MORNING SERIAL
THE Hotel is a wondrous thing. Without parallel for size or luxury.
Built as two entities. In the Renaissance style as my father had taught me.
We, Arnold and I, have separate rooms on the 16th Floor. Mr D. A. Thomas and his body-servant have adjacent rooms, or so I suppose, on the 4th Floor. Night has settled over the city and its sights will be for tomorrow, along with the work routine into which I intend to throw myself as hard as I am able.
Yet my mind races and races, love-sick with no good to come of it, I can tell myself it is idiocy, that it will pass, but I cannot make it stop. I can veil its loathsome effect by stopping this Diary, this foolish indulgence, its introspection along with its descriptions the sores I must not pick away at anymore.
Personal Diary, March 1915. Taliesin Arthur Lloyd Papers. Box 1. National Library of Wales. Aberystwyth.
They have left me alone to lie still and quiet in my bed for a few hours. Carers have their own timetables and must arrange matters so that their charges fit into an allotted schedule. This is caring. Not loving. I am not complaining. I think they think I sleep. I do not. I finger the lesions of memory when they itch.
On the reef of my old age they have accreted like barnacle clusters. They are the outcomes of spent time. I cannot change them, I must accept them, but since I live on so do they, affecting me if I consider them as they once were, for then they give me no rest. In this way they become again beginnings not endings, what ifs not full stops.
And in this irksome sense they itch away, though the actual end of me is so near, demanding my futile attention, reminding me of how I so easily accepted, but did I really have a choice, what was to be concluded before it might, possibly, begin.
These are not meant to be riddles. I am too weary to toy with puzzles.
These are the life sentences meted out, to me and to others, by the happenstance of fall out.
CONTINUES TOMORROW