the methods of loss:

The ground is still, the air is thin, and again there are his hands on your face and then on your lips and then on your neck. Frozen on your neck, dangerous on your neck, squeezing the life out, killing. is this what you like? By now your eyes are wide open. They were not at first but, my God, now they are open. No, no. Please. And then:

Oh my God. I’m going to die with my eyes wide open.

Funerals are terrible things. Your hands grip the steering wheel as you speed down the M4. You hate this dress. The weather is shit. You’re almost out of petrol.

Two kids are burying their mother today.

When you get there, there is a sea of black, and tea, and your neck twitches at the sounds of anything that isn’t sadness. Your own mother is here. It is her friend’s funeral. She walks the way she always does, back straight and head high. But today she is close to the edge of something.

She doesn’t cry when she walks into the church.

She doesn’t cry when she greets her dead friend’s mother.

She doesn’t cry when she stands to do a reading.

But when the first child, a son the same age as her own, stands to give a tribute, her shoulders begin to shake and she turns her head away.

Your mother begins to cry.

In the middle row of the church, every voice begins to fade until all you hear is your heart and hers, and her heavy silence. In this place, you put your palm on her back to remind her you are here.

I’m here, mum.

Right then, in all the ways she needs you to be.

Light has a weird way of reflecting on bleached walls. In a small room, a drugged woman is calling,

my baby,

my baby,

my baby.

as two nurses transfer her back onto her bed.

Her baby.

Her baby.

Her baby.

And that was the last day to change everything.

It was the light on the walls. They showed you the woman’s face.