Much too tired to know better

Dateline March 2017

I've been struggling with this overwhelming of making a terrible mistake. I tell myself it is because I've gone back to do another degree ('How many letters do you nees after your name?') and the wait over whether there will be a settlement in The Case of theMama Bear Who Caught On Fire_ is a long one.

Sad to admit I know, but that £32,000 I spent like water, sitting next to mama everyday bar 4 from February to May would sure come in handy as the subfloor sags and the car barely wheezes to life on the school run.   So much one takes for granted in a different life: National Health Care, public transport, sleep.

I was thinking last night about the despair I felt being pregnant again, the terror that my body would be hijacked and I would have to kill another baby. Anger at the poking and prodding, at the broken trust that sliced into my skin like silvers broken glass and how all of that malignancy was suspended almost 3 years ago.  How I feel like I've been sleepwalking since January 4, 2015. 

I used to send thank-you cards, I used to write letters.  I used to travel the length and breadth of the country to visit friends. Now, I hear the phrase rail replacement and I can't breathe. I have a full on panic attack. And I'm just not going. Can't make me. Disappointed? Well, life can be disappointing.

'Rail replacement service? Fuck you very much.' I'm gonna gove that birthday party a miss and shit..cancel that trip to Berkshire;  there are not enough emergency exits on the bus  if that thing catches fire. I don't trust my fellow man, don't trust my own legs to want to fight.  I'm not suicidal, don't get me wrong. But I am tired on a fundamental level that leaves my chest tight and bile in my throat.  I don't know I could get my legs to work to kick out the glass and I still haven't sorted out the call to my pension provider, the paperwork I have had on my desk for 2 years.  

We can talk about sleep management,  we can talk about drinking until the world fades to black, we can talk sleeping tables and sleepy-time tea. But sometimes, I can't sleep because I'm back in the clinic, so cold in the clinic and so lonely and my boyfriend ('I just want to be there for her, you know? I mean, just be what she needs?') isn't with me because he got hungry and that sandwich wasn't going to make itself!  And sometimes I can't sleep because I am back in a stall peeing blood, knowing something is seriously wrong with the baby inside me and not sure why I can't make myself heard.  Other times, well, I'm trapped in labor, or I am staring at my sweet baby brother, unconscious and twisted under the wheel of a duece and a half garbage truck, or I am watching the horrific bandaged stump of my mother's arm clamber for her throat as bile spews across us both.

Or I'm driving back from Taylor my freshman year of college with a dear friend when the window shatters from a gunshot.  Oh, there's the several days when Army CID tore apart our house in Kentucky, when I had just started down the slippery slope of binge eating.  I remember watching them transfixed, wondering as the words whirred around the room if they let people visit at Fort Leavenworth.  If didn't matter in the end. A trial, a severance package, some things get tied up neatly, like an amputed thigh or a shin that needs 22 stitches to close up the cut.

Yeah...sometimes, I just can't sleep.  And I think about wonderful things too. Maybe not that *birthday surprise trip* to Dachau, because dude...we all know that shit was FUCKED. UP.  But roadtrips to Amsterdam, to the Montenegro coast, fresh bröchen, rainbow sherbert and butterscotch topping. Sunday sitting with my head on mama's shoulder whilst she played with my hair and my sweet baby bro curled into my side for a nap, like puppies.  That time we found Sinatra (a Siamese cat) living in a drain pipe after he'd gone missing for months, accidentally paved over, a feline Jimmy Hoffa, but alive.

I go someplace on a train where the damage I can cause is minimal, I watch a movie I've seen 10 times before. I think of landslides, of snowdrifts, neon sign and karaoke bars, of kissing and being kissed as snow dances around us.  I try to sleep and then stop trying.  I get up the next day, I shower, hug my friend, watch another film then wander back to my people.