Sit With Me

Sit with me. I feel oddly lonely this morning. As if the rest of the world  is busy and I have forgotten how. So watch me while I pace the floor. Change the cd. Help me choose something less devastating than Edith Piaf. (God knows she could drive a woman to drink). Then take me in your arms and spin me around the wooden floor and let’s pretend it’s a ballroom. Lets spin around and around until we are dizzy and your heel gets caught in my skirt and we collapse on the floor, laughing till I cry  and you have no choice but to make me a cup of tea and tell me a terrible joke.
It is the sun I think that’s done it. It curtails me. Confuses me. Seems to promise much of I know not what  and upends the certainty that comes with cosying up on the greyest of days. For one feels obliged to get outside. To do something. To be someone  and have ones day in the sun. Where there is usually the freedom of the car, much talk of petrol strikes is making frugality a necessity and I am hoarding jealously the half tank of petrol I currently have. Afraid that emergency lurks waiting and I will be stranded. Afraid that those of us who do not guard what we have will come unstuck. Too lazy (too sensible) to go wait in mile long garage queues. And so I push my toes into twinkly ballet shoes and walk around to the post office to buy a home-made coffee cake I will probably never unwrap and make small talk with a woman the nastiest piece of me despises. I am billions of parts of a whole and not all of them are kind. Some are hungry for I know not what.
So I cook.  Without an apron. (Bad housekeeper, bad housekeeper!! Somebody come whip me.) Today cheese biscuits that I eat standing up, straight from the oven, squashed with warm Stilton and drizzled with the oil from a jar of sun dried tomatoes. For a breakfast of sorts. Wiping floury hands onto my nubby brown jumper, burning my tongue and forgetting to care because some days this house feels like a prison and small acts of domestic treachery are all I have to sustain me.
Dear me. Melodrama suits me a little too well doesn’t it? So lets drown it in words. In another world. Let’s read my friend. I want to exist in comfortable silence…
You take my armchair and I will lie on the floor, a bed of floral cushions beneath me, bare feet wriggling in lime mohair. There is a time and a place for contemplation and perhaps it is best taken in candlelight. Despite the sun raging outside, this little room of mine is as dark as night time, so watch me as I walk around the room creating molten yellow bursts of light from honey coloured candles that will gently disguising the air of neglect dusting every surface. Those flowers are dead. Breathe deeply regardless. Keep a notebook beside you and write down the thoughts somebody else’s imagination sparks.  Circumnavigate their dreams  and steal the sentences that best translate that which  you have never been able to put into words. (Don’t you sometimes find words leading you on a merry little dance?). Hoard sentences and sigh over pauses that tighten the black belt you wear around your heart.
When it gets too much we will stop. Yes. When we feel ourselves drowning we have to call time on the books that bite. Stand up and let’s go back to what we were doing. This was just a pause in our ordinary existence and it is over now. There are kittens to be fed and plants to be watered. I will show you to the door. Press a grateful kiss on your cheek and watch you wander up the lane.
The sun is shining. You will make hay while I burn bergamot and wish this unexpected melancholy far, far away.
The sun is shining Sweetheart.