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I couldn’t tell whether the cold on my insides was freezing cold or boiling cold, the kind of cold that made your fingers fall off or the kind you didn’t realize was heat until you saw the blisters bubbling. I only knew it was hurting cold.
I couldn’t tell whether the cold on my insides was freezing cold or boiling cold, the kind of cold that made your fingers fall off or the kind you didn’t realize was heat until you saw the blisters bubbling. I only knew it was hurting cold.
My insides cramped as I thought of the cage of high fences within which I had walked without stooping, stood without hunching, because freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.
My insides cramped as I thought of the cage of high fences within which I had walked without stooping, stood without hunching, because freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.
I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t. I couldn’t think how to explain the hunger, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in trying. You couldn’t understand hunger like that unless you had felt it. I wanted to tell her how it had shaped me, made me, because it had been huge and I had been tiny and it had always been there, a gnawing, nagging constant.
I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t. I couldn’t think how to explain the hunger, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in trying. You couldn’t understand hunger like that unless you had felt it. I wanted to tell her how it had shaped me, made me, because it had been huge and I had been tiny and it had always been there, a gnawing, nagging constant.
Over the years I had spent hours imagining the things I would say to her when we were reunited, and I hadn’t voiced even a fraction. It was the way it had been with Mam: these weren’t the grand unburdenings I had rehearsed, but surreal run-ins with people very different from the characters who lived in my head. I thought perhaps that was how it would always feel, even if I talked to them for a month, because I couldn’t be unburdened from something that was mine to carry.
Over the years I had spent hours imagining the things I would say to her when we were reunited, and I hadn’t voiced even a fraction. It was the way it had been with Mam: these weren’t the grand unburdenings I had rehearsed, but surreal run-ins with people very different from the characters who lived in my head. I thought perhaps that was how it would always feel, even if I talked to them for a month, because I couldn’t be unburdened from something that was mine to carry.
When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t real dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.
