Sleep Diary - part 3
By Noo
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https://www.abctales.com/story/noo/sleep-diary-part-1
https://www.abctales.com/story/noo/sleep-diary-part-2
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Day 17 – How would you rate the quality of your sleep last night?
1 2 3 4 5
V. poor V. good
Thanatos subsumed by Eros – can we possibly move beyond this point? I have little faith in the glib nonsense of closure, but I do believe we should - we can - begin to speak. You tell me you don’t sleep, that you needed to be with Ros to get enough sleep to even vaguely function through the day. I tell you I sleep to forget, but I want to remember. You need to remember too. To do this, we need to be awake at the same time and asleep at the same time. We’ve been existing like the people in the old weather houses – only one of us appearing at a time in the waking world or the world of sleep.
I feel I’ve been in that strange, distorted land of German, expressionist films where no angle on a door makes sense and walls fall in on themselves, or run on to infinity. Where everything is dream or illusion. Portent or nightmare.
Let us speak of the baby we lost and decide how we can knit your sorrow and mine together. After all, our sorrow is what we are left with. Our baby exists through our words – what we remember and what makes us happy and sad. Let us make room for our baby in our bed. Sometimes it will be solid and take up terrible space between us – a thing of bone, muscle and sinew that leaves us hardly any room to breathe. Other times, it will be a tiny wisp of a thing. A ghost, but our ghost never-the-less.
Lay your clothes on the chair in the bedroom, take your contact lenses out and clean your teeth. Lay down next to me and we’ll spoon, facing the door or the window, it doesn’t really matter which.
Come on my husband, you look so tired. Let’s go to bed.
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Thanatos and Eros – in Erin’s waking dreams, the mummers are moving on. The season is changing and there’s the remotest hint of spring in the softening of the ground under their feet. Tips of green spike through the earth and colour is nipping at the winter grey.
The mummers are masked still, but the drummer beats a jaunty rhythm and dancing is in the air. There’s the rabbit headed one, the crow and the ram’s head. The devil has changed places and goes next - he’s been given his due, so he’s smiling of sorts.
At the back is the undefinable mummer with the sack-cloth over his head. He finally does what he’s nearly done before and unties the rope at his neck so he can lift the sack-cloth off. Level with his nose only, but enough to reveal his mouth, his beautiful, impossible child's smile.
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Comments
Beautiful ending! Very
Beautiful ending! Very moving.
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Hello Noo,
Hello Noo,
You had me gripped and intrigued from start to finish. Great story-telling.
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This trio of delight is our
This trio of delight is our story of the week, well done!
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This mived me in ways I didn
This mived me in ways I didn’t expect, noo. I was downright teary in places. Beautiful.
Rich x
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