#waking

The sensation of this came most clearly to her one afternoon in late summer. She had fallen asleep in an armchair in the kitchen, and when she awoke, for a few moments her life was completely without context. She did not know if she was in bed beside her husband or not, did not know the time of day or night, nor the year nor the season. She could have been a child, a single woman, a wife or a widow, and it did not seem to her to have a jot of importance. A moment later, when she came to full consciousness, it was like birth; like falling out of nothingness to a precise point in time and space, as if her whole life had been sublimated so that she came from birth to this place in time with a complete personal history, like a gift which had been given to her. It was as though her past was not something which she had lived, but which was a story put in her mind to placate her, and to make her be – or appear to be – like other people. She lay back in the chair and she closed her eyes, protecting herself for a few moments from time and action.

Deirdre Madden, The Birds of the Innocent Wood (Faber and Faber, 1988)