To the end of the road...

[fightingthecage]

It has been a hell of a day.

I should give some context. I stayed up all night on Wednesday, and then all day Thursday, writing an essay I had once again left until the last minute. And it should have been an easy one! It was just really interesting so I kept getting sidetracked and reading bits I really didn't need to. Anyway, I got it done and handed in and by that time, I had a sore throat which I just put down to smoking too much in the last 36 hours, and being knackered. No worries.



Felt better when I woke up this morning. My sister is in the country and stayed over last night. She had told me that my mother's bloke, Brian, had gone into hospital on Monday night because he couldn't breathe (he has Constricted Airways Disease). They found a blood clot in his lungs, but she didn't know how he was now - anyway, five minutes after I got up today our mother rang, saying she had got through to him at the hospital. He apparently has multiple clots in his lungs and a reduced white blood cell count; a couple of days ago, they insisted his son was called in which mother says is a sure sign they thought he was going to die. But! He is not dead and sounded OK apparently; he'll be in hospital for a while while they find out what the blood count is about and sorting out care for when he gets home - overall outlook isn't great, obviously, but better than it was a few days ago.

I should have figured today was going to be weird when I got this news and no part of it really registered. I felt better, but not great; wasn't going to miss my creative writing seminar though, as it was my turn to get a group critique and I wanted to know how it had gone across. (As it turned out, universal love and compliments, woot!) Even managed to get Evie to nursery without a row, which is a rare thing for this week.

Annnnnd then...I don't know. Started feeling completely spaced out during the seminar. Had an hour to kill afterwards before lecture. Fine, went and had a coffee. Walking to my lecture felt like a bit of an effort but I got there, chilled out, few deep breaths....and the lecturer didn't turn up. Which I would have been jeffed off about if I had the energy, seeing as I could have gone home at 11am. But as it happened, one of the seminar tutors was in there and she got up and said that she'd researched radio plays as part of her doctorate and there was one she'd come across recently online that we should listen to. So, fine. Not a wasted hour. She'd put a notice up about it on the department worksite a few days ago, so I knew what it was about - Sophie Lancaster, a girl who, along with her boyfriend, was attacked for being a goth in 2007. She died a few days later (he survived). The tutor was all, 'It made me cry!' in a completely cheerful tone of voice and I didn't think anything of it because I felt completely disconnected from the world at this point.

So, we listened. I played backgammon on my iphone throughout, as I'm incapable of sitting still and listening at the same time. It was basically her mother talking about her - well, an actress who was supposed to be her mother - and then Sophie; then her mother, then Sophie etc. Just talked about her life and character and their happy relationship. It was awesome, very well written. And then....then, ahaha. It got to the bit where she was attacked. It talked about what the police had found out and told the parents; it talked about the aftermath and, graphically, the state of her face (blown up like a football, with the design from the bloke's trainers imprinted in her skin where she was kicked so hard). it talked about her mumbling and puking, the turn for the worse, how her brain died and the decision to switch the machine off and how there was blood all over the floor when she got into her bed and held her daughter as she took twenty minutes to die. And it had Sophie saying goodbye to her mother and talking to her boyfriend, all in this beautiful, evocative, poetic prose.

Well. A couple of people left before it got all the way through. I don't think there was anyone left in the lecture theatre with dry eyes. And the tutor got up at the end and said, 'I'll be outside if any of you want to talk about how this could be helpful for your writing!!' I could quite happily have hit her. Who the fuck was thinking about that in relation to their writing? I was already a spaceman before it started, already had hospitals on the brain because of Brian, and now I couldn't stop thinking about my daughter and getting in a stress. Because you know what? No one ever warned me before she was born that having a kid = living in terror all the time in case something bloody awful happens to them. I just wanted to go and get her from nursery and give her a cuddle. And I never cry but I got out of the theatre and made it to a bathroom and just collapsed for about ten minutes. I walked back to the car thinking I could just fall over from disorientation and lack of energy, and couldn't think of anything but that mother breaking down when her kid died in her arms, living every mother's very worst nightmare.

I know it's just because I'm tired and not well. Logically telling myself that didn't help very much. It's not helping much now, as I type this. That may have been a brilliant piece of drama, all well written and acted etc, but I found it nothing sort of traumatic. I had to cancel my guitar lesson this afternoon and I spent the afternoon trying to sleep so that I can get distance from it.

/tmi

Right. Now I am going to RP to distance myself from it again. Painkillers have kicked in and I'm not going to think about it any more. I just wanted to write it out to try and get away from it.

Comments

[fightingthecage.livejournal.com]

It was fucking horrific, quite frankly. Maybe she'd just listened to it so many times for her research that she was immune to it or something.

[mmexlibris]

I read a book called Song of Kali by Dan Simmons. It was a motherfucking brilliant book, but absolutely horrific. And I research non-fiction serial killers for fun. It was just -- yeah, I thought, man if I'd written this book, it would have languished in a drawer. Just awful. But beautifully written.

So yeah, I can relate. We all have different thresholds for horror, I guess.