| Always the bridesmaid - never the bride, and quite rightly so.... |
[Jun. 28th, 2008|01:35 am] |
Maybe it's the pre-wedding jitters, or maybe it's the 4 ultra-strength paracetamol I just swallowed with a half-bottle of Diet Coke. Maybe it's the fact I'm doing a Kanye West and running on about three hours sleep every night, or maybe it's the fact I'm listening to Kanye West (let's get lost tonight, you can be my black Kate Moss tonight) at 9.30am on this Saturday morning, guzzling rhymes.
I don't know what it is but I really have to write. I woke up and my head was frothing with words. I don't know what it is. If I miss writing, or blogging or just talking about the innerworkings of my mind - snore - but it's therapy, and right now I need all of that. For someone who has cohabited with an eating disorder for six years I'm surprised that it's only just now I'm having anxiety attacks at the thought of walking through a room full of people in a dress, a proper dress. People keep saying "I can't wait to see you in a dress," which makes me feel even worse that my constant ensemble of baggy clothes and trainers is THAT noticable.
After reading Icelandic novel 'The Swan' I wake up feeling like a shop lifter exciled to the country to work on a farm. This was extra disturbing this morning as I woke up at the crack of dawn in Emma's spare room, complete with patchwork quilt and spacey white walls. I expect crowing cockerels or lowing cows, but when neither came I realised I wasn't dreaming. I got up an hour before my bus left and planned what I had to do before the wedding starts.
On the cabinet beside the bed I slept on in the spare room, my farm bed, were three ornaments featuring doormice. One of them was crawling out of a half eaten apple and a thousand neurones exploded in my head, which is probably something to do with this headache, and I remembered an ornament from childhood that featured in my grandparents country house. In my room. In the room that was built for me, that my grandad climbed the roof to erect beams and concrete walls as my nanny stood and barbecued, and we all watched and applauded his skill, when now we poke fun at him for falling asleep in his chair with a biscuit in his hand. There were four ornaments, all featuring animals crouched inside half eaten vegetables. I grasped around for a photograph in my memory but only came up with one pumpkin and one badger, and the two did not fit together. Suddenly I was near tears longing for them, and all my nanny's things, on this day that my grandad would remarry.
Am I betraying her somehow by being his new wife's bridesmaid? I think back to their wedding, as if I was there, as if I was not an egg inside my mother, who herself was an egg. I see beautiful fifties dresses. I see my nanny, slightly plump but glowing, getting married, and beautifully pregnant with my father. Our whole family stretches out both behind her and in front of her. Then there is me at the very end of the path, me where it ends, who cannot have children.
I want the ornaments in my hands, so I can look at them and remember them and not have forgotten so many things from ten years ago. I remember after she died finding a draw in that bedroom built for me where things of hers were kept. Stamps, earrings, an eyeliner, a mirror. I knew only I had found it. My mum had been round months before, clearing out her things. This drawer had been missed, had escaped the brutal sweeping of her memory. It was preserved. I told no one of it. It was my treasure.
Just before my grandad moved out I placed a branch of Christmas tree in a vase in that room, and I looked out over the garden where we had danced in the smoke left behind by fireworks, or fed horses. I looked at our treehouse that we had abandoned through fear of the spiders who made it their home. In the new year I went back to the room and found the branch still there. I touched it and at once every pine fell off it, leaving the bare bones of the twig in the dry vase. It frightened me.
I think of my nanny in the hospital. I think of myself in the hospital and how hard it was for my grandad to visit me. All the memories he must have had, watching me with an oxygen mask attached to my face. I felt guilty for everything I'd done.
I have an hour 'til I go change into my dress and everyone looks at me walking down the aisle behind the bride. I have to shave my legs and put make up on. All habits I picked up after my nanny died. I feel like I have betrayed everything, simply by growing up, but it's just anxiety, and I will be fine in an hour, and it will be a lovely day. |
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