My breath comes sharply and a pain in my chest tells me I’m finding it hard. It’s not the running but a thought that has invaded my brain and it knocks me off kilter.
I am the age you were when you died.
I am the age you were when you died! How has this happened?! Not the general age, 38, but the exact age. If I were you then I know the exact moment that I will die today. And I replay your last days… remembering small, insignificant details like how much you enjoyed the taste of the raspberries from my fruit salad at lunchtime… but you were gone by the evening.
I ask myself if I’m ready to die and of course, I am not, as you were not, and I wonder what that must be like. How unfair it must feel and how painful it must be to feel so powerless.
Hot tears stream down my cheeks as I run and I hope I don’t see anybody. I enjoy these moments when I’m allowing myself to embrace the grief and the pain and it feels real. I wish you felt more real. You’ve been gone too long now and there are so many things that I wish I could remember properly but I can’t. My brain betrays me… and each thought that I try to grab, and cherish, and relive, fades and the edges are gone and the details aren’t exact and I don’t fully know what is real anymore.
I remember sniffing your forehead in the minutes after you died. Trying to breathe you in so deeply so that I would remember your smell, because I knew that I would never get to do it again. This was my last chance. The last time I would ever get to smell that comforting, familiar smell of the skin I had kissed hundreds, or thousands, of times. I long to be wrapped in your big arms and be able to smell your skin just for one more moment. As that thought stabs my heart the pain in my chest is intense, and I gasp as I struggle to breathe. Choked by the thought of everything I have lost.
And suddenly I realise that I run, because standing still in this place, where your clock has stopped but mine keeps ticking is harder than I ever imagined. And every day from now on, when I open my eyes, I know that I am living a day that was stolen from you. A day you never got to live, an age you never got to be. A day that you were not afforded the luxury of living. And I realise that I am older than you now and that… is impossibly hard.
I must not stand still for this is a place in which I find it hard to survive…
And so I run.
