In the early hours, when sleep had evaded me still, and I was tired of just lying there in bed… thinking about marriage… and plumbing, I nearly got up to write a blog. But I didn’t because I thought you might think I was a bit crazy, and I persevered with trying not to toss and turn; eventually, with thoughts of blogs in my mind, instead of bathroom taps, sleep descended upon me. It was not a lovely peaceful sleep; on the contrary, I had a very disturbing dream…
At the start Chris and I were on a cruise-ship, but after a short while, the deck of the ship became a road and the sea was a canal running beside the road.
“Where is the ship?” I asked, distressed, as I looked to Chris.
“That was ages ago – you must be crazy!” he scoffed.
“But where are all my things that were in the cabin? What about my bracelet and the clock that were on the bedside table? Where are they?” I pleaded.
“They knew you were crazy so they took them away for you,” Chris sounded so heartless (and quite unlike his normal self I might add!).
“Who are they? When did all this happen? We were on the ship just a minute ago…”
“No we weren’t. That’s another sign of your craziness, which is why they took your possessions,” he answered calmly and coldly.
It felt like I was in the old psychological thriller called “Gaslight”, where the husband (played by Charles Boyer) tries to make his singer wife (Ingrid Bergman) think she is mad – all so he could have the riches hidden in the attic, naturally. I was just like the wife, who wondered how she could not remember things and felt as if she was in a nightmare, except that in my case, I was really in a nightmare! It is a great film… but a terrible dream.
The road suddenly became very steep (like the bow of the Titanic rearing up in front of me) and in my panic I threw myself onto the tarmac and held on for dear life. I must have passed out in my dream, or had one of those mad memory lapses, because, in what seemed only a moment later, I was back in my bed. I jumped and screamed when the door open partially and shut again (Chris, I presumed); I cried because I thought I was going mad.
After a while, the door opened for real and Chris entered the darkness of the room; he had our cups of tea with him.
“I nearly got up in the night to write my blog,” I told him.
“I did get up at four o’clock, and wrote you a poem,” he said.
Chris sat on the edge of the bed and bent down to kiss my arm, my neck and lips. It was obvious that he wanted to make up.
“You smell good,” he added, kissing my stomach.
“You should have come back to bed – this bed – instead of writing poems,” I chided, still feeling sore that he had left at all.
“I know. I tried the once,” he said, distancing himself from my bare tummy.
“I tried twice…”
“Yes, but then you went on like a crazy woman about that blasted tap again…” he folded his arms across his chest.
“Because you didn’t know what I was talking about… I still don’t know why… How come you don’t understand English? And I’m not crazy – you’re the cracked one! And why have you pulled away from me?”
Marriage can be a bit of an up-hill struggle sometimes – can’t it? My advice is – at bedtime, never discuss the strange quirks in the plumbing, especially if your bedmate is the man who put in the taps! Also, I think that king-sized beds are unfriendly. “No bed is too small for the big lovers,” my old Hungarian boyfriend used to say (not that that lasted – he was a bit mad).
By the way, the poem was beautiful but rather too sexy to put on my blog, sorry. You will have to wait until I bring out an anthology of sexy poems…written under pseudonyms.