Sick

I've been sick. So sick that I took to my bed for over twenty four hours.

If I hadn't had to get up intermittently to puke my guts up, it would have been quite luxurious. 

I am so lucky to have my parents living close by, poor old Jessica would certainly have had a very miserable day if she had been left to the tender mercies of her mother. I would probably have managed to stumble around and thrown a bit of food in for her, perhaps changed one or two nappies.

She was most unimpressed when I had to stop my (rather less wholehearted than usual) rendition of Tanka Skunk in its tracks. She was unceremoniously shoved on to the floor and attempted to chase me into the toilet, hitting me around the legs with the book and then, when that plan was foiled, beating on the door with it. I emerged to an irate toddler and an enormous spider scuttling around the kitchen sink.

That was when I placed the emergency call to my parents. The spider was the final straw.

It was a strange day. Being in bed with the curtains drawn during the middle of the day made me feel like a child again. 

I drifted in and out of sleep. The radio muttered on. 

I learnt some interesting facts about Gauguin who is having a retrospective at the Tate. 

Although when I say learnt, I find that I can dredge nothing up now.

Apparently all we thought we knew about him was wrong. 

But as I can't remember the new things I guess I'm still misguided.

I must have fallen asleep.

I dreamt that a woman was standing over me. She had smooth brown hair and blue eyes. Kindly. 

At first I thought she was my mother.

I thought that I was four or six years old.

Then I realised that it wasn't my mother.

In my half dream, my heart leapt as I realised it was Georgina.

And that I was an old, old woman.

I felt so awful because I was dying.

Then I woke up properly. I wasn't dying. I felt a bit foolish. I just had a stomach bug. Like I've had tens of times before. 

It wasn't Georgina.

I cried.

I remember reading somewhere that some people loom large in our lives, like giants. 

The girl that bullied you at school, the lover who snubbed you, the passing stranger that saw you trip over your own toes and fall in a heap on the ground. 

Scenes of our grandest humiliations, our defeats, our upsets. People associated with those times stalk through our dreams and thoughts. 

And we probably never, ever appear in theirs. Such a one-sided affair.

So it is with me and Georgina.

She did not see me hurt or embarrassed.

Yet she persists because I love her so very dearly and there is nobody there to love me back. 

Unrequited in the fullest sense of the word.

I have spent hours and hours and days and weeks and possibly even months and hundred on hundreds of words trying to bring her back. To make sense of her death. To bring something back. Anything.

I lost a three day old premature baby and my dreams hand me back a forty year old woman. With kindly eyes.

Her presence, or more appropriately, her absence is such a void in me. 

That I will fill it with anything. 

Any old words. Any old dream. Any old image of a person that might be her. That could have been her. 

Oh Georgina. I'll try anything but I often know that I'm not close. I'm not close to you.

'What I meant to say 

Is that I didn't mean to say 

the things I said

Cornered, cut and rolled

and going mouthful mad 

with things I never said to you

All this time,

All these words,

I'm not even close. . . . .'

You'll have to excuse the video. This song comes from the land that You Tube forgot, the early 1990s.

Darcy and Elizabeth's silences have got nothing on me and my daughter.