Do you have those days, or even weeks, when even the simplest task seems a mountain too high to climb? The bin that’s overflowing because unlocking the door and putting it out for collection is a marathon you just can’t face? BananaWhen your diary is sitting on your bookshelf six feet away, but it’s easier to say ‘Alexa, what day is it?’?
You’d think that Yes and No would be the easiest, wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it. For I have just discovered that what comes out of my mouth bears no relation to the gestures I have used to accompany both words my entire life.
That date. 1991. Unbelievable. I was 31 years old. Why had I not known about all this? I, who had studied history not only in school but during my first year in university? Why was the world not screaming about the torture and killing taking place on a vast scale every day?
Dorit has now reached a level of self-absorption that you feel she’d walk out of Madame Butterfly if they weren’t singing about her. Not that she’d understand it. The only language she spouts worse than the Italian she claims to speak is English. Please, can someone teach her the difference between “I” and “me”.
I am wont to quote (often) Rainer Maria Rilke and his line from his poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing – ‘No feeling is final.’
It isn’t.
Until it is.
Or, at the very least, feels as if it is.
While the adage ‘Time is a great healer’ is true, I prefer to think of time as a great changer. I don’t think pain is ever healed; it just shifts its focus.
‘There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.’ Rainer Maria Rilke
I confess to crying when I see the Lindt bunnies in shops, warm in their gold foil and red ribbon scarves. Mum bought be one every year when she stopped buying me eggs, as I was never a huge chocolate fan once childhood passed. These days, I can make a Kit Kat last a month.
What sex is on my birth certificate, the man patiently explained. Look, mate, I have a goddamned whacking great hole between my legs that small creatures the size of water melons can emerge if ever I’d managed to hang on to a bloke long enough to shag me senseless.