Perfected :: Her Body :: Greek Necessity :: Deep Throats :: Scrolls

My brain can't translate these fractured memories into coherent paragraphs. There's one person who might not want to read this. So I'm warning you now. It's not that I don't want you to, but you've been upset enough. I know it's my re-tellings of that time that is in part what you come here for, but that's not solely what this is. It's a 'what if', a 'what nearly happened'. It's morbid, it's fucked up, but occasionally I wonder. There's this whole alternate reality inside my head. It's the world where the thing that almost went wrong, went wrong. For no apparent reason, my mind takes a wander there every sdo often, seemingly unprompted. I could, and probably should, sit down and note when I started thinking about it, and why. It's just that I'm always aware that it was a *possiblity*. That, some years down the line I could easily be introduced to prospective step mothers. That the three of us might have had to adjust to being just that, an imploded nuclear family. Thinking about it is like reading Braille, if I could read Braille. Familiar words, I can trace over them but I can't really *see* them. This possiblity obssessed me that summer after it all happened, the first time Clare and I had been away from home since...I couldn't stop crying. Even in rehersals, over breakfast, over the washing up. The 'what ifs' choked me, terrified me, made me convinced that if I turned away for a second she would be gone. One day I took an early lunch break and ran to the Samaritans drop in centre that I'd been loitering around for a week, too scared to go in. I cried, cleaned myself up and went back to the theatre. The man I spoke to handed me soft, peach coloured tissues the kind that I can't see now without being consumed with grief for something that did not occur. He told me it was because I was away from home, away from the reminders that *it turned out alright in the end*. I probably need to go home now, but I can wait the few weeks I have to. It could have happened. So bloody easily. I froze up in the weeks that turned into months after her operation. Couldn't write, couldn't sleep, wouldn't eat except to binge and the starve for a few days. I remember, quite clearly, the dismissal that my sister wasn't feeling well whe she ran to the bathroom and vomited after dinner for weeks. I didn't buy it then, I don't now, but if I'd called her on it... It was more than two years ago. I know that imagining the worst case scenario is better than thinking about the desired outcome of the operation, because now I can think *thank GOD*. To be honest, I don't think about it that much at all. It's the minutiae of everday life for us now, ahs been for so long. Thrice weekly hospital trips and a trackline the envy of every junkie on the Wirral. Which makes it odd that I consider the operation to have been a success. Because the 'what ifs' are always there. So I lean my head against her arm and listen to the buzzing from the fistular (I really ought to be able to spell that...)and it comforts me. Here and now, this *is* the best-case scenario. ______________________________ we have come so far :: it is over

Accomplishment :: The Moon :: Toga :: Night Flower