THE LIBRARY

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.

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.

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.

We carry on amid the chaos, pretending it’s outside us, over there…somewhere. So we make Plans. Plans are for the future. Plans are good. We should all have Plans. But we live every day as if death only turns up at other people’s bedsides.

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.

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.