Wordsmoker

It’s rained nearly all day today. It feels right. I took the death certificate to the local council this afternoon and made her death legal. She’s been added to the dead of Renfrewshire. When it’s officially registered, you and the registrar both sign it with a fountain pen. Then the registrar goes away, copies it, files it, and gives you a shortened version. It gets placed into a folder with some other papers, and you leave.

I worry about my face. I think I’m going about everywhere with a pained expression, with my mouth slightly open, like I have problems breathing through my nose. I’m worried that this expression will stay. I find myself acknowledging my own facial expressions sometimes and try to shake it up. I close my mouth.

I think I’ve aged ten years in a week. I’m very pale, my eyes are sometimes red-rimmed and swollen.

Christmas is going to be tough.

I was vacuuming the lounge this morning and pulled back my chair. There lay a single Polo mint, wrapped in silver paper. It was one of my mum’s. She always had a supply of Polo mints in her bag or under the table in the lounge. She would suck on one when her coughing was getting out of hand, usually if we were out shopping. She’d mention something about the air being different, outside to inside, and that would trigger her cough, dry air, that was it. When I saw it I smiled. Jake had obviously discovered it under the table, or – more likely – she’s thrown it onto the carpet for him to play with, and he’s ended up batting it under my chair where it’s lain for about two weeks I guess. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. It’s on the kitchen table now.

I get sad these days imagining what she’s going to miss in the future.

I sat on the bus, going into town today, looking at other old women there, sitting, chatting away, figuring out which ones were older than my mum, and how it was just fucking unfair. I sat there, staring at them, calculating variables, emotional algebra and ending up with useless equations.

I miss her.

The cats are fine. I moved her dressing gown off the chair in the lounge and placed it on her bed. Henry wasn’t sleeping on it any more, and it scratched my eye every time I glanced at it, damned fleecy-soft sky-blue reminder. I’m slowly changing things around the house. I’ll start decorating again soon. I had to quit that to spend more time taking care of her.

Dried leaves, all pastel greens and yellows, turned glossy today in the rain. The beauty is astonishing – the vibrancy became even more vibrant, the contrast got turned up.

People have been sending me money. I’ve got a thing that notifies me when emails land at Wordsmoker, and I finally fired it up yesterday. I haven’t read any of these emails yet, but whatever people have given, it’s very appreciated.

I’m not so full of words today.