Have you read this post by Sara Douglass?
She died today.
I hope her family were there to hold her hand and watch her last breath. I hope she wasn’t alone.
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Life
It’s a slow slide down into the dark places in my mind. Moments stretch into infinity as I imagine the worst case scenarios and how I would deal with them. I’m not sure how I got here, all I know is that I’m sitting at the bottom, looking at the light a very long way up.
It’s always unpleasant down here and the road back up is long and cold, usually.
The screaming outside of my head is never as bad as the screaming inside of it. The way the sound reverberates around, shaking all coherant thought with it, until I just want to curl up in the corner and drown it out with someone elses words.
It will be okay. It will be fine, I will be FINE, this is all fine. One foot and then another. It will be okay.
I’m regretful and despite regret being useless here, it insists on hanging around and I’m raw enough without adding regret to the mix.
Some nights, I dream ghosts and then I have days like today. Dreaming the past, I’d like to stay there. Nothing was broken there (only… everything was. We just didn’t know it yet.)
That’s the problem with dreaming the past, rather than the future. You can’t get there anyway, so there is no use trying.
Better to dream the future.
At least then you’re left with possibility.
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As one year ends and another begins, I start to wonder if I’ll ever forget the exact shade of ivory that hands turn after death. Or how a newly dead person looks like wax, not like the grey sunken shapes we see in movies and fiction.
Memories flow and threaten to drown me, the gurgle of a death rattle and the urge to vomit, laugh and cry all at once. How I didn’t cry, for weeks. How I can’t think about death now, without crying.
It feels like not coping, like anger, like heartbreak.
It feels like grief.
***
Two years pass and here we are, almost at the year of thirds.
You expect it to get easier. Not harder and yet, it is.
Nothing we can do, but put one foot in front of the other, and try and see the beauty in things, rather than taste the bitterness.
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Hello?
Tap. Tap.
Is anyone in there still? Hello?
Oh look. There you are. You haven’t disappeared after all.
The cursor has been mocking me here for days now, little shouts of ‘you can’t write anything, ner ner’ and ‘look at you, looking at me. Go and do something useful already’.
I should have learned to not listen to a blinking cursor by now. Especially a blinking cursor that spends it’s days swimming in the shark tank that is the Interwebs.
***
There was an explosion.
BANG!
And suddenly everything was different. A mini earthquake triggered and the world beneath my feet rocked and things I took as given disappeared.
I am learning to be okay with this.
Change is not a bad thing. Change is merely change. I’m wearing my designer shoes and ignoring the breast flaunting happening in front of my eyes, as I move through a new world, shaped and moved by things beyond my comprehension.
You could say that life is different now.
Or maybe life was never going to be what I thought it was.
This is okay.
We are all going to be okay.
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It’s a balancing act, knowing what to write about on the internet. An intricate dance of stories and perspectives, making sure you don’t put words in someone’s mouth and side-stepping the issue of privacy invasion. Knowing when to speak and when to hold your tongue, when to write and when to walk away.
It’s about more than not wanting to damage your own brand with drama.
It’s about knowing that truth can be fluid sometimes and not wanting it to be; wanting truth to be truth and lies to remain unspoken.
It’s a fine line.
***
My son is sad and his warm mass draped on my lap and snuggled to my chest brings to the fore all my maternal feelings. It doesn’t matter than he is dribbling in my cleavage or that I am not able to move, he is warm and sad and I am his mother and I can fix this, this time. When he is older and I cannot surround him with my arms, then he will be sad and my heart will break at how useless magic kisses have become.
I put him to bed with a warm bottle, knowing that he is tired and listen to him cry anyway. This is hard. This breaks my heart. This is probably best for all of us, that he sleeps now.
***
I send my daughter outside, to play fortheloveofgod go and play. She lies on the trampoline for an hour, not moving and I watch her as I wander around the house. She is tired and miserable and sad and bendy. She comes back inside and we lay together on the couch and I feel the heat of her. A temperature rising, her joints aching. I thank everything that I have panadol handy and I dose her up and lay her in bed. She is limp and miserable and I lay with her for a time.
Motherhood is hard.
Motherhood is beautiful.
***
The truth is hard.
The truth is beautiful.
With all this talk of authenticity, I can only be myself and this is how I am in real life too. I might not talk about all of it, but I’m honest at the core.
There are things happening and things brewing and at this point, I’m not sure I’m content to sit back and say nothing, but the drama and the angst, I don’t want it.
So I’m saying: Watch and listen and see what happens. Sit here alongside me and we’ll eat popcorn and wait for the fallout. Because it’s coming and it’s not going to be pretty.
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