She (excerpt 2)

Every day of the three months that passed since Rose slipped away, I realised she was gone. Each realisation came anew, as if appearing for the first time. It possessed me completely and directed all my actions. It exerted a peculiar pull and arrangement on everything I did - an obscure force in the chest and the heart.
There was only one time during the day when I felt fully able to overcome all the pressure. When I first woke in the morning, when the sunlight filtered in through the rippled curtains, dappling the room and my inner eye, when it appeared at its weakest. And I felt each time that I should return to sleep, to ward off as best I could the ensuing emptiness that would accrue through the day.
Occasionally I thought it best to stop these thoughts from filling up my mind completely. I wanted to banish Rose, to reject the daily advances and mental energy going to waste. But I thought as well that things would be poorer for not having her there, for not reminding me, for teaching me what not to forget.
When I did stop fixating, when I gave it all a break, I’d sometimes be overcome with an extraordinary sense of calm. Not the kind of cliché calm you find on a picture postcard - sparkling meadows and luminous skies. Nor the kind of calm you discover before the storm. Rather, the kind that creeps in when everything is falling apart around you, deep like airline failure, when cans of food and cereal packets topple from supermarket shelves, when buildings crumble to the ground, when the earth is ripped and torn during an earthquake, the land drowned by the sea. The kind of calm that teaches you to know better, to put stuff in perspective, to understand that you’re not the only one around. And when this happens, everything goes quiet.
Telephone codes and hold music.
We were all growing up, or learning how not to.
You can’t go back but wisdom is the goal I guess, the older years offering you the chance to avoid making the same mistakes in different situations. All the while our youth was slipping away, she kept sleeping in that bed, needing nothing, wanting only life. The seasons kept changing, the weather as petulant as a child. But she stayed the same, the same glazed look of blankness against the white pillows. Still, I took solace from the thought she was always with us, somehow, in the air we breathed, in the dreams we had.
We all got to know each other a lot better through those months, even if the mood was somewhat subdued. Late nights travelling on buses and trains, in people’s cars as we made our way to the next party. Walking over motorway bridges or beneath dingy brick arches with the sound of engines and police sirens filling up the dark. Prowling the back streets deep into the night, after the party had ended, looking for hope from somewhere amid the deserted, litter-strewn pavements and polluted river banks, among broken brickwork, among each other, faces tired and worn.
Sitting watching the sun rise in the early morning together, in hoods, arms and legs bundled up in duvets thrown up to ward off the cold. Listening to songs that sent a shiver down the spine, that chord change to bring back half-formed memories of long ago. Coming up with reason upon reason not to go to sleep. Those times would stay with me, and the things that were said meant so much more, taking on new meaning as the months passed, as we grew older, as the beauty migrated inwards.
Rose’s beauty remained, but her face looked older every day. All the time, something was growing inside her. Sure, all of us were fragile and there was only so close we could get to each other. But she was like a twisted, frost-stripped branch tottering in the wind. I guess there was solace to be taken in the fact that we were all in the same situation, all dainty little pebbles at the mercy of the wind, thrown about on shifting shores.
Sometimes I thought how little we knew ourselves, that we were hopeless among each other if we hadn’t learnt how to deal with number one first. It wouldn’t happen over night though, and it was a journey we’d all have to take in our own way. If we could help each other en-route, perhaps it wouldn’t take so long. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so long before we could spend a long summer day in the sun again.