I Let You Go

by Clare Mackintosh

They exchanged half-smiles in mutual acknowledgment of the adrenaline rush it always felt so wrong to enjoy when something so horrific had happened.

Is it possible to simply walk away from one life and start another? I have to try: it is my only chance of getting through this in one piece.

And the photos of the son I loved with an intensity that seemed impossible. Precious photographs. So few for someone so loved. Such a small impact on the world, yet the very center of my own.

It is the last piece connecting me to my past, and almost immediately I feel freer.

I wonder briefly if I have become immune to physical pain: if the human body is not designed to handle both physical and emotional hurt.

The grief I feel is so physical it seems impossible that I am still living; that my heart continues to beat when it has been wrenched apart. I want to fix an image of him in my head, but all I can see when I close my eyes is his body, still and lifeless in my arms. I let him go, and I will never forgive myself for that.

It’s a small success, but I store it away with the others, stacking them up as though they might one day cancel out the failures.

When you leave a place it’s easy to imagine life going on there the same way as before, even though nothing really stays the same for long.

Gradually, without my noticing, my grief has changed shape; from a raw, jagged pain that won’t be silenced to a dull, rounded ache I’m able to lock away at the back of my mind. If it is left there, quiet and undisturbed, I find I’m able to pretend that everything is quite all right. That I never had another life.

I can’t recall anyone ever wanting to share this part of my life: art was always something to be shut away in another room, something for me to do on my own, as though it didn’t belong in the real world.

“It makes you realize, doesn’t it?” I say. “How much . . .” I stop, unable to admit it, even to myself. “How much you need them to come home?” Helen says quietly.

I cry for a teenage boy alone in the sea; I cry for his mother; I cry for the dreams that haunt my nights; for Jacob; for my baby boy.