(un)ravelling

Back on the front line again - fearless on the battlefield. Meaning that I have been laid up and mostly in bed. This is when we (pwme) have to be brave and free ourselves from fear, become incredibly zen and dispassionate about the hours and days that slip into a continuum and there is no telling how long this will last - it might be a week or several months. I walked a short distance along the path by the golf course that leads into the forest. A small moment of overreaching craziness when I was tempted to keep walking, it would have been downhill for a stretch before the uphill climb into forest proper, and then on and on with the possibility of getting lost. Everyone here seems to have a story about getting lost in the forest. But I walked back the way I came, before the rain came down, before I landed myself in a spot where coming back would be an endless uphill slog, before a pointless unravelling.

I feel an analogy coming on - don't you?

I have wandered too far from my story again - the one I should have been working on had I not gone down with this. Story never cares about reasons and excuses for not writing, however justified they might be. Story fleshes out and becomes real when you give it energy and attention and becomes pale and ghostly when you leave it alone for too long. The plot unravels. Getting back is an uphill climb that requires real, physical effort. And today was just weird, hard to pin down: all day waiting for the vet to call back because Cat of Signs was hyperventilating last night; then today she wandered out for an unusually long time and I had thoughts of her perhaps losing her breath again, breathing her last, without the strength to get back. I wandered around and into the neighbour's garden bleating her name. She was fine, scratching her claws on a wooden post. A man came to look at a couple of things that need doing, one of them being to properly lag the loft so the bedrooms are warmer when the cold comes. But he gave me the strangest look as he came in, as though he knew me from some previous and deeply troubling incarnation. Mr. Signs ushered him upstairs and they spoke of this and that. On the way out he gave me the same look, though I smiled nicely and did a faultless hello/goodbye. Trying to think where on earth I might have met him. Perhaps he was once a student of mine and I said something about his work that he didn't like? No, I would remember. Then laptop began to malfunction and made everything look like hieroglyphics, and it was as though I stared at a wall and could not read the Signs. It went on like that for an hour or so, and then righted itself. Sometimes things just do, and leaving things alone to sort themselves out is the best way.

While tapping out this post, a whole chunk of it began to unravel and delete itself. I feel another analogy coming on.