My hands are the hands of an old person. I can’t quite believe it, but I can see that it is true. Each morning I wake up having forgotten and each morning I have to remember all over again. As I slowly come to, I watch the delicate balance between light and dark shift on the skyline from a midnight blue through a sea green to a watery yellow. I have reverted to my teenage practice of sleeping with the curtains open so that I can watch the clouds scud over the moon as I drift off to sleep. This morning, as with every other morning, I have watched the things in my room resume their shapes and identities as light and colour have seeped back into them. Now I can see my hands as they really are.

They are lying almost still on a dark blue bedspread that is neatly folded down over a pale green sheet. They are not the hands that my mother used to love, the hands that never needed moisturiser despite gardening without gloves, the hands that, even though small, could bend themselves around great big chords on the piano. The fingers are thin now and the silver ring from Mexico that I have worn both night and day for forty years is taped onto my finger to stop it falling off. It is a kindness that I find painfully hard to tolerate. My knuckles, though, are larger than they used to be, like growths developing beneath the skin, and give me pain in the mornings and cold weather. Fat blue veins, like strings of rubber, burrow just beneath the surface, repellent and vaguely scary, just as I remember being scared by the veins running along the backs of my grandfather’s hands when I was little.

Each morning, inevitably, I am alone as I and the world around me take shape. Each morning I am alone when I am struck by a grief that slices straight through me, just as the clear notes of the dawn chorus cut through the dew-filled air outside. I am not young. I am not well. I am not ready to die.

There is a glowing orange button near to my fingers, carefully clipped onto the bedclothes so that it doesn’t slip out of reach while I’m asleep. If I were to press it, a nurse would come to me within a minute or so, to see what was wrong. She might hold my hand, stroking the skin with her thumb. She might even perch on the edge of the bed and stay for a little chat. I long to do it, but I am caught in a trembling web of doubts.

Yesterday morning I had given in to the longing and pressed the buzzer, breaking the peace of the sleeping ward as I did so. I lay there horrified by the noise regretting my weakness. I heard the longed-for steps approach my room and I plunged down into a paralysing dread and anguish. My mind started scurrying around inside me, frenzied and directionless, looking for a way out of the corner in which I had trapped myself. I heard myself apologising for the bother and lamely requesting a cup of tea while my hands twisted the sheets up, silencing the parts of me that wanted to wail out and beg her to stay.

She returned with a cup of tea, wobbling gently on its saucer and placed it on the bedside cabinet. She drew up a chair and sat down, uniform creasing into new patterns, and looked at me.

“A penny for them!” she said, smiling lightly, “If you’d like to sell them, that is.”

I quickly smiled back and took a sip of tea, looking down into my cup. Hanging my head over steaming tea had always been an essential part of waking up for me, helping to soften the dried-up crusts of sleep that had glued my lids down during the night, but I knew that all I was doing now was escaping her eyes.

She waited in silence for me to continue, a tiny movement in her eyebrows being her only response. For the second time that morning, things shifted, only this time it was not the slow and imperceptible shifts of daybreak revealing what you already knew to be there, but a sudden jolt of recognition and remembrance of long forgotten things. With dismay, I realised that I could see myself in that nurse sitting by my bedside. Worse still, I could see myself from through her eyes.

I remembered how I had learned to pick up the silent cues and unspoken requests that patients could not bring themselves to voice. And I knew with certainty that I too would have sat down by my bed in response to my request for a cup of tea, that I too would have suspected a deeper meaning to my request. I had to shut my eyes as a smart of humiliation burnt my face. The sight of her looking at me with kindness stayed in front of me even after I had closed my eyes, even after she had left the room.
“It’s just early morning nonsense,” I said, “nothing to worry about.”
And we left it at that.