The House of Lost Secrets

by Anstey Harris

She is as cold as the floorboards, as lifeless as leather.

I thought I’d sit in the quiet and think about some absent friends. Absent family. But the day isn’t lost on me, dear.’

‘I don’t want to lose my family history but nor is it mine to keep.

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.

Now I understand that it was this, this peace and past, this settlement of the sands and the renewing of the waves, that meant it could only be me.