8

Its that time of year again. I feel it in my bones, physically in my bones as my right shoulder is stiffened to rust, and the vertebrae in my neck solid, fused. Sleep never comes and I devour book after book to bludgeon my thoughts, throwing anything at them. My body fidgets, my legs kick, the quality of light through the curtains becomes grainy, coarsening as it fades into the day. The birds start their usual nonsense, hedgerow hooligans defending their patch: "Come on then." they scream, "I'm still here."

And I am still here. Twelve years older than she ever was. Sagging now, swollen with wine and corseted with pain, legs brittle as bread-sticks. Its her death-day. Worse than the birthday and worse than the anniversary. The death-day is the one, stopping me where I stand, sinking me into the earth.  

I think back to the events of eight years ago: the text from the hospital, the second text in the taxi telling me I was too late. The room full of people who loved her, each of whom knew this day would come and who could never imagine the day arriving. A day with her gone. Right there in the room and so far gone, forever. 

I went for a drink with my brother, numbed, unable to process what had happened and unable, at first, to drink. I just wanted to walk. Just to walk and walk and get away and prove that I could move, prove that I had agency, that however powerless I was to affect anything in the universe, however insignificant and ineffectual, I could still put pressure on the ground, I could put distance between myself and the worst thing that had ever happened. The Lisburn Road took a rare kicking that day. It had it coming. 

Every year around this time, as the people of Belfast goad each other and set fire their communities and poison themselves with choking black smoke and drink and piss and intimidate the council and the police, I disappear. They are expulsives parading their madness through the streets like a medieval danse macabre. I stay in. I batten down the hatches, straitjacketed with physical discomfort, awake while the streets burn, filling my head full of any old thing just to kill the memories. The memories I would never kill.