Longest Day

Fear and choices.

The solstice sun glows square around the edges of the black-out curtains. I have woken from a dream in which I was put in juvenile detention. I can’t remember what it is that I’d done. In the dream, I’d relinquished the forbidden contents of my suitcase one thing at a time to a frowning matron as I smiled and smiled, telling myself over and over this isn’t so bad, this isn’t so bad.

The bedroom fan spins valiantly in the early-morning heat. I am sticky-skinned and heavy limbed. I close my eyes again, still half in that other room with its locked doors. I feel F breathe beside me, yesterday’s thoughts clamouring to be picked-up again, but I shift them off, like I do the cat who is trying to kneed my bare skin with sharp claws, until I am empty again.

I want to start this longest day with a thought I’ve chosen. The thought is this: everything that happens to me today is important and necessary. Even the things I don’t like. Especially the things I don’t like. They will arrive like messengers, like doorways in the air. They will arrive as opportunities. As friends. I will be brave enough to welcome them. It is my job to do so.

A whole host of things have happened lately that felt like punishments. Nothing catastrophic, just painful and stressful and wearing. It is still a mental reflex of mine to see my life in terms of reward and punishment, relax and brace. My religious upbringing has eroded and slipped off me over the years, left behind like sand, but still there is that hard, sharp little stone left that I carry around. Be good. Be good, or else. When things go wrong, there remains an eight, a ten, a fifteen year old in me handing over things that I love, thinking what did I do wrong?

Meanwhile, the world taps its fingers and sighs, waiting for me to put that useless last piece down, waiting for me to realise how much bigger and better and more exciting life is than that. Not a cell, a playground. Not a prisoner’s clothes, a shaman’s staff. Come talk to us, everything whispers. Come listen.

I stretch. A new day. Yes.

---

I get to be outside a lot more these days. F has an endless willingness to push me wherever I want to go. It is the greatest gift anyone has ever given me. We usually don’t go that far; the same places I’ve always been, in fact. Just my tired old neighbourhood, just my home. They are the places I love best. If I start to feel unwell, it doesn’t really matter. We can just turn around and go back. I can just sleep and wait.

It is hot, of course. I wear a big blue hat. There are poppies growing out of a crack in the main road, blood red next to yellow lines, unmoved by the traffic roaring past. We roll past them on our way into town. I have my hands folded neatly on lap. When I’m in my wheelchair, I like to sit very still, very quiet, my back straight, every bit of tension poured down through my feet to leave an invisible trail behind me, ready to blow away in the breeze. I like being out in the world like this, wheeled around like a statue, a monk. Why not?

I have a game I play as I sit. Every person we pass, I look at them and I think, “I love you.” I pretend for a moment that they are deeply beloved to me, the most important person I will see today. For a moment, they become that. I mean it with all my heart.

The man with spider-like capillaries mapping his red face, little half moon glasses perched on his nose. Hawaiian shorts, a shirt buttoned all the way up, black socks and smart shoes, his mouth relaxed like a child at school as he listens to his louder friend.

The little boy with his shoes velcroed on tight, who fidgets and slides down his chair and wiggles and twists. His patient, tired father, not quite here who, despite whatever else is on his mind, still pulled those velcro strips snug and neat before they left, in a moment of care so obvious and meaningful, it rang through the morning like a bell until I noticed it.

The joggers, red faced, bare-limbed, sweaty hair pulled back, leaning on their knees.

The tattooed, man-bunned man with croissant in his beard.

The woman wearing only leggings and red lingerie, swinging her hips.

The row of teenage boys each face-deep in a pasty.

As we wait a moment, a hunched lady is wheeled alongside me. We smile at each other. Her limp head is propped up on her wrinkled, paper-thin hand that holds the smudged, faded traces of a crude heart tattoo. Her white trainers are bright and spotless, never having touched a pavement.

I could list people all day.

The sun climbs under heavy, grey clouds, cool rain spotting my dress. The cars sweep past as we walk home. Every one has a person inside. I love you, I love you, I love you.

---

I sleep through the afternoon and wake, anxious, heavy. There has been a new, worrying pain following me through the last few months. There has been test after test after test, all clear. I had thought, maybe, it had vanished for good, like a curse lifted, but it’s back today, and I feel the susurration of old fears, like a breeze stirring.

I try to remember my first thought of the day. I try to say ‘welcome, welcome back’. The words catch and stutter. I don’t want to say them. It all felt so easy this morning but now it doesn’t. I don’t feel like a mystic anymore. I revert to whispering, I’m ok. I’m ok.

I take my sketchbook and go and sit in the garden, out where there are no walls and no doors.

Drawing scares me. There, I said it. I love to draw and it scares me silly. This beautiful world. My inept hand. I still don’t know how to align the two, but it helps, I’ve learned, to just scribble something really fast, barely looking. Three-two-one go.

I draw the scabious and the ox-eye daises and the roses and the honeysuckle. I draw as another way to say ‘I love you’. I draw to practise moving through this terror in me.

The terror says: you can never be sure what is going to happen and that scares you half to death. Drawing, illness, life, death. Sometimes it’s going to go the way you want, other times it isn’t, and you’re never going to know ahead of time how it will all work out. So what? Would you rather spend this moment in the world, or lost in the ‘what ifs’ of your frightened head? The pencil on the page makes the choice. It is a grappling hook. It is pure determination, to be here with everything around me, to look it at, and ignore the siren call of my own darkness.

I think that’s the thing about mysticism. Doorways and connection everywhere, yes, but fear too. Fear like a dark-furred familiar, padding alongside, because I don’t know, can never know, anything for sure, and yes, I am very frightened about that. I suspect I always will be, but in the end it all comes down to where I choose to rest my attention. Head or world. Head or world.

The air is so thick today. A great, suffocating duvet of a day. I want to wriggle and twist and slide my way out of it, like the little boy in the cafe — out of this discomfort, out of this uncertainty, out of this anxiety, out of myself — but I can’t.

My 44th summer solstice. I know now that this is the path: to just keep choosing.

Bees nuzzle the snapdragons. I draw my shitty drawings. The clouds have cleared. The sun puts a warm hand on me. Just stay, it says. So I do.

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