full circle

Napping in the daytime. It’s not like me, but let’s say the hard slap of January is my defence. That and hormones. I make my way downstairs, eyes narrowing in the milky light, and tell the speaker to play Radio 4.

And so. You mourn and then you move on.

I don’t know what the afternoon drama has been about but this final line lingers while I half-listen to the 3 o’clock news. My finger rests on the defective kettle button awaiting the boil and I wonder if perhaps the tiredness is also or is really grief. I noticed for a long time afterwards that the same old automatic thoughts surfaced regardless of knowing intellectually what had happened. When they stopped, maybe I thought I had moved on.

The kettle begins to rumble so I take my finger off the button and turn it off at the mains. My rings rattle against one another as I pour the boiled water on top of the teabag. My hands are cold and I enjoy my fingers best when they are like this.

I wear a lot of rings. My gran’s wedding ring is by far the loosest. I can remember fiddling with it, tight on her finger, as I sat on her knee in their small living room. She died a month after our wedding and in the hospital I had held her hand again to tell her about the baby growing inside me that it was far too soon to tell anyone else about.

I head to the fridge for the milk, pressing my thumb into the silver foil top on the glass bottle.

1989, 2011

After, Dad wore the ring for a while which was odd for me to see. I don’t remember when he handed it over for safekeeping, but there followed a long hibernation in the box we store our passports and the spare keys in. He’d ask now and again whether I’d done anything about the ring, but I’d tell him I was too busy. That I had two small children. Yes, it was still in the box. It never occurred to me to ask what he meant about doing something with it, nor to wonder that it might be important to him that I do. I took it out after he died and only then found a way to wear it.

It is the most familiar thing I have.

1957, 2015

I stir the milk into the tea for what others might say is far longer than is strictly necessary.

The above is a lightly edited version of the draft I wrote last Sunday during one of our 40 minute live writing sprints on The Chain. It was written in response to the prompt piece by Sasha Neal:

On Sunday, our prompt for Week Four will be in your inbox at 6am.

Lindsay x