Retracing your steps

On Coping #39

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I retrace your steps.

.

I go past the Shard.

Walk into the hospital.

Up to the entrance of your ward.

.

I attend your yoga class.

Sit in your ice bath.

Lie on your heat pad and your shakti mat.

.

I join your gym.

Drive your car.

Read your diaries.

.

I drink from your mug.

Eat your leftover frozen wheatgrass.

Smell your jumpers.

.

I sleep on your grounding sheet.

Head on your heated pillow.

Your salt lamp on at my side.

.

I light your scented candles and your jos sticks.

Use your sleep spray.

Burn sage.

.

I use your machine to make green juice.

I drink hydrogenated water.

And a fridge full of magnesium soda.

.

I don’t know what these things do for me.

.

You told me once.

The part each would play in reducing the inflammation.

Slowing the spread.

.

But I don’t know I heard you.

Or I can no longer remember.

.

I do know that doing them makes me feel closer to you.

.

As though by playing at being you

using your props

following the fading contours of your daily life

I can recreate you

become you.

.

By arranging myself into the spaces you have left behind I can somehow hold myself together.

.

Like unset jelly

reassuringly formed into shape by a mould

without which

it would

disperse.

.

Liquid in search of physical form.

.

Sometimes

as I’m walking to yoga

or driving to the gym

or tidying the house

I catch a glimpse of you up ahead

or in the other room.

.

A faint image.

A vision.

A hologram.

.

And so I follow you through and around our house.

Our town.

Our old city.

.

Always just a few seconds behind.

Trying to be where you have been.

Feel what you felt.

.

Other times

I realise I’m the invisible one.

.

You’re still here

doing all of these things

and I’ve disappeared

become transparent

watching from the outside of my own life

dislocated.

.

Then some days

the worst days

I remember that I have not disappeared.

That I am in fact resolutely here.

.

And that you’re not a vision

or a hologram

but a shadow.

.

Behind

not in front.

A fallen outline.

.

The shape of you

briefly visible

in bright moments.

.

Notable only

as an absence

of light.

Previous > On Coping #38: I tread water.

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On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer.

It begins in March 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. 

On Coping is the story of what happened next. 

Read from the start.

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