An Introspective

About a year ago, in January, I was sat on a train destined for London’s Denmark Hill. There is a hospital there. It is not far from the station and hugely imposing, with corridors so expansive one could easily become lost (and I regularly would). It had been a wonderful Christmas; wonderful, blissful happiness accompanied by a wonderfully blissful sense of ignorance and, I suppose, a youthful hope. In truth, I did not even know that anything could (or indeed would) be wrong. I met my parents at the hospital and, later that day, after confused faces blurred into one tear-marred mirage, a doctor finally decided to admit my mother into the hospital indefinitely. Then, my dad and I drove home, stopping at a restaurant to eat. It was a Saturday night and it was busy and loud, with people simply being wonderfully and blissfully happy. It was an overwhelming typical Saturday night.

It is eight months later and I am sat in a Bermondsey pub. It is a Sunday afternoon. I watch a woman pull off a pink fur coat and sit to sip from a champagne saucer. That pink fur coat remains strangely present in my mind. I contemplated buying one just a week later but no—grey seemed far more germane to my general state of mind. It is the 17th of September. Families around me eat roasts, they sip wine, and are simply, wonderfully, blissfully happy. But I am not. My life has just changed, forever. I, too, sip wine, but far more quickly than my non-existent appetite permits. I cry because I do not understand the reality. I cannot. I cannot understand how anyone goes on without their wonderful, beautiful mother. But yet, everything around me is so frustratingly normal. Fifty metres from Guy’s Hospital and, yet, normalcy. Pink fur. Champagne saucers. Roasts. Wonderfully, blissfully happy.

And so, I want to talk about loss. About the ensuing emptiness. The heartache which never goes away. Because we all experience loss. We all love, and where there is love, there is always, always loss. And, thus, I want to talk about normalcy.

It is the 23rd of September, and it is the day before my 18th birthday. I am sat in a hotel room, sipping champagne and gazing out onto Chiswick High Road. There are eight of us in a hotel room designed, perhaps, for two at full capacity—the room is comprised mainly of bed. But a breeze blows the white curtains into the room, and we laugh and exchange lipsticks and, for a second, I am wonderfully, blissfully happy. I feel the breeze lift my hair and I feel invigorated, as if I could take on the whole world with a glint in my eye. Then I remember, and the feeling goes. I feel shaken, and weak, and I feel the champagne and a wave of tears. But I do not cry. There are champagne saucers and love and happiness. There is always some normalcy, I suppose.

It is now February and there is some sense of normality. But I have realised that, in trying to be blissfully ignorant of the emptiness I feel, I have neglected myself, and my sense of normalcy. Testament to this is the very fact that it has taken me five months to bring myself to write. I used to write and my words had feeling. But, for five months, words have just been words. Words are very strange things. My Mum had bought a birthday card for me a week before – there were no words in it. The absence of words was what made that card so heartbreaking. There were no words to describe what I felt. But five months later, I realise that words are the only way to describe anything. Anything at all. To not use words is simply not possible; even thought and feeling is expressed through words.

So here I am, five months later, wanting to talk about loss. Because, in truth, I lost myself briefly. I lost a part of myself with her and, that, I can never get back. But I also lost myself because I forgot about the words. I became consumed by the external normalcy. The champagne saucers, the pink fur, the Sunday roasts, and all those things that were so simple, so easy, so inimitably constant. By returning myself to this external normalcy, I could live in a state of ignorant bliss. I could forget, just for brief moments.

But I lost myself because I lost touch with the words. I lost touch, therefore, with myself. It was so hard to think, to be cogent, to care about all those things I had always cared about. I couldn’t think and I couldn’t work and my words could not have meaning. So here I am, writing because I lost myself. And because I owe it to my beautiful, wonderful mother to find myself. To be the person she raised me to be. To not think only of the champagne saucers, the pink fur and the Sunday roasts. To think of the words. I lost touch with what I wanted and, briefly, with who I was simply because I could not get the words out.

Five months feels like a very long time. Every time I get a text, I still half-expect it to be my wonderful, beautiful mother. But I was blaming losing her for losing myself. But in truth, I did not lose her, because she is with me in everything I do. But, for five months, it did not feel that way because I could not remember how to articulate but I didn’t want to articulate; I did not want to feel pain when I could think only of pink fur and champagne. But here I am, talking about loss in order to find myself again. To perhaps find my mother again.

The words are cathartic. Where there is love, there is loss. Where there is pain, there is beauty. Where there is loss, there is superficial normalcy. There is no beauty in that. I cannot be whole, and I will most assuredly never be whole, but by finding the way to articulate, to undergo emotional catharsis, I can find myself again. It took me five months to write this—I did not even know that the normalcy I inhabited was not at all internal. I want to feel as though I can take on the world, with a glint in my eye. But I forgot all about the words. So here I am, talking about loss.

About a year ago, I was sat on a train, destined for Denmark Hill. And I was writing because I wanted to write. I was writing because I needed to feel like I could take on the whole world before I walked into that hospital. In those ensuing twelve months, I forgot how to take on the world. So, here I am.