ONE MONTH

It's been a month now since it happened and, to be honest, sometimes it doesn't look as if the words to explain with it are likely to be coming back to me any time soon.

Well, not the right words at any rate.

Sometimes I wake up wondering whether the words are ever going to flow properly again at all, but then, on other mornings, as you might have noticed, they sort of do.

The trite, flippant ones anyway.

They are slowly seeping out again...

But the harder, more difficult, more personal, more emotional ones, well they seem to remain locked inside the vault and unable to escape.

Because they're not allowed to.

Not yet.

Not just yet...

One month.

It's still only been one month.

One month ago today, in fact...

In some ways it's flown by and in others it's been like wading through treacle.

A month which seems like no time at all, but which also seems like it's lasted forever...

A month which has changed everything and yet, somehow those very changes haven't really begun to really sink in as yet. Somehow the difference remains an abstract concept which, despite all that we went through in those thirty-odd days (in many ways, so very odd...) since, still refuses to become real in any proper sense of the word.

The more life changes, of course, the more it stays the same.

And yet...

And yet.

I'm still not convinced that I've actually really come to terms with what happened on that fateful Monday afternoon in mid-October when I watched as she slipped away forever. Somehow it still doesn't seem to be real, and sometimes, just sometimes, I still expect that phone to ring and an exasperating message to be left, a message which I would deal with in my own inimitable, impatient and irritated way.

I should have listened more, I should have tried harder to understand...

I should have, but I didn't, and now I can't...

I'm not sure that I've yet given myself a proper opportunity to, for want of a better word, grieve...

Is there a better word for it...? Personally, I feel as if there really ought to be a far worse word for it, given that it feels so wretched and, despite words which might have suggested otherwise from time-to-time, rips out your very heart and soul.

And yet, I don't suppose I ever properly did for my dad, either. The busy hustle and bustle of life, the dashing off back to my other life always seemed to stop me from stopping and thinking, and, after a while you kind of get used to not thinking about things and then the difference just seems to be part of the ordinary, and time goes by, and life goes on and, somewhere, something important, someone important kind of gets forgotten.

Except they don't, do they...?

Not really.

Occasionally thoughts leap to mind and just strike me and stop me dead in my tracks. Certain moments which, in themselves, don't amount to much but when taken in context are just Earth-shattering.

Well, they are to me at least.

The rest of the world remains, as it always does, ambivalent and unnoticing.

I ought to be feeling "better" by now I keep telling myself. Surely tradition puts a time limit on the amount of time you're allowed to indulge yourself like this. You're supposed to "pull yourself together", "snap out of it", "move on", and "get on with things..."

But I don't think a month is quite enough.

Maybe just a couple of weeks more...?

Or months...?

Or years...?

Or decades...?