What Story Will You Tell?

15 days after returning to the UK, most of the boxes are unpacked although there are bits of furniture scattered around the place with question marks floating over them.  Pictures are up on the walls to disguise the lack repainting.  There are things that are beyond me at the moment.

The upside of having a house over 400 years old is that you reconcile yourself that it will be in a perpetual state of 'fixing up.' The plumbing issues, the missing bits of skirting board, we'll work around. There are walls and there is space to make it more and more 'ours' and there's enough bust work that in the moments I start to sob for no clear reason, or have irrational panic attacks about people I care about being in automobile accidents (I mean, COME ON! My brother has been hit twice by sanitation vehicles) or being consumed in fire, I can scrape and scrub my way through the muck and the mire.

5 days after returning to the UK, I am on a train into Town. Alternating between a book about Adolf Hitler roaming 2011 Berlin (darkly, bitterly funny; reminds me a bit of _The Dance of Genghis Cohn_ and the subsequent movie), staring out the window at other people's lives, at rear gardens and laundry on the line, brick and mortar interlaced with green, and with resisting the occasional urge to curl up in the fetal position on my seat, to cry and cry.

I find it unreal sometimes to wake up in the new house, unreal that I am not still in San Antonio. It seems unreal that just over a month ago, I was pondering how you can literally scrape and scoop the insides of a person out, down to the bone. How you can dig a trench into a person and still not get out all of the infection.

I have to give the DoD and the architects they worked with expanding the San Antonio Medical Center credit: the courtyard garden space, frolicking butterflies and flitting sparrows, the horizon rippling in the heat, the honeysuckle are an amazing.  Now, I walk past honeysuckle on my way to see the swans, to clear my head by the river.  Some days, I just want to keep walking and walking so that I don't have to think about what story to tell.