Hibernation

What a heavy hard week it's been. After the big thunderstorm last Wednesday, which would have been an exhilerating tour de force of nature right outside my bedroom window had huge cracks in my ceiling not appeared, and water, in various sized rivulets and streams, flowed down my walls, doors and light fitting, nothing in my heart has felt quite right.

In fact, as I cowered in my bed waiting for the roof to cave in, I realised, I simply cannot cope with such practical calamities at the moment. Ordinarily I may be a bit wobbled by the sight of water dripping through my electrics, but not phased, always up for a touch of dramatic catastrophe. But somehow, it all felt too close to the bone, too close to home, cracks and holes appearing in my world, no way to keep the violent storms out.

This is not the first extreme happening to occur in this flat. A couple of months ago, in fact when I was right in the midst of the immediate trauma of my Mum's near fatal stroke, I arrived home to find that my living room window, in its entirety, had been blown off. The whole thing lay sad and glass-less in the garden below my attic flat, luckily, I reflected later, with nobody lying underneath it. But it was weird, because, at my most vulnerable and insecure, feeling in need of self-protection and a sense of home, my window goes and blows out, and I am left with a gaping void where the frame and pane was, a room full of swirling papers and a sense of large holes appearing in my world whether I like it or not.

And so, with the ending of the Summer drawing ever nearer, the events in my family still fresh and harrowing, I find my flat is once again manifesting the state of my heart and my mind, cracks appearing, not enough bowls to hold the water that is filling them up.

So after last week I have been very aware of my need for some sense of safety, from somewhere, anywhere, to counter balance the huge fears and stresses of the last months, which are, to some extent, continuing. If I refuse to see the writing on the wall, my flat is spelling it out for me ( it likes to do that occasionally, see "Blood" ).

And I feel terribly upset, I have sailed far too close to those edges which we hope to only come up against a few times in our lives. So not just one abyss of facing death and disaster to stare into, but several, all coming at once, shocking, cruel, frightening.

I've coped well this Summer, I never felt stronger. But somehow, with the knowledge of this season coming to a close, I am tired, too tired. I want to sleep for about six months. Hibernate and come out again when it is Spring and the buds are bursting upon the branches of the cherry blossom trees and daffodils lace the parks that my bus sails past on my route home.

Maybe I just want another season that is not this one so I don't have to face the present moment, or maybe even the changing of the seasons remind me too strongly of how nothing ever stays the same, and how,in the end we hold onto nothing that we long to keep, no one who we love most dearly.

If I could, I'd pick up my tail, climb my way between the ferns and the fir cones, the sheep wool and the bracken, down into a tunnel of dark, where no sound can travel. And there I'd sleep, and maybe dream, but the days would no longer own me, memory would fade, my bones replenish and my fur would grow strong once again. Here, I'd close my eyelids, there'd be no more weeping for a season.

I'd wrap my tail around myself, a dark brown brush of life, softly, silently, sleeping.