In spring, I waded into water so cold it might have stopped a second heart. I let you go, released the soft ash of cremulated bone that was all I had left of you. The sea held me up, rocked and shushed me as you went out into the water like smoke. I shivered on the shore, wet through, brined and rimed with tears and sea salt, the knowledge of your silence bubbling through my veins.
On a summer afternoon, deafened by the fireworks of dahlias, I watch butterflies tremble on purple fingertips of buddleia, listen for you in the soft breath of roses and cut grass. I play back your last voice note until I want to smash my phone with a rock.
In the autumn I stood on the edge of another shore, under a sky purple with thunder heads, waiting for a storm to break. The grasses on the dunes hushed and whispered and the wind stroked the back of my neck just the way you used to. Above my head I saw the smoke of you and the pattern of you, in a murmuration of starlings wheeling through the air in the blaze of a burning copper, four o’clock sky. I thought I might hear your voice in the beating of all those tiny wings and I cried when I could not make out your words.
On a winter night white with frost and sharp-edged loss, when the air is still, paused, suspended in silence and you have been gone for a year, I stand beneath a star burning, year turning sky and I think about your voice, the space where it used to be, memory moving through me like a tide.
Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience.
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