Between Sleep and Awake

a story is itching at the inside of my skull

Photo by Ana Silva on Unsplash

I’m writing this post in my little writing room; my ex spare room, my ex was-going-to-be-the-baby’s-room, in the early hours of October, when it is not quite dark and not quite light. It is an overcast day and the low clouds are almost touching the tree tops opposite. The crows are staking their claim to the beech trees and the jackdoaws are streaming across the sky, across the rectangle of my window, sliding over the same beech trees. The seagulls are drifting on a slight updraft, they are scaring the ground for food. Some of these things happen everyday, and some of these things are slightly different each day. In my room with its view of the car park, the farm, the trees and behind them the valley of the glacier and the edge of the ghost lake, I feel embedded into the scene, not passive, but as part of this daily roll out of the morning as the beech trees or the generations of jackdaws and crows who have been having the same territorial dispute for who knows how long. This is the magic of this time of day, the noticing, the quiet, the moments where I can come to my desk and open my files and begin work.

There were a dozen things I thought I should write about today. I have a new poetry collection coming out in a few weeks and should perhaps be promoting it in this post. There was the Wave of Light event for baby loss this week and for the first time, I think, since the devastation of losing my daughter, and then the miscarriages, and the crazy infertility journey, I forgot it was happening and forgot to light a candle. I wanted to, perhaps should have, written about the privilege of being in a position in which I am now far enough away from that utter destruction and grief to forget to join with my fellow bereaved and make a collective show of remembrance.

Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

Then there was this absolutely brilliant piece by

Katherine May

about growing up with undiagnosed autism, written in response to Kemi Badenoch’s comments.

What it's like to grow up autistic

A piece that I had such a strong reaction to, a feeling of mirrored experiences, that I shared the piece in a note with a paragraph about my own experiences - suicide attempts, risky behaviour the deep black depth of self loathing, my own book which was an attempt to forgive myself for all this - and then almost immediately removed the note because I felt I was making it about me, and it should have been about katherine’s brilliant piece, and that I haven’t even got a diagnosis, and maybe I won’t get a diagnosis and so don’t own that narrative. I perhaps should use this place to unpack and explore those feelings.

Should. Should. Should. I am always at the mercy of some inner critic that tells me what I should be doing.

Photo by Jonathan Meyer on Unsplash

Right now, from my window, the clouds are beginning to dissipate in long pink edged ribbons. The birds have stopped arguing about the beech tree territory. Their calls have been replaced by the sounds of the early risers. A couple of huffs of central heating steam, a car door being slammed, a cat relentlessly attempting to open a locked cat flap somewhere. A few house lights are lit. This too is a part of a repeating story that I am a part of just by existing in my little room with its too small desk and a pasting table covered in a table cloth and the bookshelves sagging with the weight of my beloved books and the cork board on the wall.

I was interviewed by my brilliant stable mate at portobello literary,

Lindsay Johnstone

this week, and we had such a brilliant, wide ranging talk about creativity and caring, and the inevitability of caring for parents, and the complexities of parental/child relationships in adulthood, the vulnerability of self and the writer life. Go and check out Lindsey’s substack, which is wonderful. I could have expanded more on this topic, but today I chose not to.

There is so much to talk about right now, stuff that i think would be helpful by sharing, but right now this minute I feel like a lightbulb without a shade, and to be honest I want to put the shade on again for a little while. And so I am choosing instead to write about this moment, where now the sky is beginning to clear to a perfect, cold blue, and a flock of pigeons is moving through that blue and I can hear their wing beats in the air, and a thin checkerboard of clouds is now appearing high up, and someone down the village is chopping wood and yes, scent of wood smoke now through the open window

and I am writing.

My cork board is stripped of the mood boards that have existed next to my desk for the last three years. The only things on it right now are three Hilary Mantel quotes:

After a certain point the records fade from the page. Beyond that point all is conjecture, but that is the very point the novelist goes to work.

Beneath a history is another history

Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anyone else?

I am being pulled into the beginning if a new story, the story is itching inside my skull and I am turning and turning it in the early morning light, holding it up and examining the intricacies of truth and conjecture, the connection of people and time and days and sunrises, birds, hills, forests, and me, holding onto the thread, ready to write. That’s what I wanted to talk about today. I think that is important too.

Until next time

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