Magical Thinking

saying goodbye is a strange and unpredictable affair

Last week the home button on my phone stopped working. Then it started switching on and off at random times. An unwarranted sense of panic set in. I kept insisting I was angry - it’s a moral outrage that things don’t last and can’t be fixed.

This morning it wouldn’t even switch on. I felt desperate. I decided to try a factory reset. It didn’t work and I couldn’t even restore the backup because of the home button issue.

A memory kept flashing - the four of us in a phone shop in Chester buying the phone, me holding baby Arlo with little Eli doodling around the shop. I’m not exactly certain of the timeline but I think it was before JJ became ill, before Mum’s dementia stole her soul away, the time before everything changed.

I began to cry.

Bart was confused. I couldn’t explain myself, I just kept repeating “but I don’t want a new phone, I got the phone when JJ was here,” but that’s not what I meant.

What I was trying to say is that, the phone, it has JJ in it. The magic of light and 0000011111s captured tiny bits of his soul, carried them through the lens and stored them inside. Even though I have the photos on drives and on the cloud, the phone is where his soul is.

It has stored bits of Mum, laughing, before she forgot who I was.

Through all those nights when JJ was ill in hospital, Susie and I would exchange messages at all hours, the phone screen a glimmer of light in that darkest of dark times. It held us connected, that little rectangle, together even though we were far apart.

It has become a precious treasure, more than just a communication device, a place where memories and spirit and love are stored.

I surrendered to the sadness of this realisation, and with it the disorientating and impossible recognition that nothing will ever go back to how it was. And, after a while, as is always the case, the great swelling tide of grief calmed.

I picked up my phone to inspect it with a new sense of perspective and at that moment it let me in.

It’s still not working properly. At some point I will have to say goodbye, but not just yet.

Mist by Simon Armitage

Who does it mourn?

What does it mean?

such nearness,

gathering here

on high ground

while your back was turned,

drawing its net curtains around?

Featureless silver screen, mist

is water

in its ghost state

all inwardness,

holding its milky brath,

veiling the pulsing machines

of great cities

under your feet

walling you

into these moments

into this anti-garden

of gritstone and peat.

Given time

the edge of your being

will seep

into its fibreless fur

you are lost, adrift

in hung water and blurred air,

but you are here.