services. Darcy Joinery. A green van with T. Dobson & Sons on the side, and we're at Moston, where red-tipped stems of an overgrown woody shrub behind the platform hint at spring. A beige tower block. A caravan with a blue tarpaulin stretched over one end. More grey railings - standard railway issue. The train maintenance depot. Are You Ready To Be Pool Party Proof? asks a poster on a billboard incomprehensibly. The tower blocks with coloured rooves, one orange, one brown, one blue, with matching trim beneath the windows. The tower block inexplicably called Emmeline, a large red American motel-style sign on top announces this. This building was stripped back to the bone then reclad in red-brown panels and given this incongruous name a few years ago. Waiting just outside Victoria Station, the Boddington's Brewery tower now in view.

Impossible Angles

I can find no quiet way to exist, no way to be open and safe, no way to know without exploding, no way to get up on the roof without falling, no way to fly. The light is clear but fleeting, the light arrives but is always threatening to leave, the wind drifting large clouds, dark in the middle, white at the edges, across the unbearable sun. And the time it takes for the light to change is the time it takes for me to change my plans, change my mind, change from quietly compliant to furiously destructive, from capable to hopelessly fallen. Not able to pick myself up. A rag doll dropped on the floor, yellow thread hair splayed, legs at impossible angles. When I took her to church the rector blessed her at the altar rail, and I was blessed, I was loved, I was included. Don't let it rain. Today could be a beginning. If the sun could reflect in the dark puddled road, could suck the water back off the tarmac, could warm the damp-coated cattle in the rutted mud of the desperate field, could I --? Could I open the door? Could I enter the day? Could I join the world?

There are small flies in the heather - they fly up as my ankles brush the new growth and the older darker damp rough stems. They fly up like summer midges only larger-winged, I disturb them as the rain water soaks into my trouser-bottoms. My hand brushes the sapling and is wet with cool rain. Can I persuade myself to go there? If I can get through the door, if I can climb up the hill, can I breathe in the February air, look a long way south, see how the broken sun picks out that yellow field, turns that line of buildings into the silhouetted back of a dinosaur?

Please stop trying to be concrete. Stop looking for an answer. Eat questions. Chew them slowly, savour them, swallow and digest. My stomach is sore. There's a pink and tender place like a bald patch with sunburn, like a sore spot on a dog's back, like eczema, like an itch, like a burning, like a scratch. I can't soothe it, can't reach it; send down the gentlest foods. Gentle gentle to calm it to reassure it, to placate it. It's a baby crying, it needs rocking, singing to, lulling with lullabies of porridge and stewed apple, soup and rice, chicken and potatoes. Too much, not enough, which is it? What do you want? Mind a parcel, stomach a sore baby, what to do? Stay in. Go out. Rest. Exercise. Eat. Fast. Think. Meditate. Try harder. Do less.