I went to our local corner shop and bought a Diet Coke, pausing as I clumsily handed Jimmy a pound coin in payment. He knew H — had known him — too. Maybe I should tell him that H had died because didn’t he deserve to know too?
Grief means living in the confines of someone else’s sympathy. It also means having to articulate private feelings in public in sentences that other people understand. In grief, people lean on simple platitudes to give shape to swimming feelings that don’t know language. For days after H died, his friends spray-painted his name over and over again in red letters on the sides of buildings and scratched it into drying concrete paving slabs in Soho Square. Wringing out guilt and sorrow out through white-knuckled grips.
After the Instagram eulogies, worse, aching silence. The burial of the dead. Perhaps the only way to stay in the world of the living is to remain quiet. Even now, years on, I watch a familiar glimmer of panic in people’s eyes when I mention H’s name. Faces swiftly rearrange into masks of sympathy. The gap between encountering grief head on and bearing witness to it is vast.
Saying goodbye to H has meant cutting out parts of myself. The part which loved without question or consequence. The part which held him far too tight because it was the only way I knew to keep him safe. I haven’t been in a relationship with anyone since him. It’s hard to want to give those parts of myself to someone knowing that one day, they’ll die too.
At night, I used to whisper to the darkness, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”, as if atonement could bring H back. Now I tell him thank you. Thank you for being alive.
