0420. Twenty-past four in the morning. Four-twenty a.m. Not even sparrow-fart. Awake. Or am I dreaming I'm awake. The fish pie was tasty but must have been odd. To bed with indigestion and a night tossing and turning.
No erotic tableaux of previous girlfriends, just maudlin recollections of cats past and present. My Boy, My Princess, My Buddy and the Surviving Cat. The time between times is the worst time to miss anyone or anything. Memories constantly probed like a rotten tooth with the same painful results.
The dead time of the day in the dead time of the year. The world drawing breath and waiting to live again. Family memories growing up; being woken to the forced jollity of breakfast when all you wanted to do was sleep. A mother brittle and bright like a sparkler, a father either physically or mentally absent. Too much a mother, too little a father. A brother and a sister already gone down a different path. The worst knowing you have to do the charade four times a year yourself to satisfy her need for theatre.
A wife’s leg thrown over your expanding waist murmuring in your ear. Thirty years of rocking her to sleep, the gentle sound of her breathing. Calf a different shape to yours thrown over your leg, but she still has legs like swords. Memories of an electric shock seeing her sitting proud and haughty on the stairs, still not quite believing she's with you.
Old. Feeling old. Lying there, wheezing in the dark, body aching with the bone-cramp, the ombrosalgia of too much youthful foolishness and middle-aged folly. The dark of night is no place to ponder your mortality, regrets flourish like weeds, promises blow away like the wind gusting outside your window.
Drifting now, too tired to think anymore, the darkness wraps itself around you like a blanket.
Happy birthday old man.
Happy birthday........zzzzzzzz
30-DEC-2016
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