#217

I've lived, quite happily, with my ghosts for the last eight months. Grief is comfortable, after a while. A comfort blanket of misery that you can take everywhere with you. I couldn't or wouldn't let it stop me working but I allowed it to extend cold, dead, clammy fingers into all other aspects of my life. It became convenient to nest in my sadness, to spend ninety hours a week working and the remaining hours alone, talking to ghosts. I could have made more of an effort, months ago, to pick myself up and dust off the darkness, little by little. But I didn't. I didn't want them to leave. A part of me loathes the intrusive memories, the nightmares, despises the shock of seeing her face in a crowd, of ironing a shirt and discovering the faded pink heart she stitched inside the cuff. The rest of me clings desperately to those small moments of shock which leave me standing, stricken, remembering her. After all, without those...what are they? If I forget, then what? What's left? 

 

I argue with the rational part of myself that thinks, repeatedly, perhaps now - perhaps it is time. I fight fiercely with that side of me; I gave up their ashes! I gave up her things! I gave in to her family, their graves aren't even in this country! I gave up my job, our house! Isn't that enough? What more am I meant to do? And so I curled, safe and sad inside my nest of grief. And there I stayed. People tried to tempt me out, to drag me out, to pull the words from me, and force my sadness into the light. As though it would crumble in the face of their happy little lives. But it doesn't work like that. I gave up those things because it was easier. Because if I gave up all the things that reminded me of them being gone, then I was free to live with my ghosts. 

 

I'm drawing myself out slowly now and trying to find people I can bear to have near me. People who didn't know her, and people who did, some of them. I've never particularly liked people, or really understood most people, which makes it even more important, somehow, for me to find people I can bear. I still miss them, daily, hourly, sometimes minute by minute. I still have nightmares. I still get intrusive memories. I still see her face in crowds. I still haven't held my friend's three month old daughter, and I still haven't returned my mother in law's calls. I still work ninety hour weeks. I still talk to my wife. I still have that awful, hollow, clenching pain in my chest. But I've talked to an actual living person every day for two months, returned some calls from old friends, been outside more, drunk less, and tried a little harder. I'm not going to suddenly forget her because I put down the bottle and go sit in the garden.

And tonight? Tonight I had a date. A third date. Which I barely even thought about because I was so tied up in work, and so thrilled that everything went smoothly. So no guilt. Well, a little, when the extremely odd thought that my dead wife would have liked him. Which isn't a thought I can deal with, it's one that I keep boxed in the corner of my mind. Things are getting better, I suppose, which brings new guilt, new sadness, and correspondingly little happiness. Which makes it hard to see what all this was for.

#206 OR longhaul

For the last few nights I've been wandering the streets of the city late at night, through til dawn. Talking to police officers and appalled members of the public, watching London burn. I feel strange, disconnected from it, this no longer seems like my city, don't recognise these people. Youths in hoods kicking in shop windows and burning down one hundred year old department stores. That's not the mad British way I've come to appreciate, like a fine tea. But during the day, during the day Londoners appear incredibly brave in that stalwart English manner. Marching down the streets with brooms and binliners, or in the early evening making plastic cups of tea for police officers, handing them round on an upturned riot shield.

I'm staring down the barrel of having to move again. It seems as though I'm constantly drifting, although I never thought that this move would be permanent. I used to enjoy moving. We, used to enjoy moving. We moved yearly, every July brought the same old kit bags, different tear-filled goodbyes and parting gifts, the same drive to the airport and the same long, long flight to Paris, the same strange month seeing old friends, stocking up on odd little essentials (me - marmite, zippo wicks, biros, toothbrushes, and razor blades. Her - liquorice cigarette papers, underwear, birkenstocks, embroidery thread, and tampons. Both - pills, bandages, endless piles of first aid supplies until it looks like our luggage got switched with that of Médecins Sans Frontières.), and leaving our tatty, stained old Lonely Planet on the shelves. Then we'd head off again, with a crisp new guide book full of post-its and her over-excited red pen circles and exclamation marks. Heads together on the flight over, checking and re-checking the list of things she wants to do, and books I posted to myself from the airport, laughing at our mispronounciation and wondering whether it wouldn't have been easier to stay put? Seeing as we finally knew the language? No, of course not, why even bring it up?

She always talked to the person sitting next to her. I sat in the aisle, to stretch my leg out and get run over by the trolley. I always fell asleep to the sound of her answering questions about why we were moving and where from and gosh wasn't it exciting? I'd wake up hours later, the cabin dark apart from television screens and flickering orange floor lights, to find her straddling my lap, shaking silently with the giggles, her hand on my shoulder. Clearing my throat, what are you laughing at? She laughs harder now I'm awake, tears on her cheeks, sat on my lap now. 'I'm sorry, it was just your face!' Oh, nice I say and wrap my hands around her waist, kiss her chin and tickle that spot above her hip until she squirms and I have to lift her off into the aisle. I haul myself up while she's in the bathroom, as she weaves her way back through the chairs she sees me and scowls, points a disapproving finger at me. 'You didn't need to get up' I know, I say, catch her hips in my hands and kiss below her ear, but I don't know if I could have restrained myself this time, my voice is a low breath against her throat; I can feel her lascivious laugh against my lips. 'From doing what?' She bats her eyelashes, pouts, laughs at herself. Tickling you to death I say, she squirms away 'you better sit down before you fall down, old man.' Bitch I mutter, sitting down beside her.

I was always envious of the way she slept on planes. Over a foot shorter than me she curled up like a dormouse in a blanket, eyemask, and earphones, she shut out the world, pressed her face against my side, and draped my arm over her. The first time she did it I looked up at passing passengers, embarrassed to be seen so entangled. Because you never think it'll end, do you? Even when the dark recesses of your mind whisper those thoughts to you in the dead of night, causing you to reach for your other, better half across the mattress, just to brush them with the side of your hand. Reassure yourself that they're there, warm, and breathing. Even then, with horror clutching at your heart and squeezing, you never think it will end. Never really comprehend waking with the tight clench in your chest and reaching, reaching, fingertips curling over the edge of the mattress with nothing but your arm and empty stretches of cotton in between.

Those vile few minutes of sweating, shivering terror are why I walk the streets at night, why I watch late night television, why I avoid bed like the plague.