Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their plump arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

Uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.
It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.
Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

Friday morning: back home

I sit up in bed on a cold autumn morning, and I can see that the sun is shining, the clouds are moving. This is the first morning in a couple of weeks that I've woken up feeling even vaguely like a human being, with a still beating heart, and perhaps even a future and a purpose. It's a feeble flicker of it, but it's there.

Mum has stabilised, at least for now. The doctors still aren't sure that it was definitely another stroke or whether it was a fit that made her lose consciousness like that and her breathing so laboured. As usual, it's a deathly mystery. And I guess that means, after preparing for the end, once again, after going through all that trauma, we're back to where we've been for the last two years. Waiting.

So when next week comes, I'll be winging my way back to Brighton. Sunny, happy Brighton. Home of the creative and free-spirited. It sticks in my throat like too-sweet candy.

I'd like to run away from Brighton, up sticks and sod off to London, where my course begins next week. But I know that won't happen, and that instead, it's the swallowing of reality of life in Brighton for now, of waiting for things to change.

I stare into my crystal ball and don't like what stares back. I remember the forces around me that are good, the ones who care. I see the tree outside my window is still standing, waving its branches at me. It is solid and still growing.

Speechless

This morning, as I inhaled a cloud of pain and breathed it out again and said No, I will change my life, I will not let the cloaks of recent events take me down, and I rang the electricity board, and I unpacked my new mini laptop and prepared for the launderette, I got a phone call. It was the phone call. The one I’ve waited for two years. Perhaps.

     
Mum has been rushed into hospital again today, this time with breathing difficulties. But she went to sleep and didn’t come out of that, and now we’re all playing the waiting game again to see if it’s another stroke, the one that’ll finally take her, if she’s finally able to swim to freedom, away from tubes and machines and the same view of squirrels and daffodils from her bedroom window.

     
Today, for the first time in my life, I lost the power of speech. I'm a good communicator. But today, my brain shut itself down, and the world span backwards, and my mouth no longer said the words I wanted to say. I slurred my way through this afternoon, this evening, a personality I no longer recognised, in a world all too familiar. That blurry world. Where walking forward feels like going backwards, where I blink an eye and am filled with terror. Where I suddenly notice the moonlit sky or the glassy sea-water and I feel like heaven is exploding right inside of me.

     
I am used to being split open. I even get accustomed to it even, and find joy in what I discover inside - the hidden jewels, the rapture of knowing what really matters in this life, behind the masks and the craving, the need and the games. I can hold it in my hands for an instant and know it’s worth everything.

     
As I cycled slow as a snail towards the Meeting Place today, I saw a little girl with her dad on Hove lawns, just learning to walk. She turned as she marched with wobbling legs away from her father, her face lit with an incredible radiance - sheer exhilaration, unadulterated joy coming into being. It's hard to accept, but true nevertheless, that what lies behind that little girl’s smile is the same as what lies behind my Mum’s closed eyelids, and what will take her, if not now, sometime soon, away from me forever.

     
What a magnificent beauty of a terror for us all to live with. It makes me want to love all the harder, dance all the more fiercely, hold what’s precious in the palm of my hand and never malign it. Then it makes me want to crawl under a bush and stay there forever. We are idiots, and that makes us all the more human. We throw away the best things in life and usually we learn the hard way.

     
I hope I'm learning. One day I will finally no longer call myself a victim. One day, maybe tomorrow, I will reach out and see all this is my making, not my breaking. And that forgiveness is always, always, already there, at every turn.

An Autumn Morning

I woke up too early, after little sleep, to the smell of sea salt coming through my open window. I stirred, felt my skin against the sheet and a small stab of wonder in my belly. It surprised me to find some joy on this too early a morning, when life hasn’t been too kind and I really should still be fast asleep.

     Maybe it was something to do with the weather, or feeling the sea so close at hand. This relentless shitty weather doesn’t bother me much. In fact, it is a relief to see summer slip away without any final words to say to light up these September days.

     Summer is so obvious. It wears its plumes like a peacock. It is without subtlety, without irony. I end up feeling so much pressure to live in summer – to squeeze its juice out to the last drop, to run in its sunshine, to muck about under its blue skies. These last months have largely been such a washout, that’s rarely been possible. It’s been cloud and relentless wind, with the odd peep of sunshine in between. So I’ve been let off the hook, and I felt this morning, as I have on many mornings these last few months, happy that I no longer have to try and be happy.

     I’ve always loved the rain. I don’t like grey skies, or damp cold, or that wind off the sea that bites into my neck and makes my face scrunch up. But I often welcome the streaks of wet coming down the windows of my flat, the sound of car wheels rolling through puddles, and the calm dripping from the gutters after the rain has died down.

     One thing I do feel a little cheated of, however, is autumn. Summer being a washout is one thing, but autumn? Autumn is for shifting colour, for the last flood of warmth on skin, for picking berries and getting muddy trainers before curling up to watch the sky turn first amber, then red, then pink from my living-room window. It’s not meant to be just a continuation of drizzle - non-descript and apathetic, each day the same as the last, uniformly wading into winter. That’s simply underhand.

     I'm not looking forward to this winter. I really don't know how it'll be. Although there is at least one major new beginning for me, I feel people I love dissolving around me like water into mud. Consequently, I feel very alone, only myself to rely on. Someone told me recently that life is giving me a chance to dig out the weeds, the old dead stuff, so that new plants and flowers can bloom in the spring. To let go in order to bring in the new.

     But if I look out at my garden, it seems pretty empty and forlorn, and spring feels a long way away. Maybe that’s what all this rain is good for. To make it all grow again. I hope so. Bring it on. I don't want to make anymore mistakes.