Sunday, 18 June 2023

The Peacock 912

 My first memory, before recovering my last moments with my mother in the car crash, this was my first memory.  Waking up here, next to the massive sleeping form of my father.  I didn't know at the time, but we had instinctively gravitated together, to sleep together as a way of coping with my mother's, his wife's, tragic passing.  We were there to support each other.  We were there for each other.  I was too young then to count the time, but later he told me that we had slept together for six months.  And then we both wanted to sleep alone, but we couldn't do it too suddenly.  The first night in my own bed, upstairs, where now Carl is sleeping, perhaps also just waking up, I would lie down under the covers, and Dad would sit on the edge of the bed, and he would read to me Winnie the Pooh stories.  Then other children's stories.  And then when I was six, he would sit in the cozy chair in the corner while sleep approached me, and tell me about his day when he was studying in the school of theology, and I would tell him about my day in school.  Very gradually, slowly and gently he let me go into my own person, my individuality, myself.  I hear birds singing outside, and the clock says six am exactly.  I have had a full and complete sleep....

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