We have gone on a drive because Grandmother has been drinking. The drinking this time meant that Mum said please can you tell us when you’ve been drinking because I’d prefer it if you didn’t come round to the house like that. Grandmother said you have no idea what it’s like you treat me like dirt on your shoe. She did not say anything about the fact that Mum has been looking after Grandmother since she was twenty years old and Mum’s life is my Grandmother’s life.
Apparently, a storm is coming but it is not yet raining. It is very wet. The drive is along fields and trees and towns and takes place in late afternoon where leafless branches look roughed in the sick Blair Witch Christmas light impressed upon them by wadded cloud come down slowly like vomit sinking into water.
In this weather, I have been sleeping heavily and pulled back into it easily when not standing on my feet. I have woken in my bedroom to three seconds of hypnagogic spider hallucinated onto my cupboard door in black and fluorescent green. I have turned the little television on because it looked like there was a little soft toy girl wedged in between the wall and the cupboard waving a black stringy arm.
I have woken and felt not real for three days. When I am sleeping heavily it is because I am dreaming heavily. I dreamed of a woman I have not seen for a year and spoke to perhaps eight times over the course of another year. In the dream, I felt very strongly for her and it was strange and unreasonable for three straight days that I did not know her at all and that I would not see her again.
A lot of time is drained this way, particularly when the winterlight comes down. Time is permitted full existence in the light. Without light it becomes washed with dream. Awakeness becomes unreasonable in the time and light of the dreams. Awakeness and the dreaming are unreasonable from the standing of waking; from the standing of the dreaming, only the waking is unreasonable.
You could reasonably ask what the point is.
I cannot drive. My Dad is driving. I am in the passenger seat. I do not have to do anything