Always You and Me

by Dani Atkins

I learnt that you can’t outrun grief because it always knows where to find you, but you can keep yourself so busy that it can only squeeze into the gaps of your life, instead of burying you under an avalanche of sadness.

Josh shook his head, and there was a look that novelists like to call ‘steely determination’ on his face, but in real life it’s better known as sheer stubbornness.

‘Nobody wants to hear about him. They don’t ask you what he was like, or what were the things he loved. No one wants to know what made him laugh or drove him crazy. They edit him out of every conversation because they believe it’ll be too painful for you to talk about him. But really, the most painful thing of all is never getting to talk about him.’

Panic is a strange dish that goes from a moderate simmer to a raging boil almost without you noticing.