And Death Shall Have No Dominion

The dawn is breaking.  I am in a black-hearted place.  I am standing in my darkened kitchen drinking a mug of peppermint tea.  In the background that weapon of mass distraction otherwise known as the television mutters on.

I have not slept for several nights.   I have not had a lengthy conversation with another human being in several weeks. I have shrunk from the world.  I isolate myself, I wall myself in.  Life breaks hearts and so I avoid it.

Nobby is dead.  Correction: Nobby has been dead for a little oner a year now.  ‘I promise I will be with you ‘till the end.’ I told him. It was a reckless promise and I never should have made it. But I cannot go back.  I cannot go back. I cannot unpick the knots.  On the cusp of death I abandoned him.

Come back, Nobby.  Come back. I cannot accept that he is dead.   I make tea and I find myself thinking, ‘I must make a cup for Nobby too.’  Or when I am out shopping: ‘I must pick up a treat for Nobby whilst I am here.’  Muscle memory carries me to the door of Nobby’s flat.  Halfway across the lawn I freeze.  He is not there anymore.  I am left with a hollowed-out inside.

He visits me in my dreams.  So often that I greet the dawn with disappointment. I don’t remember details.  Just elusive images, like shards of broken glass. I try desperately to retrieve them.

I did not fully appreciate what I had until it was taken from me.  I feel him like an amputated limb. I depended on him.  Sometimes I felt as if he were my only friend, my only refuge in a perennially hostile world.  And I know that he would have defended me to the death if the need had ever arisen.

Many spend their lives searching for heroes, for people to look up to, to explain. It must be said that there are those who look in vain and I am fortunate that, thanks to Nobby, I am not one of them.  I have been blessed.

Which is why all this feels so terribly self indulgent.

Cherish what you have, while you still have it.

Check this out:  War Stories 

It began here: Reality Bites

Addendum: They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Does this also apply to brazen plagiarism?

Frosted Glass

SOS

A recurring memory has taken up residence in my head.  When I was twelve, at the height of summer, my family and I took a vacation to Majorca.  As a child I was a loner and I felt as though I were being slowly suffocated in the hotel room I was sharing with my brother and my cousins.  So, one afternoon I took myself, a book and an  inflatable floating mat down to the beach.  I climbed onto the mat and lay back.  I accompanied the tide on its way out.  And then I fell asleep.

I have no idea how long I was out.  I awoke with a heavy head.  I looked around me.  i was surrounded by the sea.  The beach had disappeared. I was alone. I sat up.  My book had fallen into the water.  At first I panicked.  I was a poor swimmer.  The tide was going out.  I was sure I would drown.  I think I may even have prayed.

By some miracle I managed to doggy-paddle myself back to the shore.  I collapsed, exhausted onto the beach.

I returned to the hotel and never uttered a word of what had happened to anyone.  I told my family that I had fallen asleep on the beach while sunbathing.  And that raised hysteria, so heaven knows what their reaction would have been if I’d told them what really happened.

I was so badly sunburnt that for the next three nights I had to sleep on my stomach.

What is the point, you may ask, of this random anecdote.  I recount it now because I feel now like I did that day.  Floating in an expanse of ocean while the tide carries me further from the shore, praying for some small miracle that will save me from drowning and get me back to the place I started from.

Matters Feline (No 999)

Doll Face