Having a Rest
There is a bad smell in the room, so you light a candle. The label on the candle says 'soft blanket' as a way to describe its scent. The idea seemed funny when it was given to you as a gift, nice but silly. As it burns, you sniff the air and feel both happy and puzzled to find that it does smell like a soft blanket somehow. It's a pink candle in a metal container. Funnily enough, it was given to you at the same time someone else recently gave you a pink soft blanket. Everyone gave gifts, there were lots of knocks on the door.
The pink soft blanket is fleecy, warm, and formless. You like to keep it on your legs all day while you worry about the things you should be doing because it comforts you. As you burn the candle you realize it’s somehow doing the same job as the blanket, but you put out the candle to save it, it would hurt to have to say goodbye to it too. It sits nearby on a low table.
You worry that the comfort is not helping somehow because you feel less and less capable, even though you know that rest is supposed to make you feel more capable, more ok. The armchair you’ve been sitting in all the time feels hard to get out of, and you’re wrapped in the soft blanket, it’s tucked tightly under your legs. A feeling of itchiness comes over you at the same time as a wave of nausea and intense tiredness.
You think about what would make you feel better. You feel sure that only when you have travelled far away, and baked all day in the desert for a few weeks, sleeping under the stars in a vast sky, will that itchy feeling peel and then blow away, revealing your familiar skin underneath. And it will be a relief to see it again. But you can’t go far away, you don’t feel well and you’re scared to do things.
Sitting in the chair doesn’t really protect you, you hear everything somehow, through the walls, and you see everything bad through a rectangular light in your hand, only you can’t DO anything about anything. You think about washing. You feel you should wash, but you don’t, the thought of it makes you want to cry like your daughter cries when you tell her she needs a bath.
You look at your arms and it looks like a second fungal skin is growing on top of your skin because you’re so dirty and so moist with misery. You laugh a bit at first, but it doesn't come off with a vigorous scrub from a baby wipe, and it doesn’t come off when he brings you a washcloth wet with hot water that makes your blanket damp. You slump back into the chair, your face drops and you let the chair take the weight of your heaviness, wrapping the blanket more tightly around you and pulling your legs up onto the chair.
Your head itches terribly and you close your eyes and focus on the bad feeling in your stomach that won’t go away and sit motionless for a very long time.
You hate everyone and you can’t stop thinking about all the people who pretend to listen, you feel disgusted and wounded by their disrespect and you feel ashamed of yourself for failing to be heard. Why couldn’t anyone hear you? Silent is better, there is nothing worth saying.
You feel your body slowly sliding down the back of the chair, little by little, day by day, you can tell you’re becoming more and more a mass of sludge, and some parts are sliding between the seat cushion and the chair back, an area held open by a big, painful coiled spring that’s poked through the material. You can feel it, but you endure the discomfort hour after hour without moving, having failed to find the strength to readjust the cushion enough to cover it.
What’s left of you to do the things you wanted you to do? Practically nothing. You are too soft, that’s always the problem, too soft and you change shape when you press against things, instead of being hard and keeping the right shape. Instead of being a forever solid and beautiful object, your shape is determined by the surfaces you come into contact with. Maybe if you ate things that were more like wood, you would be more like wood. You think about all the woody things you could eat more of and this makes you sigh and with every sigh, you seem to sink lower.
Lower is better, it feels better, there is less feeling to notice.
The blanket seems bigger, it covers more, how satisfying, now all covered up, not in view. At what point are you really nothing anymore? It’s the last, lingering question and there is no answer, no specific moment. The chair seems to be mostly empty, nobody there anymore. Just a mess under a soft blanket.
Access the published version at the website of Astra: https://www.astra.fi/blog/aktuellt/astra-4-2021-omsorg-omtanke-omvardnad/
