Firepussy - Counting full stops

** Sometimes don’t you feel you just have to write your mind out? Like it gets too full and needs emptying.

I was lying in bed last night lulled by the sound of barking dogs. I thought to myself how strange it would be if I couldn’t hear any dogs. Which got me thinking about a couple of books I’ve read about Rwanda this year: A Sunday By The Pool In Kigali and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families. I remember a part that discussed the fact the author couldn’t hear any dogs barking at night. During the genocide the UN Peace Keepers weren’t given any authority to intervene to stop Hutus killing Tutsis but they got good target practise killing all the dogs that were feeding off the piles of dead bodies.

Anyway I couldn’t get to sleep so for some reason I started counting full stops. Not sheep. Not trees. Nor commas or colons; full stops. [..]

Then one morning while lying in bed fiddling with my itchy skin I felt a lump in my breast.

PANIC.

In two seconds flat in my mind I’d gone from a lump in the breast through to waking up from surgery one breast less. And I had this sudden vulnerability about death, about how breasts help define your femininity, how they make us more sexual beings. And all that. And of course we’re all different but this was my particular speeding train of irrational thought. [..]

Maybe I can write again because the scans and mammogram said I’m ok. The Rash has moved on somewhere else too. Right now I’m feeling relieved, and grateful. **

Better so, from Zimbabwe!

¶ Tuesday, May 30, 2006