The House of Lost Secrets

by Anstey Harris

Grief is longer and heavier than this. Grief likes Wednesdays and bus queues, a hijack in the most unlikely of situations. Grief likes to be close, and friends for years.

There is a hollowness inside me, a change – a before and an after. The person I was with her and the person I am without her.

There is a magic to the oldest of relationships, a deep peace that comes from a lifetime of shared experience, of understanding the things that made us.

‘Permanent happiness is not a normal human condition,’ he says. There is a pause where he lets the phrase sink in, lets the rhythm of my feet land on happiness and human. Repeated. ‘But we’re led to believe that it is.’ His voice is quiet, fits the pine needles and the light-green moss that covers the branches like fur. ‘And there are certain personality types, people, who are tied up in knots by that. For a lifetime.’

It is that hazy phase of night-time, a furred navy blue that has the briefest line of orange at the horizon – like it has been set on fire at one edge.

‘What’s for you won’t go by you. That the right thing will find you at the right time.’

‘They just look happy for other people. He shouts and she cries, neither of them ever stops drinking, and my sister and I sit upstairs ignoring each other so everyone can pretend it doesn’t happen.’

Ben says that grief doesn’t only have to be for death, that you can grieve something you’ve never had, grieve the negative space of it. Accepting that has helped me to add my mother, my teenage years, to these ghosts I live with – as much a part of me as all my best points. Each a part of what made me. I didn’t lose my mother to death: I lost her to difference. To a difference in the way we perceived the world, to a difference in what mattered, in where we would find our happiness.