Dinosaurs

I love them… You must have seen Jurassic Park… I saw it about ten times in the cinema. I was obsessed. Also I loved this particular cinema, it was an old fashioned picture house. One where you walked through a curtain to get to the screen, heavy velvet curtains the colour of deep red, the sticky carpeted floor and the smell of cooking popcorn. There was a booth one side of the screen that you could get snacks from and a girl carrying a tray so you could buy as much ice-cream as you wanted. The curved stairs to get to the higher areas took you past a bar that I never went in but the sour sweet smell of beer would float around you. This place was where I went to in order to escape. Sometimes with friends, sometimes with family and sometimes alone.

It is strange to think of going somewhere without someone. Now I don’t have to – there is always someone who wants to go with me or just hang out. But back then that cinema was a safe place. I would go out and settle into those popcorn smelling seats and know I was safe and that the movie was something spectacular but I knew it.

Did you know that the re-watching of a movie that you know really well is a form of stimming for someone who is neurodivergent? Well, it works. It was the same as a weighted throw or a favourite jumper. I would slip into the storyline and allow myself to suspend disbelief. I knew that there would be a dinosaur but I still I gasped with awe and shock and horror. It was a comfy pair of slippers.

I collect stuffies or soft toys, but not one is a dinosaur. Not one. I have seen Jurassic Park so much that I have worn out 2 DVDs. Worn them out! I’ve asked R for a dinosaur for Christmas. I’m guessing we will see if I get one.

When I was in my thirties I decided to go on holiday. Again this was back in the days when I was alone. I joined a group of people including one lovely American who could not only touch her toes but also place her hands flat on the floor. I was in awe of her. That holiday though I remember with fondness but I doubt the guy running it remembers it that way.

I rang them and said – is it steep? Will there be hills?

No – they said – it is an easy walk.

So I booked and I went and the organisers cried. It was not easy. None of the walks were long but they were almost vertical. You needed to have some climbing/bouldering experience. I had neither. Now, this was before the bone spurs and the arthritis and medical issues. This was before the pain when all I had was a level of unfitness that embarrasses me and vertigo.

Vertigo.

I screamed going down some of those slopes. All the work we did was on the beach, but once there… Oh my… I saw dinosaurs. There were small therapods streaking across the landscape, sauropods moving like the giant goliaths and the bird-hipped hunters that stalked them. They were all there. Well, their footprints were. It was fantastic and wonderful. I stood surrounded by people I did not know and we drew and studied dinosaur footprints. I sat in a sauropod footprint! It was the same size as a hot tub.

It was brilliant. Yet to get there I had to take a fear and shove it away. Sometimes I think that my life is like that. I have those footprints but to get there, to stand in amongst the awe and power, I got to get down that slope that is covered in loose rock and wet grass. I got to fall and slid on my arse and then live in those mud caked jeans all day. I got to do all that but at the end is something so brilliant that it won’t matter.

Dinosaurs have been in my life since the beginning, and probably always will be. I’ll probably write about them and even publish books on them, something I wanted to since I was eighteen. I have seen the giants go from being only able to support their weights in swamps, to being great grazers who collected into herds in a world where insects were over a foot long and millipedes would see a human as a lunchtime snack. Where the hunters of this world went from reptiles to almost birds with feather like hair and speeds that would outstrip a cheetah. And I find them fascinating.

The dinosaur is my comfort blanket and the symbol of the awe that could be at the end of the slope, or the ladder. I am not a pessimistic person and I don’t give up, but I know that my future could be one I hadn’t imagined. At no point do I think it is going to be one of me limply moving through life as a passive character; a person who has no control over their own story. Hell, no. I’m not a dinosaur watching that rock hurtling through the sky and thinking – well shit. That isn’t me. I see that rock and I refuse to simply watch it. I want to study it and fix as much as I can, but ultimately in ten years time I want to still stand at the bottom of the ladder and be happy with who I am and what is happening.

So, I will write about those ladders of medication and pain, and futures that are not yet here, but that is just me trying to work out where that damn rock is going to hit and how I can make it work. R and I will make it work. Because he is the reason I no longer have to go to an empty cinema and watch a movie. We got this. Now is the time to grasp my own health by the tusks or bony spurs, accept it and see if there is anyway to make sure I am still as smiley as I am now.

Meh, who is scared of a ladder if you got a dinosaur at your back.