The upside down sun

This maddening heat. I’m welcoming the feeling of contextual disorientation.

It’s the kind of heat that convinces you it has always been here, and will always be. It suits us, and this psychedelic vortex of reality and satire we live in.

For every modern ill, there is a pseudo cure. We get to pick what’s wrong with us, according to what’s wrong with us. The terrified among us can feel safe under the umbrella of anxiety, abusers can be victims, the powerful can be altruistic.

But one thing we all share is dysregulated nervous systems, thanks to, and saved by, modern life. We’re all perpetrators and doctors for each other and ourselves.

I listened to a podcast the other day that told me, among 500 other things, that we should strive to have a secure attachment to reality.

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As a freelance journalist, I can choose where to roam, and I’m going towards the worst, saddest, most maddening things. I hope no one thinks I have a saviour complex, but I don’t fully know why else I’d hunt for the darkest things.

On the hottest day, I have a video call with a family court judge for work. It’s just her and I, and I don’t know how to address her, never mind what I could possibly say that won’t make me sound like a child pretending to be a grown up. She is very nice to me, before and after I ask her for the documents that show the systemic abuse she’s at the helm of. My bum sweats, and I’m grateful for my standing desk.

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R and I haven’t had many chances to exchange more than fleeting eye contact in months. We’re coordinating our impending house move mostly over Whatsapp, somehow aligning our entire values into a future we’re imagining in separate showers.

I’m interrupted during a panic attack when the estate agent called to tell us someone wants to buy our house. I tell her I’m speechless. It’s during a minor health crisis, one week later, that I receive the call telling me our offer on the house we want has been accepted.

That night in my twilight hour, after E is asleep and before I give up and join him, I sit on the stairs, looking out at the view I hope I won’t miss when we move. I think about how I’ve never before felt such a collision of life and death, and that this must mean I’ve either had a really easy, or a really boring, life.

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A few mornings ago, E told me, before he’d fully reached consciousness, that he needed to get into a lion this morning. I quickly realise was referring to the lie-in R requested from him last night.

I know I shouldn’t, but I laugh as I explain. A few days later, we wake up and I ask him in earnest if he’s excited to see the lions at the safari park today.

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I assume E is getting to the age where he’ll be starting to form tangible memories. I used to rely on the corporeal calm I’d pass from my body to his, my sleeping pulse regulating his nightmares. Now he’s moving from the body to the brain, from this bodily feeling that all is well, to needing more sophisticated cues of safety that he can lock down forever.

I wonder what my body remembers of my own childhood that my conscious brain doesn’t, how I can erase the unwelcome footsteps of things I can’t even see. I Google somatic therapy then decide this is one of the many things the internet is trying to me believe.

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E likes to pretend to be a robot. I can only assume that this familiar monotone relic has survived the past three decades thanks to people my own age who share my desperate wish that the worst thing a robot can do is fetch the wrong slippers.

I ask him to go back to singing his haunting post-nursery Victorian nursery rhymes about the plague.

He also recently asked about guns, another thing that’s migrated from nursery. I tell him we don’t say that word. I’ll teach him about the importance of free speech one day, and hope he won’t remember my lazy effort to make sure he’s a pacifist.

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In my late teens, I had one session with a therapist who listened to my anxieties then told me ‘You’re afraid of death’. I stared at him like he’d just told me I shouldn’t need to breathe.

E spent spring asking about death. The questions came at night time, just before bed. At the exact moment his first question about mortality came, the death of a distant family member started to pass through our world.

A few days later, I enquire about a nursery friend he hadn’t mentioned for a few weeks. E tells me he must be dead, and then I model to him that the appropriate response to this announcement is to laugh, then apologise, then offer him an ice lolly. The ice lollies will save us all.