3. Back to Ireland?

Got hardly any sleep last night. Mustered barely enough energy to drag myself out of bed and downstairs onto the couch, where I’m positioned horizontally now. Dad’s not here. Not sure whether or not he came home last night. Hope he did and got some sleep and has gone grocery shopping. There’s nothing to eat.

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The other night… when he gave me this journal… what the hell happened? What had he been on about? Had he really said that we’re moving back to Ireland? Has he lost his mind? Have I lost mine? Is Memory, like Death (and Sleep), now playing games with me, too? And – can this be right? – didn’t he say that he couldn’t understand why I didn’t write anymore? Anymore? It’s crazy! He’s must’ve been even drunker than I’d thought. 

He wasn’t nearly that gung-ho about my writing when - for a concentrated three-month period last summer - I actually was. A strange interlude in which I wrote furiously, Judy’s fountain pen in hand, head down, brow furrowed. The only thing I remember Jack saying about it then was that the time I wasted on writing would pay better dividends invested more wisely: studying for instance. But I paid no mind to his discouraging words and scribbled like a man possessed - or is it obsessed? Something with a lot of ‘S’s’ in it anyway.

This sudden U-turn on the matter perplexes me. Instead of trying to talk me out of it, now he’s actually persuading me to write, enlightening me to the joys of keeping a journal. He suggested that I read a book called Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. He told me that when he’d read it a long time ago, he got so inspired that he began keeping a journal the very next day. Didn’t stick with it for too long, though - something he puts down to I.D.D. – imagination deficit disorder – hey ho! But, now… Now, he swears, he wishes he’d kept it up.

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I guess I kind of wish that I had, too. Kept up my writing, I mean. But unlike Jack, it was due to S.L.D. – severe lack of discipline - that it all came to a grinding halt. That was November. About a month before 

THE ACCIDENT! Time out: I hate that word! Despise it. Dread the thought that whenever I think back to last December, that I’ll think: The Accident. Just before The Accident. Shortly after The Accident. (Mental NB: Try to use different words for it, softer euphemisms.)