We arrived in the country together and flew home alone. What followed was a journey marked by performance, compliance, and the slow realisation that the story everyone believed about the ending was easier than the truth it replaced.

The noise of the dog retching wakes me from my restless dream. By the time I’ve decided whether I feel relieved or disappointed, the day already feels ruined — so I make a crestfallen brew, stare out at the muddy ocean below, and try to remember why staying inside has suddenly become unacceptable.

Those people feel like ghosts now. I hope some fragment of them is still there in that arcade — the machine humming, the claw dropping, the small improbable win looping forever. A moment suspended in fluorescent light, before grief, before knowing what it would cost to love someone that way.

We all keep staring at the place where our lives are about to come to an end. I think about what he would do if he were here. What he would say. I stare at Samantha and she she stares back, before beginning to slowly shake her head.

I booked a house on the highest point in the bay, a bedroom with writing desk and an ocean view, a veranda to smoke copious amounts of weed on (that I definitely wouldn't be mentioning to the owner), and a geographical distance big enough to warrant a commitment to the cause. But instead of feeling relief, I realised there was one problem - me. I would be there. Alone. Unsupervised.

I laughed out loud when I saw the headline — a reminder that there was still good in the world. Seeing that she’d achieved her first ever number one in the charts, it seemed as if the public had quietly, collectively given her a hug and a metaphorical pat on the hand, as if to say, Don’t worry, love. Kids will be kids. Here’s a number one, just to show we care.

The room was brighter and larger than I expected when they wheeled me in on the bed, filled with smiling people in blue. As they positioned me under the bright light, the classical music in the background was both calming and a strange soundtrack for the moment — like I was at the dentist.

I hadn’t been able to sit with the not-knowing, like I was endlessly searching through an overcrowded graveyard to lay flowers on a headstone with no name. What if it wasn’t a stranger? What if it was someone I knew?

The absence of those essential front pockets hurt me more than the missing lining, like I wouldn’t be able to hold his hand. That’s always where he held mine — inside his front pocket. When it rests on the back of my rickety but favourite wooden chair, it tricks me into thinking he’s just upstairs, using the bathroom.

Although I appear to drive aimlessly, I think my unconscious seeks out personal landmarks, as if performing some morbid memory-lane exposure therapy. I’ve realised there is nowhere I can go where I can escape to that isn’t haunted by the ghosts of some version we once were.

I can’t listen to the radio anymore. There is something insultingly normal about it. I drive in silence instead, my hands gripping the wheel too tightly, the road ahead an endless blur of unlived possibility. My thoughts fragment, skimming over the surface like a stone skipping across water. I have the overwhelming sense that I’m not really here. I’m somewhere else. Somewhere that feels like nothing and everything at once.

I don’t know exactly how many days it’s been. I stopped recording them. My guess is more than three hundred. I’ve counted at least three seasons, based on the weather - out there. Darkness has been the most consistent reminder that what were once normal days have passed. Night-time arrives like an echo of something vaguely familiar — but which now feels less like an invitation to rest and more like an intrusion.

I continued to play my part every year with the performance of mince pies and carrots. I feigned excitement about what “Santa would bring.” And I pretended not to hear my brother’s annual reminders of the truth that he never wanted me to forget, as if I ever could. I knew I would be rewarded on Christmas Day for my silence in the plot.

I never realised until he died that grief makes you feel like a helpless child again, afraid of the monsters under the bed, crying out for a mother who will never come. Left only with the cold, empty space where love used to be.

Once upon a time, she was my best friend. My only friend, really. Looking back, she was my antagonist. I spent years believing we were like sisters. It took me a long time to realise she never considered me blood. The signs were all there — just clouded to eyes that hadn’t been trained with enough love to consider them relevant.

I reached for the sound of our laughter, hoping that their echoes might permeate my heart, but the walls refuse to speak. C.S Lewis very rightly said that he never realised grief feels so much like fear. But a person's nature is never one dimensional, and grief's is no different. I never realised that grief feels so much like motherhood.

There are deaths that fracture families, and then there are deaths that reveal fractures that were always there. His funeral should have been a place of gathering. Instead, it became a theatre of exile. One coffin. Five wakes. And the clear announcement that I did not belong anywhere.

Nearly twenty years later, I can still feel the weight pressing down on my teenage chest — a weight left behind from a devastating absence, the hopeless feeling that something vital had left not just my body but my soul. That the fight in me was gone.

I was breaking every rule I’d ever been told to follow. It was intoxicating and terrifying. That trip wasn’t just about cigarettes or punishment. It was the first time I glimpsed who I might become, even if I was still terrified of it.

If you asked me how many men have tried to kill me, I’d probably laugh before I answered. Then I’d start counting.