Today

Today you are speechless. It is a mood not a physical impairment. You are sad and angry. You are introspective having locked yourself away from the day and the people. Your thoughts are obsessive, incoherent, coming to the boil and they have killed your appetite and sapped your energy; and they give you no respite – they are exhausting. The last post has been written – but it is still pending, it has not yet been revealed in its entirety.

They did not know what they were doing. They cut out my whole tongue as an expedient. It was not planned that way. And the expedient posed an enigma. What then? They said: “All in good time”. Another expedient; an excuse; four words of hope to gain time or circumvent a reality. A reality you have suspected but the surgeons were unable, unwilling or incapable of articulating. There is no recovery. Total extraction cannot be contravened. It is permanent. No tongue now, no tongue tomorrow, no tongue evermore. No more conversation, no more food – just a Neanderthal world of rasps and gulps. A disastrous expedient of a rotten organ to save a life, an organ the body might be able to re-generate, but there was no time to study or ponder. And then the slipshod ‘we will see’ – come back in the spring and ‘we will see’. And what do you expect to see? Do not answer. You have done enough. Now, I will tell you what you are going to see. Nothing, my giant. Absolutely nothing…!

The last post

This 'entry' may sound a little ominous, especially hugging the tail of my previous entry. But it is nothing more than it says - the last post on this blog. I gave myself a month to put it all down and with all the gaps and excesses (and a few digressions that reveal two ideas - mountains and poetry) there is nothing more to tell - and I am not going to turn this blog into a daily record of the banal undertakings of an individual waiting in sanitary silence to recover the use of his tongue. This blog is about the instant of losing my tongue (why do I say I lost it - as if I had put it down somewhere and forgot where it was), not the eternity required to recover it. Having said that I thought the final post should be a little introspective...

I am conscious of a change. I go about my daily affairs, and in my dealings with people and moments I am surprised I no longer care so much about the fragility of others. I used to thin of  people as being fragile to a greater or lesser degree. Colleagues, shop attendants, neighbours, the postman - all had a tender side it was important to respect and not prod too roughly. Now, I almost ignore the leanness of people's good side. I do not deliberately assault it - but I do not respect it any more. I used to treat shop attendants with a pristine respect, and always had a banal but harmless word to say; now, I ignore them and limit myself to a gruff statement of what I want with no prelude and a curt dismissal.  

Yet, on the other hand, though it may seem a total contradiction, I am more amenable - towards myself and towards others. I put less importance on more things, and  I give vital importance to fewer things. My new lema is: 'It's not a problem until it's a problem and then it's a problem'. And if I fuck-up something I am doing, I just let it be, instead of taking myself to task and giving myself a raking over.

I put people off, I know. I will end up as alone as a dragonfly  in December. And I will ask myself: 'Does it really matter?' I tell myself it does not matter but come the time, and the time will come, I suspect it will matter a lot (I was told in school that 'a lot' was bad English - so I continue to use it a lot). Today is a good example. It is New Year's Eve, right? And everybody gets together on New Year's Eve to celebrate something - the demise of the old, a new beginning, whatever...Right? I will be on my own. I am a monster. I cannot eat, drink or talk. Who the fuck has any time for that... taking up space at a table? And who reads this stuff anyway?