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 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 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.

In the beginning I didn’t have to remind him about cards, or dinner plans, or what anniversaries meant. We didn't care. Later I did. Later still, I stopped.

You’ll never be her again. You’ll never have that same sparkle in your eye. You’ll never feel that same love in your heart, the kind that fills you when you’ve met the person you want to spend your life with, and they’re here next to you, holding you in their arms. When your soulmate dies, and you have to carry on with the rest of your life, it does something irreversible to you.

To my youthful and inexperienced eyes, Jordan Knight looked like a gorgeous Italian man had eaten James Dean and then birthed a beautiful hybrid Adonis. (Jordan’s Canadian, as it turns out, but this was my fantasy after all.) Now, nearly forty years later, as I search for him on Google, Jordan Knight just looks like just another bloke called Dave…and I wonder if I might finally have a chance.

The days roll into each other. I try to keep myself busy with errands and overdue decorating. I’m currently on my eighth coat of Forest Green in the hallway. I attempt my usual precision — he hated decorating, never had the patience — but in the end I’m just slapping it on like a toddler at playgroup. Still no word from the coroner or funeral directors. Apparently, there’s a queue to die. He would have found that funny.