she let herself go

Grey, rainy days accentuate my melancholic tendencies, and I experience everything more deeply.

Random thoughts bounce around while I’m trying to tidy my desk, trying to settle down to do my stitching. Words are pushing harder. They’re often the first line of defence against chaos, disorder – when I need to make sense of something.

I remember my beach walk the other day, bits of conversation floating past.

Passing me, a man said to his companion, She used to be so beautiful, it’s a pity she let herself go.

Baffling and non-sensical. For when a woman stops pandering to the male gaze, she invariably comes home to her Self, becomes herself, finds herself.

Perhaps you disagree.

And now I’m thinking about an old friend who lost her mind, it’s almost ten years now since we last spoke. Lost, without her mind, she decided she didn’t want to see me anymore. Her husband apologised, tried to explain, settled on, “I’m sorry. Nothing much makes sense nowadays.”

As an exploration geologist, she travelled widely, to exotic destinations. A rare virus was suspected. Larvae picked up somewhere, somehow – perhaps swimming in that bilharzia filled river  – worming into her beautiful brain.

We wrote our first novels at the same time, were sisters-in-arms, in our word-filled trenches.

When my mind rejects hurtful facts, I seek solace in visual images and patterns.

What does a broken mind look like?

Last night I dreamt that she found me in a large crowd at an art gallery and threw her arms around me.

I missed you so much, she said.

Perhaps I should let her go.