Helen

In five days and one month it will have been a year
of not having you here.
A calendar full of forgettable days
that have lolloped into a year.
Milestones I have been through alone.

Your skin and your smell and your voice
are still here in traces.
I am sent them in dream-places and flittering
trickles, spools of memories that
can never truly capture you.

A year is just too measly a
slice of time.
A flake, a little shudder.
Not nearly enough of a stretch to be
able to say goodbye or begin to forget
the thirty-two years that have stalled
to a near-pause since you vanished.

Grief feels like so much weight.
Like a plate metal costume; cold and
uncomfortable.
Some other strategy.
There is no longer a you and me. You're
free. You're there.
And me? I could scream at the
unfairness of it all. Fall on the floor
and - in despair - bewilder myself with the word mother.

I fear my fading memory, I'm scared I won't
remember your face if sleep beats the fight out of me.
Waking, I fear I'll see blankness instead
of your smile and that would be like discovering
you are dead a second time.

You wouldn't be far, were you breathing,
you wouldn't be far. But you are,
aren't you, Mum? You are.

Padlock these memories for me now and
tell me how I can keep them safe.