Disintegration

I feel unsettled. Springtime brings up strange feelings in the body. A stirring of hormones inside. Nature working its own thing. Waking up is not easy. Thinking about things again is not easy. Maybe I could return to sleep? I know that is impossible as earth moves on relentlessly without exceptions. The bear like creature I am becoming has human arms and legs. I stretch my nails out in front  and count them one by one. They are important to my survival.

‘Hey are you awake?’ The voice broke into my conciousness. From the cave like darkness I crawl into full wakefulness. My hands still outstretched above the sheet. I can feel the cold air on my skin. My voice tries to emerge but sounds like a growl.  

He places a coffee beside me and walks away. My mind jumps from bear to human and from cave to house. Sometimes I am confused and don’t know which  may emerge. Does he see the bear or not this time?

The coffee smells good. Shopping for food is much harder now, in those places with rows and rows of products. Each one crys out to be bought with lables that promise everything. I hate shopping.. Does that mean I am not a proper wife and mother?

The bear stands and stretches every limb towards the ceiling. I want to growl but know somehow not to let them know yet about that inner self.  It wasn’t the time. I slowly shower and dress I can’t really speak to him as he doesn’t understand much these days. He sits lost in his own fantasy world, a blank expression of strange optimism across his face. The next idea, the next project… one that will bring their family into that place of  having enough and even more than enough. He has turned into a shell not human or bear and I can’t talk to a shell anymore. All that comes back is his own echo of false ideologies that promises success. Nothing is as it seemed to be. Everything feels contrived.

I notice the kids have gloomy faces chomping down cereals with coats and bags strung on their chairs ready for the ritual dumping off at the school. Even they recognise the deadly routine somehow and responded with their  typical teenage body postures.  I manage to wave goodbye and don't care if anyone notices. 

I drive the same way to work as I have for many years. A continuous blur of grey housing estates and unfixed pot holed roads from the snow past few years back flash past. A big colourful petrol station intersperses the bleakness every so often. Flashing its wears at you. Breakfast served here. Free DVD’s with every 60 euro of petrol. 

Full again, I can’t find a spot for my car. For fifteen years I drove around this building once or twice waiting for someone to come off the night shift to get a space. Never enough parking for the staff. It was destroying me from the inside very slowly like Orwell’s rat torture.  Ten minutes late I run to my clinic. Noticing the blood spats on the pavements as usual. I attempt to disengage with it all.  Spliting into many parts as wife, mother, shopper, and nurse.  None of them authentic, all of them manufactured. I never willingly gave consent to this. 

I think of my husband, his life as he knew it, fractured by unemployment. In his inner self he felt washed up at forty seven years of age but he never speaks this out loud. Instead he waffles on about ideas and projects that will solve eveything if only he could get a break. Delusional. His sense of values tied up within a system that crucifies him daily living him still breathing. 

At a meeting now of how to get people out of hospital faster and faster. I find myself pushing hard to keep bear emerging. A low snarl pushes out sometimes. Other times I become dolphin laughing with merriment. Except it’s the dark laughter of Poe wrapped inside the puffer fish. It’s the early signs of a sort of madness perhaps. I know I am on a slipery slope. I recognise I am often the only one who senses the total insanity of all this. I now have clear responsibilities.

I get through my day in the only way I know how. Putting aside my mixed up brain and fronting my nurse face to the queues of people waiting. I run a clinic for people with heart disease ironically when my own heart is splintered. The mix of people who attend always willing to tell their stories when asked. Many men have lost their jobs and their hearts are just broken. The broken men I call them, wandering around with no purpose, feeling estranged from society, judged useless and worse a burden. How do I tell them to stop smoking or eat less or get exercise when they can barely get out of bed every day? How do I give them hope when I have no hope left. I am shelled out, a walking bunch of bones, my head balanced on my shoulders weighted with its barbed thoughts.

So this day again I joke and make them laugh so they get some minutes of  reprieve that may add time to their lives. I prescribe laughter alongside the usual things and maybe lift the mood of some as they trudge through the hospital corridors. The day passes by as usual and nobody has caught me out yet. Bear remains hidden just clawing at my intestines ocasionally and reminds me of its existence. 

Inside the kitchen again pulling together food as no one else does. The children are too young and the husband is not hungry anymore. He taps on the computer hatching business plans. I wonder if he may be going mad too. We manage to sit together to eat, mobiles going off at random as the kids text their friends. The rule of no mobiles at the dinner table has long been broken and the energy to enforce has gone. I think I love them all as I glance around at them but that feeling of love is something I no longer fully recognise. The bear is pushing them all away. Isn’t that what bears do?

I sit and look out the window. I can be very still sometimes for hours at a time. I watch birds land on the bird tray. They fight and shout at each other ocasionaly but then cleverly hide in a tree or bush and swoop back for the crumbs. Two fat looking doves mange to squeeze themselves under the roof of the tray and sit there content to eat it the rest of it.  Animals fascinate me. I often think we have lost much of our animal nature. That instinct for survival has been eroded since we evolved into city dwellers and technology addicts. “We are the Hollow Men…heads stuffed with straw..” Elliot’s infamous poem speaks to me.  I stiffle a roar as bear wants out.

The plan is emerging piece by piece in jumbled fragments. I know what I must do. As a healer and life giver it contradicts everything I have done in my life so far. But as a mother and wife I know I must do this thing to set everyone free. They will know once its done. They will understand. I go to the garden shed and start preparation for what will be.  Putting off the night as bear gets stronger each time I sleep. 

A week passes repeating the daily routines as usual. Husband and I pass by each other preoccupied. Children do their daily routines and live in their own worlds. At least I tell myself that.  I know all is not well with us. I know we are only existing. I feel a sense that something will happen soon. My body shivers in anticipation. A glorious strange shivering. Bear feels it first. It’s a raw physical sensation that supercedes mind. It will act before mind. I allow this to encompass me for a while as every nerve in my being feels alive again. 

Later I sneak out into the shed again and with sharpened nails I toil long into the night once more.  Dawn breaks and I creep back inside. My large claws gently scrape along the wooden floors. My bulky frame magically fits into the bed beside my husband. I feel the cotton sheets embrace me as I curl up in a space beyond tirednes. My plan can wait a while.  My breath rises and falls steadily as bear finally begins to relax into sleep.  Nails are now retracted. Bear is now peaceful in its hidden place of safety. As light rises the bear cave gets darker and darker. Bear recedes deeper and deeper into its long hibernation when shades of sleep and dreams intertwine and transformation is complete.