I opened the coffee, I breathed in it's fragrance; made up my plunger pot, decanted the cream I ordered into a little glass yoghurt jar I bought from France and sat in my morning room and felt human. They even delivered a little pastry for me to enjoy with it. I follow my morning routine religiously because if I don't I'm worried I will come unstuck and to re-stick myself could be a lengthy process. I am tethered on the edge of last years anxiety and every now and then if I stop, I can feel it breathing it's warm slightly spooky air on me. I take that deep breath and start my dance class.
I have signed up for two online classes at the same time - it's something I do in the middle of the night when I wake up from a Covid dream and can't get back to sleep. I have to make a choice. I decide to do the Instagram one but I'm so tired I phase out and later get a message saying: 'I saw you left early.' WTF!
I try not to lie on the bed during the daytime. I think that takes me back to places I don't want to go. The day my husband died, for some reason I came upstairs to my room and lay on my bed and told the world via text that my life and the daughter's had changed forever. It was a beautiful sunny day in January; my window was open, I was touched by a faint breeze. Women friends gathered at the foot of my bed that day and fed me tiny sandwiches and Brownies (there was probably more and I apologise to the other women for not remembering). It became my safe place. For eight years, bed was a place of grief and safety, a strange mix of bedfellows. I realised when I arrived at the hotel for quarantine and the door shut behind me without a key, that it was time to get off the bed and sit in an armchair. Along with the return of my creativity , this total isolation has done a lot for me. Who'd have thought!
A surrealist vision of me in my armchair!
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