I’ve been seeing “how it started, how it’s going” pairs of photographs for 2020, and today is the first day I’ve wanted to do one. I woke this morning at 5:30, pleased to have slept a lot of hours all in a row, read myself back to sleep, then at 7:20 seldom have been so glad to be woken, from a dream about my sister. If it’s a vaguely-now dream it usually entails my wanting to know where she’s been for the past 10 years but not wanting to press her, knowing that if I ask something that sparks the wrong memory in her she’ll remember she’s dead and disappear again. I have to remember that having her there not knowing where she’s been is better than not having here there. She’s with me, but it’s a nightmare. Having her with me cannot be a nightmare because she’s with me.
My head is splitting and I’m blaming my hair — did I have a headache for 12 years of having long hair? but this hair is only to my shoulders — because for my sister to visit me cannot having caused this hollow-eyed ache.
(That’s the connection. I started the year with my usual hair, as my college roommate would say, the same as in 1986. My hair no longer involves mousse but she’s not wrong: short, parted to serial killer side, floppy. It’s now to my shoulders, plus this is the first year the ageing of my face saddens me. But I’m not going to do the pair of photographs.)
Happy December!
