Mind out of time

I have lived in the house I sit inside now for two and a half years.

It always takes me a while to really feel comfortable in a new house. Since I turned eighteen and left my parents' house, I've moved eight times. Usually for the first six months or so, I find I don't sleep particularly well. I try to take an extra step at the top of the stair and my foot thumps down on thin air. The light switches are in the wrong places and attempting to turn on a light in the dark results in protracted searching, my hand blindly rubbing over the wall trying to find the switch by touch. The door handles seem to be at strange heights or turn the wrong way. The house doesn't smell right.

Then I get used to it.
By increments, it becomes my home. A strange, creeping process.

But, at night, the walls seem to play tricks on me.

I know the dimensions of my bedroom, I know how far away the bed is from the wall, I know where the windows are, I know I will roll to my right and see the bunched up shape of my husband fast sleep, I know the low static mumble of the baby monitor listening to Jessica in the room opposite (assuming she isn't actually in between me and my husband as often tends to be the case, wisely or not), the mutterings of the water pipes or of the BBC World Service I sometimes switch on for company in the watches of the night. Familiar.

And yet. At night. My mind throws up ghost walls, creating other rooms. Rooms that were once as familiar to me as the room I sleep in now.

My childhood bedroom. A thin body, ribs still visible, no curves. The smell of the bedsheets. The flattened sponge innards of my childhood teddy bear. The sounds of the radio distort and become the sound of my parents talking downstairs. The low rumble of my father's voice comes up through the floor boards. The clicking of tea cups in the kitchen below.

I wake and feel suddenly tall and ungainly. As though someone had strapped my feet to stilts in the night. The floor tilts away from me alarmingly. I look in the mirror and feel robbed. Where did my time go? What happened to that little girl?

The night rooms.

My old room at university. I can see the shadow of my room mate sleeping across the way. The smell of smoke and stale alcohol. My dreams are of being younger, of potential restored. Of being someone who others thought might have an opinion worth hearing, of being the girl that might still attract the eye of a man across a bar.

The night rooms.

A hospital room. The sheets are made of something synthetic, sweat collects and cools in the lumps of the pillow. Inhaled air held and held, waiting for the telephone to ring. A television that doesn't work. A kitchen next door with no windows. An airless room within a hospital. A room that I can see myself inside, talking on the telephone, as though the roof of the building has been cut off by a giant hand and only a cross section remains. A room that keeps coming back to me. I can still remember the pattern of the carpet, the feel of the cold corridor flooring as I step across to shower. The sounds of the administration office next door. The cries of children in the paediatric ward overhead. The feeling of sinking, down and down, through the floor and back to the earth, into the soil.

This room is more vivid than the others.
The other night I dreamt I was in that hospital room with twin baby girls. One of them was Jessica. Her face was turned towards me and it was my Jessica. Not as she ever was in life. Her face, at that age, was always covered with tubes. But I know her. It's Jessica without breathing apparatus, without lines, without monitors, without probes.

The other baby, her face was turned away.
And even if she'd looked at me. I don't know that I would recognise Georgina now.

But that room. That room will stay with me. I expect I'll dream of it until I'm dead myself. The memories of things that are so unimportant come back so vividly. But the one thing I actually want to remember, she is elusive. My mind won't bring her back to me.

At night, time feels so fluid. In those moments between sleeping and waking, it seems almost as though I could move at will. Through the years of my life, through my memories. Time seems to judder and lurch at night.

But it is just an illusion. I can't summon those days and hours back to myself as much as I might wish to. Instead, I shake myself awake.

I look at my husband, I listen to his even breathing, sometimes his snoring. I reach for his hand and wait for him to flick me away, irritated.

I pad across the landing to Jessica's room. I lower my face to her, as close as I dare. I try to breathe in the air that she exhales. I can smell her, a smell that makes my spine melt, my lungs want to burst, as I try to cram as much of it in as I can. I can hear the slight wheeziness of her breathing. I can see her hands, pitted with scars, flung to either side in abandon as she gives herself to sleep. The young do everything with such a passion, with such wholeheartedness.

But the old, well, we're different. But I can still muster it on occasion. When I watch my daughter sleeping I can't imagine feeling more.

This is what I have. I might wish for more but it is what I have. Happiness.

And sometimes. Sometimes I think that I have it all the wrong way round.
Perhaps it is Jessica and I who wait outside in the cold.
Waiting to be let into that night room where Georgina waits, facing away from us, hidden by the roses that surround her.