Poppyseed

Yikes. The 21st December. The shortest and darkest day of the year. I have been dreading it, as it is sure to be a dark one for me. I've been trying to share these feelings for almost 9 months, and I have not managed it. It looks like now I have - with an hour to go. 

Like I said, it's a day I've been dreading. I spent today with friends and on the way home I really started to feel the weight of tomorrow. As I walked from the tube station to my house I hit a junction, and looked along the street I used to live along 6 years ago. Feeling a bit lost, I made the decision that I would like to visit my old flat. 

I began a guilty pilgrimage down the familiar road lined with Victorian houses with bay windows and wreath-adorned doors. I saw Christmas lights rested on window sills and warm lamps illuminate entirely different stories. 

The walk was 12 minutes. It felt like years. I felt all the possibilities and impossibilities I have ever felt. Grieved for things I lost long ago, and hoped for the many things I still have time for.

On the way back, I looked in through windows on to lives I used to feel my choices had denied me from, feeling that now, maybe, one day, it might be possible for me to comfortably look out of them. I reached the road I live on now and laughed. Laughed at how scary and alien 18 year old Jessie used to find this road. This road that feels like home now.

Do I look for poetry in my life or is it actually just very poetic? Because I just can't ignore the narrative loops at this moment. As the number 4 bus rolled past me, the one that goes from my old house, my new house, my new workplace, the most important train station in my London life, and my favourite place in the world. The same number as the one that goes past my home in Wales.

I've done some good things this year. I am very proud of myself. But I feel like a fraud not being honest about where a lot of that motivation has come from. You see, I have struggled with guilt about something I have not done. Something I could not do.

Tomorrow would have been my due date. This, this next bit is what I've wanted to and struggled to scream about for the last few months. How angry I was at everyone who said they were proud of their degree, because I did my final essays in the worst pain of my life. How much I wanted to scream at people who acted like life was black and white, when I had been taught so harshly that it wasn't. How shocked I was when a friend's off the cuff joke about kids got caught in my throat. 

I could fill this space with a million words on how much I have grieved over this. If you have ever lost anyone at all, I have infinite respect and love for you. For surviving. Saying goodbye to this person, this poppyseed, was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I have no idea how you handle it when it's more than the few cells I lost.

My great-grandma Jessie was adopted, and had views so far ahead of her time. My dad's mum had to give a baby away in her teens. I can never be sure, but I feel like they would agree with the choice I made. The timing was just wrong. And timing is everything. 

x

Ps. Writing this has been incredibly cathartic. I have used this evening as my time to be sad. I am hopeful and pretty certain now that tomorrow I will be okay. So please don't feel the need to message/check in out of necessity, your good thoughts are enough, and I have lots of lovely people around me who have helped me through this.