The weather is turning now, or it should be turning. I look at the forecast for Sunday, when I'm planning to run my marathon early in the morning, when I can social distance myself from everyone and run slow and heavy alone. It's going to be warm, almost. What is a summer that you watch through the window glass. What will any of the future hold. We were worried about the singularity last year — now, I just want bread flour and arborio rice.
We took a trip to the Cotswolds in January 2012. Naomi had Scarlett Fever, she was quite ill. It was an illness that I didn't think people got anymore, and could barely believe, but there it was. That year was the final year of my PhD — we had just had Mia and I had the sense of being up to my neck in water, with it rising, standing on my toes, wondering how much more was coming, when I would go under. We planned this holiday for January because it was Yoko's birthday, but the trip made less and less sense the closer it came. Still I had made the plans and stubbornly refused to cancel — I had done this before when we went in our honeymoon and Yoko was ill, but we went anyway. We couldn't lose the money, could we. That was the one thing we couldn't lose.
The car wouldn't start on Tuesday night. I had packed up the reusable shopping bags and taken a list of things to buy at the supermarket. There was still something in the battery, but not enough for it to turn over, and I opened the door of the house shouting in that the car wasn't starting, I was stuck. The lockdown goes quickly from being annoying to be a crisis — what if we don't have a car anymore, what if the car has a flat. A neighbour came out to help and it took five tries to get it to work, and then it turned over and I physically felt the pressure leave me and I wondered why I ever took something like the car starting for granted.
I promise now to never take it for granted, but it's ridiculous. Like how I said a prayer, a kind of prayer, when I put the key in after shopping and willed with everything I had in me that the battery wouldn't be dead again. Please. And it started and I thought again, I will never take this for granted, and of course, I will take it for granted.
When I was younger, I got pneumonia once. I remember very little about it now, except that I felt something from my parents I don't ever remember feeling again. It was a kind of love, now as I think about it, that a parent feels for a sick child. A prayer even if you don't pray — a will, that sheer will for your energy to flow out of you into your child to make them well. Take me instead of them, even if it's ridiculous, even if the child is not that sick, but you think it, don't you. You think stupid things when you're scared. I remember getting a shot that was big and necessary and I remember my father holding me.
Most illnesses you survive, of course. Even Scarlett Fever and when you look back at the pictures, depending on what you want to remember, you can remember what you want. I don't know what I want to remember now. I have wanted forever to be positive, to put a positive spin on the hard times, all the hard times, there have been. Each year there was something, wasn't there. We made a practice of not telling the truth because it was too hard. I keep wanting to cry, I'd been crying weakly, pathetically before the lockdown. Now, there is no context for it. I wake up from a dream about a world that doesn't exist anymore. I was on a plane, and I wake and think, oh there are no more planes. It was just a dream.