The Widow's Tale by Mick Jackson Read Free Book Online

how fucked-up I am. About how fucked-up my future’slooking. About all the extra pain that’s waiting for me there. I have created for myself my own little … what am I saying, little ? … my own monumental vortex of sickness and anxiety. And who on earth would deny me that?
    My worries come in a whole host of shapes and sizes. There are days – an alarming number of days, let me tell you – when I feel like a stranger on earth. I have problems with reality (my number one problem with reality being that it is all too terrifyingly real). I feel raw. I feel alienated. Sometimes just getting from one moment to the next is an effort. And speaking of time. I think its gears are slipping. I’m not sure it knows which way is up.
    Other than that, I’m doing just fine.
    A friend of mine, who has had her own little difficulties over the years, passed onto me some little nugget of wisdom she’d picked up somewhere, quite possibly from a professional, which put great emphasis on acknowledging those occasional moments each day when you’re not actually one hundred per cent depressed or desperate. When you take a sip of coffee, for example, or take a breath of cold, fresh air. Or you find yourself laughing, albeit involuntarily, at something on the radio.
    The theory is, I suppose, that you begin to accept that such moments exist. Then perhaps start to knit these teeny pockets of hope together and focus on the good stuff, if only to give yourself some respite from all the crap. And slowly convince yourself that one’s life is not, in fact, a wall-to-wall horror show.
    Well, like I say, it’s a theory.
    I have enough objectivity, at least, to see that some of my little episodes are self-inflicted – in that I start niggling away at something until I find that I can’t stop. I wind myself up into a sort of neurotic frenzy and make myself quite nauseous. Whereas other attacks just seem to land on me, like a meteorite. It’s as if I smell something in the air – or briefly experience a strange metallic taste at the back of my throat – and before I know it … WHAM … I’m struck down in my tracks.
    I have begun to use the phrase ‘panic attack’ in certain instances. I do now know that whilst it might feel as if I’m falling, I am not actually falling. And that even if I were actually falling, I will not, in fact, fall forevermore. I’ve had all of this pointed out to me. But, contrary to popular opinion, the successful identification of such a thing does not necessarily nullify it. Does not make it go up in a puff of smoke. So, I can be wheeling my trolley down the aisle of the supermarket and, without knowing why, feel the fear begin to creep up on me. And suddenly I’m off, slipping and sliding down my own terrible helter-skelter, until I think I’m going to pass out, and fall head first into the nearest freezer, among the pizzas. To be found, months later, by some despondent shelf-stacker, like one of those frozen corpses they chip out of glaciers. And what will the archaeologists make of me, I wonder? Will all their carbon-dating equipment and fancy micrometers successfully tell them what my story was?
    Oddly enough, one fragment of my myriad anxieties is bumping into people. I’m not half as panicky up here.Maybe it’s because there are fewer people. Or maybe I’m just afraid of those people who might actually know me – who’ll gravely enquire how I’m doing, whilst examining me to see precisely how screwed-up I am today.
    Ah well. I’ll just have to hide away out here in the sticks the rest of my life. And buy an old black bike to push my shopping back from the Spar.
    One thing I really do worry about is that without John around to rein me in I’ll slowly grow into some eccentric individual. Not eccentric, as in quaint and charming. Eccentric, as in just plain weird. Our marriage was far from perfect, but one way or another we used to contain each other’s excesses. And now that he’s gone I worry