The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

‘Whose fault is it?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably Prime Minister’s.’ ‘Why’s it his fault?’ she asked. ‘Linda,’ I said. ‘Everything is his fault.’ Sometimes it was tiring having a best friend who was thick.

Mam had asked God to protect her. She could have asked him to protect me, or both of us, in the same number of words. She never had.

When bad things happened to you, people always said things like ‘Poor you’ and ‘You’re so brave’, and it was meant to make you feel better but usually it just made you feel worse, because you didn’t want to be brave and poor, you just wanted the bad thing not to be happening.

The snag of anger caught me in the soft place where my jaw met my neck. 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.

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.