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She is a different person in a recognizable body and I wish she would come back to us.
some days it is as if I am carrying a second body draped over my shoulders.
Mostly she is just there. Mostly she is just a mother to us and she is in rooms the way chairs and tables are.
There are whole sentences in my head but when I try and say them the words choke themselves and my head jerks and not a single sound comes out.
She tethered me. Not to the world but to her.
liked to watch them. These other people, so unlike us. The girls especially. The way they moved. They were assertive but not too assertive, bold but not too bold, clever but not too clever. They were playing a game we did not know how to play.
I wondered, in that moment, what it was like to be a mother to children who did not need you.
Yes. I think then, as I have so many times, she is the person I have always wanted to be. I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars—and that she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world.
She housed those beautiful daughters, didn’t she, and she has housed depression all through her life like a smaller, weightier child, and she housed excitement and love and despair and in the Settle House she houses an unsettling worry that she finds difficult to shake, an exhaustion that smothers the days out of her.
He was like a black hole and nothing caught in his gravitational pull could survive for long.
They always seemed to be telling some great secret, some truth only they could know.
September wears me like a coat.
I open my mouth to shout at her and she draws in a big breath and any words I was about to say are sucked from me and into her.
The days are threaded together with blood, sewn with the needle of red: the blood in the bathroom that day, the blood on the beach, the blood in the swimming pool.
When Sheela’s mother died there had been bank accounts to close, a house in India to sell, books and kitchen implements to sort through. But daughters leave so little behind.
When someone died they didn’t live on inside us; they were just gone.
After she’d given birth she felt emptied out, like a beloved house closed up for the winter.
I hold the pencil and then squat down and write: If there could be only one of us it would be you.
It is awful to have anything other than grief,
I’ll let you go. I won’t keep you. I’ll live.
I do not know how to tell her that I have been living with the ghost of September strung around my neck.
Grief is a house with no windows or doors and no way of telling the time.
In a moment it is possible to forget and then remember all over again.
I do not know how to talk to her without September between us like a bridge and a wall all at the same time.
