Three days ago a wood pigeon woke me with all it’s cooing, then later I bought geraniums and planted them out in an old steel window box. I’d put it off, scared they might make me look like I was staying or feel like an unmanagable commitment or make this place look like home. As I brushed against their rust coloured leaves I remembered how my Grampa used to grow them, how he’d sit for hours away from everyone else in his greenhouse, baby seedlings getting bigger and bigger, then I’d touch them and they’d make my skin come up in a rash and the whole house would smell of them all summer long and then when he died someone took a whole bunch of plants to the church, lined them up along white sills where the dusty light hit them as it filtered in through the stained glass windows. This was the thing that got me the day we buried him, when we stood to sing after the minister finished with all of his eulogising and the air, old, held for too long, was too thick to breathe in, I couldn’t stand, got dizzy and the world stopped turning, I thought I’d keep going, fly off into space when he reached out his arm, wrapped it around what was left of my waist and we stood, the same way we had as children, not sure which one of us was doing the holding up, neither of us certain either how we’d ever manage to drag this weighty sorrow home.

And all the while, whilst the world was going black, full of white noise and crisp static all I could remember was the last time I’d seen him, some mid-summer evening, both of us in the front porch, and he’d sat there holding my hand with tears rolling silently down his elephant creased cheeks, getting caught in the cracks. All the little strokes he’d been having had short-circuited his brain, the words trapped or lost inside him, which he couldn’t say, he was just this shell, his body keeping up with his breathing, and he’d sit all day trying to add up like he’d used to, or spend hours winding clocks. And me, I was just as bad, half faded away, just a facade or a joker or a liar all skin and shadow. And as he held my hand like a claw I sat there trying to work out how to escape, I’d build this brittle shell to keep people out, and here he was in the light that would not fade, crying for I knew not what, for me or for him or for all of his life that had rolled by so slowly, suddenly caught up, those mornings spent too heavy to get out of bed or the hours sat watching golf in his chair or the scholarships he’d won and the school he’d taught and the discoveries he’d never made, what I’ll never know, he just sat there crying and I gradually managed to wriggle my hand free and patted the top of his and tried to tell myself in that teenage way that he wouldn’t know, wouldn’t realise how easily I was disposing off him, how scared I was to see anyone else’s pain, how I wanted to hide and run away from everything and wrap myself up in a reality of my own. And I wanted to believe that he couldn’t see the way I was killing myself, albeit more slowly than his own daughter had, but dying all the same. And so that evening we drove away as the light dipped lower over the fat fields swollen with grain.

Later that year the book the Diving Bell and the Butterfly was released, it was after reading this that the regrets kicked in in earnest.