SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE

This is starting to feel brutal…

There’s only so far you can bend before you eventually break, and it feels as if, like a piece of raw spaghetti, it won’t only be two pieces that I’ll be breaking into.

But the miserable sequel to this year’s most irritating storyline “Hospital Stay 1” has already stretched to a week and, with an added hospital acquired infection, looks like turning into another epic, with the added complication of being so much further away that the travelling time is doubled, and when you add in the commuting time to and from our tiny little office next to the sewage works, and the occasional battles with blizzards, as well as the insomnia, the worry, and the increasing sense of unwanted responsibility being thrust upon me, I am, quite frankly, knackered.

And it’s not as if the visits seem to be doing much good, even though the place itself is so relatively remote that I’m likely to be the only one who makes the trek out there. We sit there with little to talk about apart from tales of work that nobody outside the place could reasonably be expected to be interested in, meals which we haven’t had the time to either cook or eat, and the exciting news stories that don’t see to have penetrated through the walls of the ward.

Other than that, all we do is try to sleep, and there’s only so many times that you can tell that old story…

Oh, I know I should try and prompt some kind of reaction, ask probing questions, but she seems to have lost any interest in the world beyond that mattress as well. One day, I’m sure I’ll regret not having taken the time to ask so many questions about what things were like in her youth, what it was really like growing up with my grandparents as parents and whether, behind all the madness they were actually people whom I might have enjoyed the company of and getting to know.

In another reality, another world…

One day, all those opportunities will have slipped away and be gone forever, but we have never really had that kind of relationship and, to be perfectly honest, I imagine that if I started asking about such things now, she might just suspect that I’ve finally gone completely around the bend or that I “know something” that I’m not telling her…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’m also beginning to wonder whether I have indeed rounded that tricky hairpin…

I’m so exhausted and I know that I’m starting to miss things, forget things. I go downstairs to take my morning pills and the little bubble bearing the name of yesterday’s day is sitting there unopened and I wonder whether I missed a day or just forgot that this sachet hadn’t actually started on a Sunday but now it mysteriously does…

I can sense the concentration slipping away at work, and I can sense that the mind is struggling to come up with new and exciting thoughts to put down in my roughly hewn sentences. Not only that, but things are quite simply not getting done as the squares in the picture puzzle of life get shifted around again and again to accommodate the various changes necessary, but the picture always manages to not get completed…

Sometimes it gets tantalisingly close, only to get jumbled up again by the simplest of moves, because, in the end, something’s always got to give, and I’m beginning to suspect that the something might be me…