I saw a spotted woodpecker in the woods today. It was a surprising, unlikely sighting. Unlikely, because the chances of my being in the woods today were so slim. I'd have preferred to be hiding inside. Again. And were I to be hiding inside again I would have preferred to be eating my way through my body weight in crunchy nut cornflakes. Which is what I was busy trying not to do.

They were pale, pale pink. Salmon pink, perhaps. A pastel colour that was not quite baby pink. They were made of soft material. And they were old as the hands inside them, folded on the seatback rails in the bus. These gloves were old and a bit of an anomaly.

A small knot, circling around itself, tying tighter and tighter with the attempt to contain. Each new pain plaited and patterned and looped into all other pains. A tiny seed full of power and purpose. And potential. Full of potential, full of fear.

In the corridor he takes my hand. Not a very auspicious situation for a star-like meaningful moment. The smell vaguely bodily and the peeping attention-seeking needing needing needing someone, ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ imperative and desperate. Un-ignorable but somehow utterly pointless, too. Nurse may come. ‘Help me! Help me!’ wails from another room. A nurse may come. Someone may help. But that’s not what you’re talking about is it?

I’ve been keeping really quiet and still. Talking in murmurs and hushed tones to myself. Keeping all movements small, smooth and glacially minimal so as not to surprise them with a sudden jerk.

I awoke this morning with the stream of my heart song in full flood

And I thought of you.

Is this a love song?

A poem, a cry for help, a blood let, a pressure valve, a fire hose…

The wild battle cry of my deepest nature?

Another Saturday, towards the end of those Junior Guildhall Saturdays. I’ve thrown my lot in with my friend’s friends. She’s the only person I know when I start going there. Cello. One of her friends is a flute player, (he of the bent banana flute incident, who found my nose hilariously wobbly in orchestra). I am not a great fit with these cool kids but choose to hide myself here, rather than risk taking up the proffered friendship of the smiling young man that I like, or the more ordinary nerdy squares with whom I do, but don’t want to, belong. We all tumble out after orchestra one day and someone has a car.

There are snippets. So vivid I can almost taste them. Far away doesn’t even get close to the distance, the slippage in time. They pass me, drifting around in the void like little jigsaw bits waiting for the box. Waiting for the picture on the outside of what you are supposed to be.

Did you know that if you lose feeling in your leg, your socks won’t stay on straight? No? Well, that’s one little detail I’ve learned this week. Sort of lovely really. I mean, I would never have known that socks were so ergonomically designed to rely on the pressing of movement through the foot in a forward direction when you are walking.

I went down to the river. The familiar exhilarating rush to be under one’s own steam, the potential to fly, to feel stronger than yesterday, as well as a little twinge of specific protest and pain. Just enough to be able to date with precision the additional yesterdays since the surgery.