Home, 18.17 // later, home, 3am-ish

Are You Alive? (Orbital, feat. Penelope Isles).

He sits on the jute rug, oblivious to anything around him, shuffling cards, the hood of his giant fleece up, his thin milky white legs crossed like a frog might, his long lashes almost brushing his cheek as he looks down. Sometimes it strikes me that he’s an impossibly strange looking child, both beautiful and creature like, switching between the two as easily as he breathes, which was not always easy, given that in the hours before his birth he played with his umbilical cord as he still fidgets now, needing his impatient hands, his busy mind, occupied; grasping and ungrasping his cord until he was born blue and spluttering, rushed away and since, has not stopped adventuring. I taught him to shuffle cards not ten minutes before and now he’s cutting them with glee; his hands, fast, his fingers long and slender; his knuckles by far the widest part of each finger in the same way his great grandmother’s were and as he sits like that, cutting cards like that she is back in the room - how these children always incant everyone back - and she is sitting at the card table, the green baize laid to keep the cards in place and she is shuffling so expertly the cards seem to be flying, merging into each other and I have no idea how she is doing it, and after she’s finished shuffling she’ll deal them and we’ll play Racing Demons, her hands relentless in her pursuit to win. And I will see her engagement ring, the gold worn thin by her need to twist and turn it daily, and my grandfather will come in the room, laugh, call her a card shark, leave. And now my too full of life son is doing the same thing, like his too full of life great-grandmother, so full of it she paced and worked and walked and read and had strong, loud opinions she terrorised the editor of the BMJ with in the same way my son terrorises me now with his strong loud opinions and later, I when I lie in bed there it is, the feeling just to the left of my breast bone, some pulsing feeling stopping me from sleeping; some life, too much, not used during the day so I cannot sleep until finally I finally submit but still I wake, some time around three, a sleeping child in my arms, having crept there. A bad dream maybe. I get up, settle them back down. Pat their back until breath becomes heavy.

There are no curtains at the window yet. The sky, clear, dark, cloudless, a planet pulsing, Venus surely. I lie watching it and the piercing star just to the right. I have no right to any of it. To Venus. To be awake in the dark dead of night. To my children or the life I have. It simply just is and in simply just being and almost not being at all, the most intense thing there is. I think of how a friend and I met last year in the dead days between Christmas and New Year, drank cocktails so strong it wasn’t long before standing was an uncertain thing but the whole night was shot with pure joy when we both realised the chances of us being there, in the same city in the same room on the same planet at the same time drinking the same cocktails were so marginally slim that the maths of it assumed its own magical status. My son likes to tell me the chances of him existing are something like 1 in 8 billion and then he throws in the born blue bit, just to make him even rarer. I lie feeling like Bukowski might have at some point like the fox, I run with the hunted, and if I’m not the happiest man on earth, I’m surely the luckiest man alive.