The weekend is full of action: runs and rain and forests. We find a den in a wood, and while the baby sleeps in the buggy - rain dripping from cloud to leaves to her legs - the rest of us build a porch for it, and a front door. We pull branches across the forest floor and twist them and line them up, weaving in fronds of a curled ivy-ish plant someone has thoughtfully left piled up in the clearing. We work until my hands are green and there’s no more clean spots on my coat for the kids to dry their hands on.
Sunday sees the early period I was promised when I took the morning-after pill last week; I always forget quite how little my body appreciates bonus external hormones. The mood I’ve been in for the last four days - spiky-bordering-stormy - blooms in the evening into something apocalyptic, tipped with migraine in a way that makes the car journey home feel like it’s in eighteen dimensions. If I wasn’t worried my skull and mushy brain tissue were about to crumble into a pile of soft red dust, this strangeness of it would almost be enjoyable, an inverted feeling to the hash hot chocolate I drank before a gig as teen, that led me to cling to the arm of a friend’s boyfriend, saying, ‘I’m trapped in a dream. PLEASE, PLEASE, WAKE ME UP,’ while he chuckled softly and stuck me in the corner with some coats piled on top.
In the end, I get pretty much the same now, tucked into bed until I can remember my own name and I stop trying to escape to run with my wolf pack. I’m reassured to find that it’s still the best solution.