To the beginning before any of this started, because for each of us there is a time before. I think of that person, who had it all coming; no wonder she was worried, did she know? Or did she sense an atmosphere where it was possible, something terrible, simply because no one was watching? I see toddler me, two-year-old me in my cot in my bedroom in my father’s low-beamed cottage surrounded by her soft-toy worries and I cannot take my eyes off her. She’s standing up, leaning against the bars, looking at me with those big blues, and she’s listening. She has the face of a child who doesn’t understand. The duvet on the bed is green like the woman who picks her up and holds her, sits on the edge of the single bed, and cradles her, whispers it’s going to be all right, but she’s caught by a sound inside her head, and I want to stop time. These are the feelings that haunt me, the sense of knowing, and the powerlessness to stop it. The impending death I paint onto pictures in my present day, my friend calls it Mrs Armageddon, her version, the emotional flashbacks that swamp. These are the colours of my c-ptsd, the worry me searching like a radar over water for the possible deaths approaching, the translation into the everybody-hates-me’s as a way of staying safe, a habit, a narcissism born early and arrested, the worry me leaning into the bars of her cot. In the garden of the low-beamed cottage was a Mouse House built beside the lake we were told was made of quicksand. A woman had escaped from an asylum and drowned. We must never go near it. This room of brick and tile, a mouse weathervane on the roof, a blue door, metal windows on two sides, the paint is peeling, was where my father wrote his first book. He would take himself away to this quiet spot, a man of ghosts and hauntings who built a life to survive his worry-self, stories to keep us away, who found joy in an order constructed on the page. I’m walking through the garden now, up across the lawn to the small river, along the paths cut through long grass, past the Ginkgo Biloba tree he planted from a seed brought back from Washington, into the shaded undergrowth where the river banks become steeped in roots and a swing let us fly out in a circle shouting, where Alice fell and didn’t break her back but we all thought she had. I’m aware that time is doing something strange; I’m swinging from two, to five, to fifty-two and back again; I had two lives, one in a low-beamed cottage and one in a tall, cold house. I’m in the garden amongst the shouts of play and sunshine, the Mouse House sits quietly, the lake is still, there’s something for me here. I am searching.
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This text has a beautifully immediate yet hauntingly distant quality. I feel like I dreamt it rather than read it. Amazing.
I have different child me, too. The early one is so similar - despite all the shit that was festering in my tin shack, I always think of it as sunny, and some of the best times of my life. Light and shade.