The House of Lost Secrets

by Anstey Harris

‘My life is almost all in the past now, and there are fewer and fewer people who remember the cast of it, let alone the plot.’

I am so glad you have found Ben. We are nothing without hope and I thank God you have found yours. We all deserve the chance to be washed clean of our pasts – that’s what faith is about. Change is always difficult, but God will be beside you. It is never too late to start again. I will keep you both in my prayers.

‘The prayers and the writings are here for us to channel our collective strength in the direction of the person who’s asking.’

‘If you were the person who left this,’ Ben says, ‘I think part of why you’re leaving it is for someone else – a complete stranger – to send you love, some good wishes into the universe.’

‘The power of collective consciousness?’ he asks.

‘We’ve a saying in Scotland,’ he says. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you. That the

I look at my hands on my legs, at the map of age and experience, of life, they have become.

It fills me with peace, that idea that you can communicate with the ones who’ve gone before you – with your lost people – alongside missing them every day.

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.