Love without relief
A vigil of crows
Vigilant.
Vigil.
I am keeping vigil.
***
Watchful.
Over some unshakable dilemma, an unknowable curse, an as-yet unmanifest tribulation.
Crows bark their morning orders.
It is still.
Quiet.
Apart from the bloody crows.
***
There is an air of anticipation. The day is early enough that it hasn’t fully started yet.
I coil myself around a cup of tea, anxiously waiting.
For what?
***
Being the capable one wasn’t the prize I once thought it was. It was me they turned to, and when everything crumbled, it crumbled around me.
I stood there, confused, fixed. Maybe that fixity, that rigid stare, got mistaken for rootedness?
But I was frozen. Not rooted.
***
Of course, that was all a very long time ago, back and beyond, in the time of giants and fairy nooks.
It is different now.
In the linear, orderly sense.
But in the cyclical way, you know, the way of seasons and rhythms, it is all the same.
Same story, different set, maybe a new plot twist for flavour.
***
I am watching over my life like a first-time parent, overanxious, ready to leap into action.
It brings to mind the night we brought our son home from the hospital, his first night at home, a teeny weeny scrabbly baby, all wrinkles and softness from a nine-month cook.
All night I spent on edge, drifting in and out of a semi-sleep, alert to every inkling of a sound.
I’d wake, check he was breathing, scan the environment for risks, before returning to my noisy rest.
Yes, similar, but different.
***
Vigil – a wakefulness in service of something that matters.
A clue?
Something matters.
***
The crows are far away now, their bark barely audible and in its place is the gentle tittering of the little ones … the tits and the chaffs and such like.
They take up their space with much less melodrama than the squawky ones.
The day starts to become a real morning, not a ridiculous why-am-I-awake-at-this-godawful-hour one.
One tea becomes two, light shifts and the world takes form.
***
Today is solstice. A long one.
The longest one.
Mid-summer.
I don’t know why, but that word invokes a sort of frenzy, as if the rules shift at the edge of time.
What is it, this frantic madness at the midpoint?
I am anxious.
***
Bacchus is an ancient Roman god of wine, agriculture, and fertility.
And wild parties.
OK, so I made that last bit up, but in my mind he is a god of hedonic pleasures and wildness that goes on for days.
All amply assisted by a limitless deluge of wine, or such like.
There is something about that edge-of-reason mania that emerges after a sleepless night. It invokes a frenzy … an other-worldly ecstasy-rage.
You know, that sense that Anything Could Happen.
I imagine him flinging himself wildly about at a vineyard rave. His throbbing fleshy form gyrating and gesticulating, carafe in hand, wine sloshing everywhere. He is accompanied by a wild host of half-beasts, half-humans.
It is enthralling.
Slightly repelling too.
***
They are on my roof now.
Not barking anymore, but still they make their presence known.
Skittering and hopping, uneasy little buggers they are, and not that little either.
Love-hate. Hate-love.
***
I read recently that hate is actually not far from love and that concept took root in the mulch of my mind.
It has been gestating a wee while now and I think I get it.
Do you hate something you don’t care for?
Hate is reserved mostly for the things that matter.
So is vigilance.
***
Back to Bacchus, the god of escapism, except it’s elsewhere he takes me, not to ancient vineyard raves ... but to Thailand.
I’m in Ko Pha Ngan, aged 18.
A full moon party.
Yes, I know, so very cliché.
But this was the 90s, love, and it was edgy then.
I promise.
The party lasted a full moon and some.
Several possibly, although under the spell of Bacchus I couldn’t be sure.
A time arrived and a thought emerged, and the thought was:
“Go home. You need sleep, my love.”
It was then, in the execution of that command, that I got distracted.
More music.
A deep heavy beat so intoxicating that all I could do was stop, roadside, and dance.
Except in my delirium I got it wrong.
Or rather I got it right … but it was wrong.
It wasn’t a beat, but a road drill.
I was dancing to a bloody road drill.
I went back to my cardboard hut and slept for days.
***
What’s all this got to do with waking up in the grip of anxiety at 5am?
Nostalgia? Fantasy?
God knows, but that’s what goes on in here.
And you didn’t even ask.
***
They are quiet now, the crows, and the silence shifts the vigil up a gear.
Somehow the noise, the busy-ness, is less alarming than the silence.
Silence.
Emptiness.
What next?
***
I am waiting for a collapse that never came.
The crumbling, the descent, the chaos, the escapism, that was all part of the story.
But the collapse never came. I was already frozen, hovering between this and that. There was nowhere to fall.
Yet still I create its possibility at 5am.
I am braced, ready.
***
Curse the bloody crows. They are silent now. I want the relief of annoyance.
I hate the bloody crows.
I hate them when they are here, and I hate them when they are gone.
Why is love like that?