So my life is in boxes in three separate locations and I can't help but feel like I'm back at square one. Which of course isn't true but I have a nagging feeling that I've been coasting for the last few years. But what could I have done differently? Don't we come to things when the time is right for us to have it in our life? Or is that just a complete fabrication we tell ourselves, to placate, to smooth down the feathers. Are we not where we want to be simply because we didn't work hard enough? I know, I'm being too hard on myself.
All of the stupid question marks that start floating up, like unsettled dust, over my head, staring down at me with blitheful menace as soon as you remove 'the stuff'. But the hugest mark of all that is up there is invisible because it is more ingrained in me than anything else I know .... what is it that I want? .... And the awful truth that I'll probably never be able to answer that.
But at least there are the words. And a small comfort in escaping my own life for the terrible life of my character. Because hers is definitely worse and it, if only for a limited time, makes me feel a bit better about my own.
In the midst of it all I came across this. AL Kennedy was one of the guest tutors, for the fiction side of things, on my course in St. Andrews. I never saw her or even heard her speak. But she was much revered and feared in equal measure by the short story ladies. Lara tried to persuade me one day to sneak into a talk that AL was giving but her reputation preceded her and I remained in the relative safety of my poetry workshop.
Anyway ....
As August is in the process of disappearing behind me I find that the unsettled feeling is settling slightly. And I hope that in the kick up of the dust that it throws up something that I had forgotten about, or something I didn't even know was there, or if I'm lucky something brand, spanking, new.
"Wherever I am. Onwards."
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