The Cure For Sleep: Choosing
Season 1, 004: in fairytale fashion
This month’s advance extract from The Cure For Sleep is about choice: those rare moments in life when we are brought to a sudden need to decide on something that will alter the course of our days. After reading, do share a short true tale of your own - no more than 300 words – on this theme in the comments section.
You can read the stories already contributed by readers over on The Cure For Sleep website
june’s extract
The only thing missing for Nye and I now in our mid-twenties (or so we told ourselves) was a home of our own, and this we found soon after marriage on a single day of searching when we looked at just three terraced houses, the last of which had cupboards full of mouldering food left behind by its long-gone tenants.
Despite the stink, the disorder, we found ourselves checking every room, each feature, as if it were a newborn: See the old wood panelling under the stairs! The little lean-to beyond the living-room window – just like his Gran’s! The back door to it was locked, so we lifted the sash and climbed through to the porch.
That hot plastic smell of his childhood, mine!
We had to have it.
Whimsy. Fun. Instinct. Lightness. How some of the best – and worst – decisions of a life are made. Walking over a threshold and seeing a stranger, a set of rooms, and emptying one’s head, one’s pockets. Taking a hand, a key. Exchanging the milk cow for the magic beans. Thinking not of cost or profit. Refusing the call of future possibilities that will fall away when choosing this place, that person. The way it is done: from smell, sound, stomach; all the senses coming together to assay the moment.
Every spare hour we had found for the writing life, we gave over now to the removal of wallpaper, carpets and ceiling tiles, before eating soup cold from tins and reading by candlelight for the months it took to get the electrics made safe. Sleeping happy on a mattress on the floor surrounded by the strange confetti made by all the debris.
Work and home began to balance, and when either of us in a rare empty minute felt the lack of friends or our old literary ambition, we trusted to the future. We were young still; that time would come again.
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Tanya,
Thank you for generously sharing your success and providing space for the words of others.
Michelle
Choosing Then & Choosing Now
Glossy brown, smooth in the hand, I eagerly housed the conker on my childhood shelf. But oh, the disappointment to see it shrink and shrivel and grow dull. I learned you cannot keep the shine of the horse chestnut.
Two decades later, now a mother a continent away, I sat beneath the chestnut that spreads its shade in the Arsenal picnic grounds in Watertown, Massachusetts. My two toddlers played on the blanket. Conkers lay all around. Holding one warm in my palm, I remembered the childhood lesson and saw a choice.
Keep the seed but lose it, or let it be buried and fulfill its promise. Beneath the surface, in the secret soil, a seed splits open, one shoot and one root push aside the earth. Give it time and time and more time, it rises and deepens, fruits and shelters, an exponential generosity. Which to choose? Hold tight to my life, my time, my now, or sink down beneath the daily deaths of motherhood. Yet grow and fruit and put out hundreds of hopeful seeds, a rooted life?
For twenty-nine years I have made this choice. Tall around me are the saplings of six young adults: a new college grad, a newlywed, a young mother, and still two teens. Also, one a recovering addict and free from anorexia, an excruciating decade of believing in someone, holding them by the roots, tangled in your heart. Things I did not know I was burying myself beneath or would be called on to do.
I keep a photograph of a late fall sunflower husk, a horse chestnut seed, a dry grass head, in my room next to where I dress. Spare, rich beauty. And now, in the fall of life, near spent, I yet hope to polish seeds of words that shine.
I long for the days before perimenopause when my body did not feel every emotion as if stung by a jellyfish, as if it was bound in electric wire, both exhausted and thrumming with energy, a woodpecker inside, tapping on each nerve ending. I am in this land of mixed metaphors, no certainties. Human skin sheds dead cell by dead cell, millions a day, but still, just a patchwork, change unseen, leaving one essentially the same. Mid-fifties and change must now come snakelike.
Snake skin does not grow with the snake and the snake eventually cannot abide being contained. To allow this change the time it needs, it will hide away, days, weeks, vision impaired, alone. When ready, the snake will rub against something abrasive to shed, to crawl out anew, enlarged, old skin left there, intact but empty. I was that, but now I am this, that old skin reminds.
Women, too, know the itch of wanting to crawl from one’s skin, past lives no longer fit. Snakes who do not do a complete shed risk infection, blindness, death. Women, the same. Women forced to shapeshift in public, if they dare.