I’ve entered the tired stage, the no sleep section of the year where I rise at four and go to bed at six, it being the only way to get in the rest needed, my body waking up earlier and earlier so that last year, by the time summer came, I was boiling the kettle at three and sleeping an hour before midday with the effect on my system that I was having two days in one. I don’t know when this habit began but since I discovered these magic hours I can’t resist them. I had a breakthrough yesterday. One of those lightbulb moments. Move chapter seven to the start. I cut. I pasted. And pow, it was as if the engine of the story came to life. It thrilled me for the rest of the day. I kept returning to it, feeling the rush like fifteen coffees at once and that’s what you have to do sometimes, start where the juice is happening and radiate out from there. Maybe the shape of this story is a star. The reshuffle means all sorts of simplifications to the now proceeding chapters, a few technical time leaps, a three part division of the first act. It fills me with the spice I live for, the reason I get up willingly while all the world is sleeping. The house is quiet, the cats wait in the kitchen for their breakfast. I pulled the winter duvet on last night, another brief waking, cold for the first time since April. My gold sequinned Dior jacket that I found in a junk shop in the village hangs off the side of the rocking chair. No one would buy it, the woman told me. They said they wouldn’t know how to wear it. My green flight suit on a coat hanger is hooked on a curtain wire strung across the wardrobe mouth, there’s a picture of me on the narrow dividing wall aged six in France looking dark under the eyes, wearing my favourite straw hat. In the fireplace, shelves which replace hearth are lined with heels that I don’t wear anymore since the pandemic reminded us all that they were uncomfortable. A painting of Edna the donkey done by my RA god mother hangs above them, beside it, a photo of the northern lights over Svalbard, below that a framed poem by my children reminding me not to treat them as twins even though they are. They decorated it with hand prints identical. A gold woven sofa with clothes slung on the arm. A black and white image from my pagan wedding, a child in a tiger suit talking to cows. The shutters of the window open onto a blackness, a world still sleeping and I must make my next cup of coffee and get on.
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I really enjoy reading these little slices of life.
This was so beautiful to read. Made me smile. Thanks.