A month of years

What was I thinking a year ago? What did I mean by 'in good time' when it was clear that nothing about the present time was good? Was I waiting for the wheel to turn and for what passes for 'good' to return? Would I recognise it when I saw it? (and did I, in August?)

In other words, why this blog?

I stopped posting on Spaniard shortly before I began this and then I stayed silent for a few weeks until everything was over. When I did start to post here, this blog was open. After all, if I was going to air the most painful thoughts on a blog at all, it ought, by rights, be available to everyone: the more people there are the more anonymous you become.

In time that did not feel right any more. And so I restricted readers to a couple of dozen, some of whom I still had never met except online. Was that more right? Are there degrees of rightness with the opening of wounds in public?

Now there are six of you. For all practical purposes, we might be a bunch of people at a coffee shop or - God forbid! - at an AA meeting, swapping therapeutic stories. I'm Space Bar and it's been five weeks since my last sob story.

This was meant to be therapy, wasn't it? A place where I could say things I might not even have allowed myself to say in front of my own family, fresh with their own grief. A place where the sum of all your other experiences would help to drain away the charge of my excess. This was the hole in the wall where I could whisper my unspeakable secrets and no one would know though everyone was watching.

Then, when it became more particular, in the days when you had faces, I lost my voice. Why? Why did I allow you your separateness and me my silence? What were we doing still sitting around this cold hearth?

What am I doing now, already looking back on the not-yet-a-year as if it had the didactic weight of a lifetime? What am I meant to learn?

A year ago, when I wrote that first post, I didn't know that I would wake up the next day to find my father crying with exhaustion, his eyes too dry to make tears. I didn't know that I would begin to take decisions on his behalf and take him to the hospital despite his wishes. I also didn't think they would keep him, that I would break my promise to him that this would only be a consultation and not admission.

I didn't know any of it but I knew why I needed this space.