Interminable…

the bones, skin, organs….. ache.
frost forming on the windscreen of the cars outside, how can anything survive out there? The cough have remained, with a brief few hours respite, luring me into a false sense of hope, now dashed and leaving me once again not able to sleep.

I cant lie down for coughing, so how can I sleep? Ribs bruised with the effort, every inch of me in conflict in trying to find a different way to feel comfortable and failing to agree on an amicable solution…. another cup of honey and lemon and whisky before I go to the valley below…… I love the cold, winter, ice, frost, mist, which I also know is strange to some people, though sadly, the cold doesn’t like me. But it does me an excuse to sit close and curled by an open fire, feeding it with coal and logs, coal and logs… food for the flames to lick and lap and devour…
each morsel greedily consumed accompanied by a dance majestic.

I ache… and my eyes feel strangely wide awake considering they haven’t really had the pleasure of staying closed long enough. What I have been experiencing has been less like sleep and more akin to a series of long blinks interspersed by surreality. An almost hypnogogic state of fever and paralysis. Or maybe not paralysis, more and exhaustion so complete as to make any thought of moving my limbs too much effort to contemplate for longer than a nanosecond.

Last night my mind screamed for sleep, a chance to let my unconscious sort and filter the cacophony of the day before. Instead I still have what is now 7 days of disorganised chaos rattling around in there waiting for some time to filed away for future reference….. basically, in the mind, the ‘in tray’ is full to over-flowing. I don’t mind not having dreams, though I haven’t been so fortunate as to avoid them through all this, only the ones that came to me emerged in my waking sleep moments and as such were more bizarre than abstract could describe. Just the part of sleep where the junk can be rearranged in my head to make some kind of sense.

Breath…. held……
breath…. stopped….
wake up grasping for a few molecules of air….
what a mess, a shambles shall we say….
each first inhalation forcing coughing fits to wreak their unrepentant havoc from limb to limb to throat.

I ache…
and quiet frankly it has all become a little tedious now. This cold has long out-stayed its welcome as I have watched it move through its stages totally oblivious to my needs and concerns….. nevertheless…

I ache… still… ache.

Cough
cough
cough

…. Day 6, not all going well. The coughing is still entrenched scarping and clawing at the insides of my throat, stopping me form getting of the end of sentences, erupting unawares from seemingly nowhere….. holding back just results in spasms that are most undignified.

Is that yet another sneeze I see before me exiting this hole on my face, with feeling like I just blew off the back of my head with the one hundred and odd mile an hour force of it. I am so tired. Sleep, not so great at the best of times is even worse, the cough enjoying the freedom of when I lay my head down, it is as if I give it free rein to launch forth in a repetitive tirade and splutters and quakes.

On day 3 I got to the stage where I almost was too tired to cough even though I had no choice. Like I had nothing left in me to give to let the cough emerge from it visceral depths. Throat feels and no doubt resembles sandpaper by now…. the chest begging for mercy.. I give in, I give in….. no more! How unremitting this cough can be, and how much more can a body take. Fears of internal injures cloud my increasingly fuzzy brain which rattles like woodpeckers head. And the phases of the cold continue unabated, each one coming along in its own sweet time. Slipping in almost imperceptible until its full impact is realised….. as sniffles, sneezes, headaches, swollen tonsils, weariness, tunnel vision…..

cough
cough

cough

Each wracking cough and rage within, bruised and battered and beaten down by something so tiny, a virus, in itself nothing to look at. But its impact is all-consuming and unrelenting. determined to run its tortuous course through the body, through the days, through the long unslept nights.

I watched the day awake slovenly from mist, a shroud, chilly fingers reluctant to to let it go, to let the dawn become a morning. To allow definition to return to trees and buildings, which now are just silhouettes, almost not there, hanging on in my visual acuity. Being washed away almost where they stand… and I hold my breath, fight back a cough, see the slow reveal of landscape, objects, washing into view as the mist gives up it quarry to a barely climbing sun which itself can almost not be bothered to drag itself above the horizon.

It won’t be here long as it is. Hardly risen then slipping out of view again within a matter of small hours. I wish this cold was the same, gone in a matter of hours, and not like interminable beast that it is, scratching and smothering, and coughing and spluttering…

cough….. cough…. cough

Queuing in the post office for a counter to come free, and jolly and bouncy voice come across…. ‘counter number 2 next customer please’…. lifting my dulled spirits only to find behind the glass a sullen face of counter staff staring docilely back… the voice was automated it seems, luring me to false expectations…. maybe they had a cold too, not feeling too bouncy… maybe…

... cough… cough.. cough

I sneezed
it took me by surprise.. it shouldn’t have, after all I have a cold and it’s what happens when you have one of those, usually anyway. And for a moment I was like a feather, light-headed, floating, came down to earth but not I a hurry. A slow descent back to the here and now.

In that same instant I felt invisible, like the sneeze blew me out of existence. Out of where I stood, space and time, felt between a crack where unless you looked close you wouldn’t see me , face scrunched in crinkles and wrinkles as the sneeze took hold and took its toll… thunderously, unimaginable speeds.

My throat rattles and complained with a wracking cough as if not impressed by the sneeze and wanting to makes its feelings known too, despite the chaos it through my limbs into grabbing out for dead air in an epileptic zeal. The sunset grazed the beach before me, unmoved, not noticing my contortions and what was almost loss of consciousness. Peeling back towards a horizon, broody but brilliant as the colours changed before my eyes even though I couldn’t detect when one tint moved to another. Just suddenly aware of that change…. and then the next.

I clawed back with a sniffle and felt the freezing air rush up my nostrils… winters truth unnerving. My eyes popped out of my head in surprise…. oxygenated, revived…. whatever, I felt viral air being replaced by fresh clean unadulterated air left behind by the day. I stole some of it for myself to take home once I leave these dunes and head for the car to make my way back to coal fires and hot chocolate. I was sure the evening sky could spare it anyway…. as I watched my outgoing breath dissipate in a light newly shading away into little more than suggestions of what it represents.

The aches remained. My body complained at the toll this cold was taking.
Could I call it flu?
I think not.
If it was I wouldn’t be stood here under my own weight parasitising the dusk for my own personal memories. To be stored away and reminisced later, maybe in a blog, maybe conversation, most definitely over whisky and oatcakes.

I sneezed and all at once I felt everything shatter and be cast away into never-neverland, never to be seen again. It all came back of course, in the next inhalation, and there I was still standing, staring, ready to go back and find my pen.

Hitting a wall, the climax is anticlimactic. All things become big things, one on top of the other, a shambling heap teetering on cracks too fine to mend. It’s like the day of the dead where all your ghost come out to taunt and tease and whisper just out of earshot.

All this energy, time and stress, all a build up to this one day, Christmas Day. All the while message getting mixed up and tangled in consumer hell and bluster… and sometimes all I can do is stop, stand still and look on bemused. Catch myself like a breath mid-gasp and take a second to remember where I am. And then in they come, the absentees, no explanations for not being here, feeling no compulsion to comfort me….. they just come one by one by one……..

Then the day itself, Christmas day…. this is apparently what it is all for, this one day, of the month of the year. Far from being pleasure it become suffocating, where expectations grab at my sleeves and scrape at my skin telling me how I should feel. That I should enjoy and give it all, everything, leave nothing to chance…. and yet the energy just melts away in a pile of kindling that cant quiet take. Cold and damp, the smell of decay and artificial perfumes crawl from an atmosphere so charged with want and desire that it becomes impossible to move from one moment to the next without a sense of ache and pain.

Night slips into day sipping light from horizons sharp and sheer, low clouds lift from weed-strewn shores …. expected to enjoy, to celebrate, to mark this day with a passion and a vigour of all that’s gone before. To impose a mood, a nature, a face on all and sundry.

Surrounded by the jetsam discarded as platitudes, offered like apologies that maybe you could have been more enthusiastic but by today have been sapped of all but the dregs, a drip, drip, drip of smiles like grimaces. Barely veiled disappointments a receiving nothing of use, preferring not to have been given anything to something next to useless, soon to be unwanted. At the same time glad to receive something, whatever it is, even if its just so as not to look out of place amidst the shower of wrapping paper not given a second glance.

How small can I make myself? Enough not to be seen at all? An inward curling coil forever turning in and in and in.

This may all sound very depressing but I have seen the terror in peoples eyes. That ‘fight or flight’ moment when you tear open a Christmas cracker and the usual damp bang they often ‘bang’, only to have fall out of it a tacky tissue paper festive hat, or crown, and the knowledge that all around you in that room are expecting you to wear it for the rest of the day. I have always found leaning awkwardly over the open flame of a candle can deal with this dilemma conveniently… but setting it alight there by relinquishing the need to feel like a fraud in your cracker headwear.

It came and it went… was it all for that one single day in the month? It isn’t of course, but it can explain partly why what is supposed to be a happy time of the year and all too easily be built on very thin glass and come crashing down at a moments notice.