Looking over my shoulder
It’s difficult to believe that we’ve been out of our home for almost six weeks. At the same time, that first, nightmarish, week in the Roslin Hotel seems like a distant blur, already fading into the kind of half-memory that’s usually reserved for particularly bad holidays – bad enough to not be cherished, but not bad enough to stand out. Tristan has just come down from his bed and had a little cry because he misses his bedroom and his bunkbed. If I could take him up to camp on the bare floors then I would.
The wound caused by the fire runs pretty deep. It’s almost as if ones existence on the planet has come into question. It’s not just the things that have been accumulated in 7 years of parenthood – scan pictures, height marks on walls, toys, and so on. It’s not even the collection of bits and bobs from 14 years of marriage. It’s the complete destruction of all the things we have from our thirty-odd years on Earth that mark our presence, that show that we’re here and we’ve done things. School workbooks and report cards, class photos, cherished childhood dolls, books, and so on. Right now it seems there’s a void within me – the book of songs, poetry and writings that I’ve been irregularly adding to since I was first able to write has been reduced to a handful of dust. With it go the memory of those particular things. Photographs that reminded us of places and people long gone – memories that will fade with time, with no physical thing to remind us they ever existed.
This is the worst kind of loss – it’s not that these things simply don’t exist any more – it’s as though they never existed at all.
