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Island Blog – So Will I

This day, in a fallout of death, I am aware of Life. I decide thus, Let me feel every single minute of this day, every soigné one. It is dark when I wake but there is a slither of light around my blackout curtains. I know the colour and my heart smiles. T’is not the moon, no, for this light is golden and the moon is never thus. She is slice white, cold blue, lemon if indeed she ever gets anywhere near anything yellow, which, she rarely does. Maybe in her summer coat. Maybe. But now, in the days of incoming cold and threat, she is clear in her colour. So, I am delighted to see that warm glow framing my blackout curtains and I just know is it morning. Oh glorious morning. I love mornings and have little regard for their start point as I ever did of the mother of boys. Boys have no start point, in my experience and just lift and run just whenever they feel like doing so. I have found confusion, then allowance, then engagement with the lunacy of boys. And, in girls too, although I only had one, yet she was match for any of her brothers since first she clocked her situation. She never looked back.

Back to me. It is so strange to walk into a familiar world knowing that someone, younger than my eldest son, is dead. I cannot conceive it, nor allow it and yet here it is. It is not my grief, primarily, not at all. There is a big and grieving family right there in the thick of it all, those who will, for many years, try to make sense of a daughter who died too young. They might question, they might take a dose of pain to their own hearts, they may confuse and dissemble. I would. if my own daughter had died within her 40 years, I would. I cannot, nor can anyone who has not gone through this, say anything. I can say nothing at all and perhaps that is just as it should be.

This day the Rose Bay Willowherb dispelled her seeds. I watched those seeds flit by my window. As the sun pulled pliance the seeds tipped and flowed and moved on as if they knew where they were going. All my spider webs are revealed, beneath chair, above curtain rails, over stairwells. Highlighted in a mist, snowflakes encaptured. I move out for a walk with the doglet. Breathing, honestly, today was a tricky thing. Any breath swooped in seeds. I am not going to let that stop me, not in the face of young death and my olding life.

Coming back into land, into my own home space I think this. I know that Nikki lived her life with wild and colourful dance. And I know this too. So will I.

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Island Blog – A Friend Gone

It took a while. She wasn’t well for a while but inside that ‘while’ she stayed lively and strong.

Now she is gone. Too soon, too young, behind me by two decades, ages with my own children.

It snaps me. Confounds me. And then I land and allow. She was a light. Now her light has gone out.

It is a shame and a longing hand reach for her friends who remain on the land of life. Watching her float away is tough.

But let her go. She was light and lively and red blood rebellion. She thought to gift at times when nobody else thought. She came when nobody else did. She was not afeared in the face of sickness or decay. She came. She always came. And now we need to free her.

Salut my lovely woman

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Island Blog – Thinks and Daddy Longlegs

I have too many of them. Thinks, not Daddy Longlegs. I wonder how the name was gifted. I often wonder that. Was it something to do with the One Who Discovered? If this discovery had been made by a woman might it have spent all eternity being known and recognised as Mummy Longlegs? I wonder that about God too. I know, I know, too many thinks. My thinks might be my undoing for as often as they travel through my mind in the hours of daylight as questions begging answers, they do not sleep overnight. I feel sometimes as I did as a child, excited and bunked in Cattle Class on a sleeper from York to Inverness, so awake to every sound, every shunt, pause, toot and groan of the carriage, one more redolent of an old woman in ill-fitting stays than the sleek, spirited (and grubby) fast train of today. I barely slept and this has not changed. I don’t mind, not often, nor usually but just sometimes I wonder what it might be like to go to bed, hit the pillow and drift off into the night, waking at first light with no idea what just happened.

Inside my home for the last few days I am Daddy Longlegged out. They are everywhere and here am I marvelling at their obvious confoundment. This morning at some pre dawn hour I met one in the kitchen, just by the kettle. It flapped at me a bit and I said hallo and waited till it had done with checking me out. It landed on the wall, spread in all its fragile beauty, six legs splayed, until I filled the kettle for coffee spilling a drop of water on the counter. Immediately it lifted and landed by the water drop. I ran for my specs, my magnifying glass (no laughing please) in order to watch this extraordinary and so short-lived survivor bend for a drink. It has a snout. Yes, it does. Like a hyena only way smaller. It also has a number of eyes which makes sense considering the short lived/predator thing that is ever present. Humans swatting, birds snatching, spider webs waiting, wind slamming and so on.

I watched it drink, wondering should I put it out or should I not? I make coffee taking care to keep it out of the way of the killing steam. It finished drinking and seemed revived. It lifted all the way up to the ceiling. Should I leap about in my goonie in attempts to catch it, to set it free? Into what? Danger? I Googled. I often Google. What did we ever know before Google? I learn little.

I go through the to the conservatory and light a candle, sip my coffee and wait for the dawn. You came in, I say. Your choice. Who am I to make a decision for you? Then I slide back over my Night Thinks. I decide to set them free too. You came in. I repeat. Your choice. But here I can make a decision. And I do. I choose to move into my day, into my daylight, into the new and I leave my thinks behind me. After all, they were only thinks.

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Island Blog – Autumn, Our Gift.

I almost didn’t go to the pier today, to sit on the flat rock and to watch the tidal activity. Almost. Waking twirly and feeling it as the day slowed on, I conversed with myself as though to allow such a falter, to give it credence and approval. I will walk the short walk today, I said. It’s fine. I am allowed. But, as I moved closer to the exit opportunity, the rebel in me drew blood and stood in my path. I could see her in my mind’s eye and she laughed me. Ok, ok, I said, I will walk on. She withdrew to allow safe passage. I would so not want to challenge her.

Leaves are turning. Above my head, beech, alder, hornbeam and birch show me tip. That tip into Autumn, that acceptance with a rebel of colour shouting at them. No dying without colour, she says, no dying without that glorious dress of swish and ruby, of gold and speckles, that differentness that comes only now, only as Summer with all her flounce and confidence yawns like a princess and takes a first class flight across the world. There, she can astonish as only she can, lifting tired human minds, human bodies into swimsuits and flowing wraps and barbecues and beach encounters, but Autumn is pragmatic. She speaks to the dying light, to those on the cusp of change, she is change. And she does it well. Even though the storms may come and the light give way to a big dark, she is clever with time, for those who are watching. She is not one to sleep in.

The light lifts as I walk. Although it seems that the sky is closed, all grey and without comment, there is a shift. I can feel blue coming even if I cannot see it and it comes, with dissonant clouding and cerulean blue. For now it is just sweaty and cloying and my frocks clamp my skin. Then home again as Father Sun finds his spot and beams hot and sweaty after a jumper and boot day. I roll my eyes and peel off morning layers, damp down the fire. The temperature flips from nothing much to 27 degrees in a matter of moments. My neighbours suddenly barbecue. It is what we do if we are working with what is on offer, much like Autumn. I like her. She is feisty and determined. She is beauty in the face of death only it isn’t death. Death is forever, whereas she, Autumn is just one of four and playing her part. She is that jazz singer with a whisky/cigarette voice you hear whilst walking home, one that draws you in to hear more. She is nuts and berries, vibrant and wild, offering a harvest that comes only to her. She is preparation for the winter months when we all lose the plot, light endless candles, and pretend we don’t mind the dark and the cold. She is a herald, nonetheless. She is saying, get ready, pay attention, get real about this time, in particular, This Time, for we are all afraid, all wondering, all peering out at a world we are no longer sure about nor confident to walk in.

I won’t do the cheesy and say that this is nothing. It is not nothing. But we humans have survived, lived, loved danced and made a difference over and over for thousands of years. None of us know what will happen next but next is out there and we are right here, right now and this is Autumn. Our gift.

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Island Blog – I Dare You and Defiance

There’s a natural space in the woods that always looks me in. It’s as if I lose control of my eyes for they slide to the right even if I am captivated by the left where wind-bowed hazels dense the hill flow down to the shore. The gap shows me promise, hope, a further on, an invitation. I know, because I have gone in before, that a rise of scrub grass and big rocks will lead me, puffing like an old Billy, right up to the top only to show me a short down and another challenging up. But today I don’t accept the invitation, not least because of……what, I ask myself and myself as ever has a quickquick answer. Because you are scared of falling and of lying up there in the silent depths of the wood where nobody will find you for days, maybe weeks. I silence her with a sharp hiss which alarms the walkers coming towards me on the track. I feel that overwhelming need to explain that I am not mad (really?) and not a daft old woman talking to myself, which, of course, I am. I roll my eyes and once far enough away from the looking-back walkers and after checking the wind direction, I ask myself why it is that I always have to explain my actions. I yearn, and always have yearned, to be one of those women who can beatifically smile at sudden encounters that encroach on private moments and to not give a monkeys whatnot as to their reactionary thoughts or whispers. I have a long way to go on that one.

Not going in doesn’t mean I cannot pause and send my eyes scooping through the darkling gap to rise and rise again to where the top of the first hill hits the sky. I notice the grass that has fought its way into a piddling light all summer. Now its fronds are bending over and soon they will die their yearly death, kidding on that they are done for good. I smile. I know their root system. I have met that root system in my own little garden. There is way more of that below the surface, below my seeing, than there ever is above ground. The fallen beech tree just within the. wood still sends out leaves, clever limbs reaching reaching up into whatever light sustains the ancient fingers below ground, the ones that garner every bit of moisture they can find, and year after year. It is a long time fallen, this old beech and yet still it blooms. I step in and put my hand on its belly, its trunk, thick as a planet and as long as time. Well done my friend I say. You inspire me.

Fallen I am not and yet when life changed for ever just over a year ago, I can feel a bit fallen at times. Perhaps Nature is teaching me. No, Nature is definitely teaching me. The flower that blooms between paving stones, the cowslip that grows butter yellow and flowers for many days perched atop a big fence post and this beech. It is never about perfect growing conditions, never. I have known so many who seeded, bloomed and blossomed in impossible places under appalling circumstances, defying loss and pain, and who did it anyway. It was never for show, but to shout to the naysayers or to those all settled and comfortable in those perfect conditions, Defiance. Shout Defiance. Shout it. But do something. Shouting alone gives your throat a horsewhip and achieves as little. Choose, instead, to bloom. Go on. I dare you.

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Island Blog – The Usual Route

As I walk today, the usual route that never stays usual, not even day to day, I am thinking. And noticing, and the noticing part shows me changes, little ones mostly, shifts in growth or movement from earth to sky, from tidal flow to a tree canopy painting a season. I have heard people say that they need to change their walk route, and I respect that, but it does wonder me. How much noticing are you doing my friend, because even if you walk through the same terrain every single day, you will always see something different. It can depend on your mood, on how you feel, on whether or not you carry anger or sadness or other pains; worries can flutter around your head like picky terns when you get too near a nest and they can hurt and hinder any other noticings . You can march on a fitness thingy, or be plugged into music with those nifty white ear pods. You can be aware of ouches in the body, sharps in the mind, bothered about wishing excess weight away, aware, too aware of your body.

I leave all that behind, but don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a natural state for me. Hell no. I had to do this marching, musical oblivion, too fat, too floppy, I hate you and the world thing for, well, too long, until some wise person suggested I ‘notice’. Notice, schmotice, I snapped. What do you mean? He explained and I listened, thinking this:- what I am living with, the me I am living with, is not working. I am not working. I am fighting against demons and doubts and hate and distraction and I am marching, marching, marching. To where? he asked. From what? he asked and I had no answers to either.

To free a mind, even if the body is imprisoned, is completely possible. No, it is probable, if the inner work is taken seriously. Now the word ‘seriously’ gives me shudders and always did. I had, have, no plans to be serious. Serious speaks to me of knuckling down to latin syntax or of playing goalie in a lacrosse match in temperatures that would freeze a seal. I want to be light about change, tender with transience, open without fear, fear of my own lack. Who teaches that we have to be everything in order to gain everything? T’is a lie, my friends, but the lie works because we all buy into it. If ‘They’ say this is how it is, then, by definition, most of us are failures. I digress, but with no apology.

Back to the walk. It is like slowing down time, walking and noticing. I don’t need to march. My keeping fit and my belief about keeping fit does not require my body to be something unnatural to me. I have met so many people who have lost stones only to put them right back on and thus to feel an even bigger failure. They worked on self control and denial when the real pain was deep inside their mind, their body memory. As was, is, my own. When a person understands that, the prison bars squeak a bit. They know what is coming if this noticing human begins to take in everything they see, slowly, gently and with respect for our beautiful world and they know their own rigidity and impermanence. They are but metal where we are blood and sinew, mind and soul, heart and transience.

All it takes is acknowledgement. A first walk, slow paced and with looking eyes.

‘To long to live in a state of perpetual contentment is, in truth, to accept a frozen life, one with no eyes on the future.’

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Island Blog – Cusp

I like being on the cusp of change, even as I sometimes am a fearty. This day I walked beneath a billow of grey clouds and thought, well, at least the sky isn’t flat. I’m not great at flat, unless it refers to my midriff, in which case I am delighted. The sun is closed and already lowering in our skies which brings a change of light. Another cusp. As Summer concedes to Autumn, I wonder if they discuss when and how and if there is any resistance or if all the seasons are good students and just know their places. You go, no, You go, No you, or something, or is it silent, peaceful and are the four of them friends? I have met Autumn in the mornings, a thrill of chill, a shiver, a rush to light the wood burner, only to end up with burned skin in the afternoon. In the laze of Spring, for she is lazy up here, I can dress in thunder resistant woollens, mighty leggings and at least four frocks plus jumper and be trounced and bounced into stripping off by lunchtime, only to fall back into shivers by wine O’clock. The seasons are capricious.

It can frazzle me. And then it thinks me. Perhaps the seasons are like us, ditzy and unpredictable. Perhaps they too are unsure of their roles, of who they are are in the now-now of now. Old people in my young days and in my middle age could bore my tonsils loose going on about how long the summers were, how on time the snow fell for Christmas, how floods never flooded and how we never knew what a hosepipe ban was. I can hear myself now, telling a young granddaughter about the ‘simple’ days but I notice and pause and erase and laugh for this is memorical nonsense and so very flat sky.

I walk the same track, the Tapselteerie track and it never bores me for it is always changing as the seasons change. Today beneath the yellow, umber, Payne’s grey and white of the bumpy clouds, the scabious lights up. Peacock butterflies show me wild strong colours and sea-dandelions are so yellow I want to spread their buttery gold on my toast. I peer into the woods and see the green slowly change from lemony lime to deep wine bottle. Summer in there is moving out. The grasses are dying and so they should for we will need them next year. Nonetheless it is a gasp, the watching of it, of their turning. Where sunlight lifted and tousled, danced and elevated these emerald fronds, he is abandoning them now for he cannot reach from his louring face in the western sky. And it is right and it is time and it is preparing us if we just care to notice. Bracken stems copper and begin to fall, to fail. Different birds fly over, birds that will leave us soon for the north, for the south. Go safe, I call out. Come back to us.

Mushrooms and toadstools stand like sentries along the track, big-chested, bullish, almost scary, some tempting and beautiful. I touch nothing. A choir of temptresses, all perfect and come-eat-me have erupted overnight on a tree stump. Hallo, I say. Not interested, I say, and not because I don’t eat mushrooms but because I have no knowledge of the safe and of the deadly. I do look back. They are beautiful. I walk to the old pier and sit a while. The wind is snappy, cooler but the tide is gentle, ebbing but softly. Two herons screech at each other like women at a WI cake sale and I smile, rest on a basalt rock and look out while someone across the sea-loch pushes out a dingy and heads for his fishing boat. I stay as they spin by and wave, heading out to catch dinner perhaps. The coolth lifts me from my rock and I wander back home. I check the fire, bring in logs, close a window. I slide down the cusp and go in search of my boots.

Hallo Autumn. Welcome. In you come.

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Island Blog – The Dive Board, the Door and the Girl

As the days roll on my thinks shift and settle in new shapes. Although it is written that grief has seven stages and are sequential, it is a lie, unless I am the weirdo I always believed myself to be. Please note the past tense. Initially, in other words just a year ago, I spent some weeks feeling I was in control. I could do this. It wasn’t so hard after all and ‘after all’ is relevant here because I had been watching him die slowly for years and that is all consuming, all demanding, all scary, infuriating, debilitating and many other ‘ings’ beside. Then came the crash, the inner questioning, the confusion and self-doubt as the past, our shared past threatened like a courtroom with me in the dock. Now, a year later, a year when without has taken me within and within is somewhere I had avoided for about 60 of them, years I mean I am opening like Strelitzia. It is a mess in there, I told Myself, a mire, a slough, a war, a holocaust. Don’t go there. So we didn’t, she and I. Sometimes within would scratch at the door, mewl and scream out, but we ignored it. The very thought of opening that door to be floored by a boiling wave of recriminations, of bloody fury, of lost times, of regret, shame and self-loathing was enough to keep us hunkered down, backed against a wall, listening with our hands over our ears. How is it, I asked her, that some people can ignore within for a whole lifetime and die with a smile on their faces? Myself takes my hand. I don’t know, she says, but we are not ‘some people’ now, are we? We are curious and we long to heal. I nod, but my jitters are jittery and I feel nausea rise.

At first, the first time I considered opening the door to within, I had support from a counsellor. I trust him completely and have known him some years. His wisdom and experience in the ghastly arenas of caring and grief are not in clever words but in his gentle eyes, and his empathy. He responds to something I throw-away say with a hand to his heart. Ouch, he says, and his eyes tell me the rest. He gets it, he hears me. I have a voice. I am important. I am all that I longed to be and was sure I was not. I feel like I did back in school on the high dive board, the pool about 3 miles below me and a load of anticipates watching, watching just me, the skinny kid in a sleek black costume and on a strong, safe and flexible dive board. Climbing those steps was just climbing those steps. Once aloft and singular, shivering and terrified and alone, I saw the turquoise water like a puddle under my gaze. I had done this many times before, of course I had, but that was in the noisy swell of other girls, of friends, of a be-skirted swim teacher with a whistle between her lips. It was almost fun, but not this time. This time the team depended on my timing, my poise, my perfect arrow dive, my perfect arcuation and subsequent rise to the surface, sans snot and apoplectic coughing.

This state of being heard and valued is a like the foundation stone for a new build. At first I didn’t trust it. Soon, I told myself, it will be snatched away as it always has been, had been. Myself says nothing and keeps me walking. I am in the mood to keep on keeping on, so I concur and comply. I am tired of ignoring the wails and whines and fingernail scratchings of within anyway. As we walk through the days, I stumble often on the rocks of regret, am straked by the barbed wire of self-loathing, burned by the fire of fury and iced to freezing on the snows of regret and shame. Hmmm, I snort, this sequential thingy is a load of tiddley pom (I didn’t put it that way, to be honest). I have gone from roundabouts to swings, from trust to abandonment, from warm safety to cold ire and all inside one hour. But, very gradually, the wasteland is showing me a tree or two, the song of a bird, the comehither tinkle of fresh running water. I am seeing new, I am seeing hope, I am also able to look back without reaching for my sword, my armour. I don’t need protection because with help I have opened that door and let the within out. When I finally did open it, instead of a wave of furious rapacious fire, brimstone and demons, there was silence. You coming out? I said, once I had recovered from the surprise. Was my imaginary enemy not as I thought he was? My looking in rounded the open door. A girl, just a girl. Me, I recognised her at once. For all that wailing and whining and the fear, she was just a girl.

Come with me, I said, holding out my hand. Tell me all about you.

I have a writing on my wall. It reads thus :- ‘I love who I have become because I fought to become her.’ Although, at this time, the ‘love’ bit seems a bit strong, I am watching it each day and it is beginning to gravitate within. My sister asked me today ‘what defines a victim?’ A very good question. I considered, taking it immediately to myself. I was one, I answered, but not now. I allowed myself to be one, whined and wailed and railed against my victim state when, in truth, all I had to do was to open the door that was never locked, to climb those steps and then to dive, like an arrow, into who I always really was and can be again.

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Island Blog – Till Tomorrow

The seals are calling today. I hear them as I round the point but I can’t see them. Their eerie crooning comes on the breeze, one, two, maybe three of them. I stand to listen, allowing the song without words to enter my body, my mind, my soul. It shivers me but in a wonderful way. I cannot live without the sea and all her friends. She lives inside me, her tidal ebb and flow, the pull of the moon, today a pink fingernail hanging like parenthesis. The seals sing on, the lift and fall of their melody something unreal, ghostly. I am not surprised that such music terrified sailors back in the days when they feared falling off the edge of the world and felt the dread of scurvy. Safely rooted here on the Tapselteerie track and inside the knowledge we have today about seals and their singing, not to mention the confidence that neither I nor anyone else will ever fall off the edge of the world, I smile and linger. Taking the song home with me I wonder what they are saying. It will be for a purpose, that’s for sure. There is no sentimentality in the animal kingdom. Every sound, every move is about survival.

I meet nobody on the track. It is just me, the turning trees, the dying bracken and sunlight dapples. Birds flit and flutter, busy on the berries now red as blood and just asking to be eaten, the seeds spread only by travelling through the digestive system of the birds that respond. Scabious host peacock butterflies, blue, red, purple and of such delicate beauty. Harebells, heather and many bullish seps, big enough to shelter a small rabbit from a rainshower, flank the track. Leaf fall carpets the woodland cut-through, red, gold, brown, butter yellow and copper and I see nature’s artwork laid out below my feet. A cooler breeze today I think. Autumn is moving in, but softly this year.

The last visit to the sea takes us down a steep slope and across crunchy seaweed. It sounds like I am walking on crisp packets. Last week this weed was stodgy soft, greened up again in the high tides of a full moon. Be patient, I tell it. High tides will come again soon when that fingernail gets above herself and puffs out like a balloon, causing many of us sleepless nights and itchy teeth. It will wait. It knows how to wait, has done this waiting thing for thousands of years, after all. I heft my old self onto a tall flat rock. After himself died I did no hefting at all. I just stood like a dwarf before a giant and longed. Now my hefting ability is growing balls and I am thankful. I am no good at dwarfing. Although I am shrinking, it is normal but I know that it is just my body, not my mind.

I sit in the sun and watch the water. A Merlin erupts from the bow-backed shore hazels behind me in a startle. He lifts and floats across the narrows to scoop up into a distant tree, startling a heron who lifts with a screech. Ordinarily, the wee doglet would ignore a heron but as it lifts, it screeches and that screech bounces back from the far rocks creating an echo. She is startled, the doglet, and barks back. In turn, her bark barks back at her, once, twice. She barks again, certain there is another dog around even if she cannot see it. I clap my hands to stop her and the far rocks clap back. Good Lord this is turning into a situation. I am aware that the folk in the holiday cottage are at home today and I don’t want this echoing percussion to upset their peaceful afternoon. I heft myself down and whisper a farewell to the sea, the Merlin, the heron and the echo rocks. Was I to speak it out loud, the whole echo thing would kick off again.

Till tomorrow, I breathe. Till tomorrow.

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Island Blog – All the Hurts

Thinking about this today, as I did, and not just today, I have realised that as time goes by, minute by minute, step by painful step, across days, weeks, months and years, the hurting softens. It’s like a blob of washing soap that melts into a bowl for washing dishes. I blob in, fire up the hot water and watch the blob loosen. As the bowl fills, the water and the soap conjoin, presenting me with a dilute. They are both still there, but somehow they have created a new environment. After all, I don’t wash dishes with just the soap, nor just the water, but together they create me a new environment, one that allows a transcendence. From dirty dishes to clean ones. It is just like this for hurts and time. Together, they make a solution.

Although I (and everyone else it seems) thought that now that a year is over, a year during which I live on and my husband of almost 50 years does not, I find myself confounded by upstarts of anger. He did this, yes he did. He put me down, yes he did. He controlled, yes he did. They flare like sudden flames and stop me in my tracks because what I was actually thinking of was more about whether I would iron my frocks or clean my fridge. These confounds trouble my feet, so I might even stumble as I flit through a doorway. They smack at my heart. I invite them not but they come anyway. Half way down the stairs once they hit me and I could barely breathe. Thank goodness for the geriatric banister thingy. My water slopped over the glass and I shook my head to realign my eyeballs.

I don’t want this, I said, out loud to no-one there. I want all the good memories to come back. My mind nodded. my body stayed quiet. Ah, I said, I get it. Mind has memory but so does body. I am tempted to write “and ne’er the twain shall meet’ but I won’t. Nonetheless it is true. Body does have memory and hurts lodge in muscles, in veins, in arteries, in bones. I know this, have always known this, and there is no hiding. We can control our minds, sure, with endless daily and exhaustive self-control, but the body is a wayward and a truthful thing. It will remember like an elephant. By the way, I am now, me and my thinks, almost at the bottom step. And I realise another something. I must listen to my body memories, even if they are painful, even if they tip me off my path. They are not complacent milestones, sunk into the ground of the now. They are djinns that leap out at me begging for recognition and release. We all have them but only the brave (that’s me) stop and turn to say Hallo, tell me your story.

In a world that, apparently, controls us, nobody wants to, nor acknowledges, body memories. If someone is showing signs of distress in a situation that appears like nothing much to others, that person obviously needs medication. Oh flipping dear. I am thankful for all the organisations out there now who stand firm against such illiteracy. I am hoping with all my heart that anyone who feels marginalised because of hurts will find the courage to contact those who really care and who can actively help.

I reach the ground floor. I look back up. I hear you, I say, over my shoulder. But I am down here now and moving on. I thank you for keeping me safe but now I am a different woman. You will always have a place inside me because you are the truth. I look at my bare feet, my toes. Well done you, I say, as, together, we swing through the door into the kitchen and flip on the kettle for strong coffee.