Me, Myself & Id

Siobhan is being fed when I walk in the door and her impossible blue eyes are open. I rub her legs to say hello. It is the closest I can get. She has a shamrock badge sewed or stuck or both to her cardigan. 
It breaks my heart. 
I have spent the day watching the parade and lunching and cofeeing all over the gaff. It has been exhausting. I like to talk in bursts and then stop. I like to be able to walk away and be quiet. When I am in full flow, it is like someone turned on a volcano that spews forth endlessly, quips, incidents, stories, tall tales, things I have seen or heard, or eaten, or watched, things I have done in this and many other lifetimes.
If I love you I want to inhabit your skin, feel the insides of you, inhale the smell of you, see the world from behind your eyes. But I also want to walk away and think about you quietly on my own where I can process the information and unwrap the essence of you, slowly, like chocolate, one square at a time.
I like to sleep alone curled up in one corner of the mattress with only my thoughts, and the memories of you to keep me awake.
I don't do intimacy well.
Even as I lay bare the fabric of the presence of the self, I reserve a small crumb of that self, one I appear to want to only dissect with me, myself, and Id.
Who is listening to the constant chattering, the devils haircut in my mind, other than the true self?
When the traits of personality, voice, action and reflex are absent what can remain................
Looking into my Mothers eyes on this St. Patricks Day, I realise. Siobhan is as dependant and vulnerable as a baby. She is fed, washed, dressed, turned, hoisted, examined for marks, has food and fluid pressed to her mouth, and bolstered on her air bed.
This baby is not going to roll out of the cot.
In this real life Benjamin Button this baby will not gurgle, or reach out a hand to clasp a finger, or smile a colicky grin.
I wait in the sunroom while the hoisting to the commode is carried out and watch the shadows on the candle lit curtain to let me know when I can return. I sit amongst the women who a couple of months ago I could have had full scale conversations with. There is silence now, save for the rasping of chesty coughs. They are beginning to disappear. 
They are shadows of their "selves".
We are all shadow selves, wrapped up in ego, waiting for the self to appear and reclaim us. 
In Siobhans room we sit silently beside each other in the dark, She and I. The only sound is the guttering of the lit candle, its wick flickering and gusting in the crack of air from the open window. 
We are our selves. Our job and raison d'etre being purely the gentle rise and fall of our chests as we breathe in and out and out and in. 
You don't wake up at night to breathe, so something, some awareness, some intuitive source within you carries on your breathing all by itself to let your self sleep and recover. It watches over your unconscious self and loves it more than we can fathom of the term. 
It is THIS self that is gazing out of my Mothers eyes. It is the very soul of her, gazing out the windows of honesty, of complete and utter dependance , with complete and utter serenity and love.

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