Tell Me How This Ends

by Jo Leevers

She was told she’d been ‘sectioned’ – and she quite liked the sound of that word, imagining how nice it would be if you could do that, slice the parts of your life into neat portions, trimming off the bad bits. If she could, she would cut out her entire marriage and throw it in the sluice bucket, like something bloated and diseased.

Henrietta can feel that familiar blank expression forming on her face, the one that protected her through her lonely schooldays and then university and jobs where nobody spoke to her. It’s the face that hides the rising panic of knowing that she’s failed again.

‘Some people say it gets easier, but I think you just adapt. The grief doesn’t go; you just mould yourself around it.

Truer words never spoken