These are the Days

 I remember...

I remember the old wooden dining table with 6 chairs.

The coffee table that was wide enough to cover the entire lounge room.

The "U" shaped couch that fit every single one of us.

The dinners we would eat, filling the stomachs of all of those I held dearest to me.

The smell of cigarette smoke and freshly cooked meals.

I remember.

I remember the arguments, the laughs, the chores.

Complaining about the tasks you requested.. I remember.

The sound of grinding teeth and hating you all taking photos of me.

I remember the day my sister was discovered and the exact words my mother had said when letting me know about her.

"I have a surprise for you, Samara", my mother said after picking me up from after-school-care in Ipswich.

"Is it food?", I asked.

My mother said no.

"Is it clothes?", I asked.

My mother said no.

"What is it?!", I screeched.

"I will love you no less, Samara. I am pregnant and you're going to have a little sister or brother" she replied.

The excitement that overwhelmed me.

I remember knocking at my mothers door persuasively. It was getting to a point where my curiosity turned into anger. 

"Mum!!! Open the door! Mum! What is going on!?"

Her friend opened those two, large, bedroom doors and said the words I had never wished to hear.

Before my heart had literally sunk beneath my chest, she told me, "your grandmother is dead".

Until this moment, emptiness hadn't existed.

My best friend was taken from me. My best friend had taken her own misery and drowned her sorrows in every prescription drug she had ever thought of.

I don't think I had every truly cried until this moment. 

There is sadness and then there is pain. This hole that was gaping in my chest slit right open.

Like a tornado, a black hole had swallowed me entirely.

The stillness left the air and the feeling of loneliness began.

Growing up, you realise, you understand things that you had once seen that you never thought twice about as a child.

Becoming an adult gives you clarity and understanding.

The words that were said and the experiences that you saw become clear as day.

I look back and I think of all that I saw and I question if I had of understood - If I had of done something sooner, could I have stopped it.

If I was an adult then, was there something I could have said, could have done, to change the outcome of it all.

Eyes glazed in yellow, mouth wide open, barely alive.

It was like seeing the person I love most, dead.

I should have known, but I was blind. I was just a child.

and now? now you're nothing but a memory I hold close.

If it wasn't dancing in your lounge room or you walking me back to bed as I sleep walked through your room or protecting me when I was saddened or mad..

I don't know if I will ever love someone the way I loved you.

I am an adult now.

And you have been long gone.

And, I think about all the memories we missed together. All the things I wished you were apart of but are not.

I remember the last hug that we had. I was almost bursting to leave Lowood. I just wanted to go home. Little did little Samara know that in that very moment, you knew that it would be our last.

You knew and I now know.

What I would do now to run back for a last look, a last hug, one last goodbye, grandma.

I never, I never would have thought that you had felt as alone as you did and only recently do I understand why.

But, I forgive you.

I forgive you for letting go. I now know how it feels to lose everyone around you that ever mattered and the desire to want to forget, want to escape something we cannot change.. 

I guess I just wished I was the reason that you wanted to stick around. Although I guess I was. 12 years was a long time by my side when there was nothing else holding you here but tragedy, trauma and pain.

No matter how much you wanted to escape and how distant you would take your mind, you made sure that I was happy, healthy and knew how loved that I was.

I remember.

I remember that New Years Ever and you handed me a bracelet that was handed down rom generation to generation and you told me not to tell anyone that in fact it was I that was your favourite.

As a child, you don't really think about those comments. Always, always, I had felt unloved or an outcast in my family and it was you that reminded me that I mattered. That I was loved. No matter how naughty or abrupt or insane that I was.

On the last week that I saw you forever, I should have known you were sick.

Unable to leave bed, you asked me if I could walk into town as a child and collect your prescriptions.

Looking back it was nothing but an excuse for me to leave the house for a while. Illegally the nurses handed me your script with a look on their face that were so say they knew.

Although I did not.

Although it was I that was blind.

And the next day I gave you that swift hug almost as if to say " I will see you soon, grandma ".

A week later you were gone.

A week later I realised from the bottom of my heart, that I would never see you again.

NO other grandparent or parent or friend ever appreciated my existence the way you did.

I never felt full, ever since.

Like, no one was able to. You don't realise how much someone can relate to you until they're gone.

But for the first time ever it wasn't abandonment, it was death.

The first death that came knocking on our doors and the spiral effect that followed.

I don't think anyone felt like home after that.

Walking to your door step, bare foot.. with my thumb in my mouth and my blanket in the other hand.

I was home. Grandma, I am home.

One day I will see you again.

one day.

We will play Rummy Kub and Go Fish while sipping sweet tea listening to Andre Rieu. You won't have to look after me because I am old now and it is I that will look after you.

These are the days I've been thinking of.