Songs For Your Mother

not sure that people know what to get.
One person I can always rely on to deliver is my friend Susan. She doesn’t bring me grapes. She brings me flowers. Plastic flowers, orchids, because real ones are not allowed. She offers them to me and says, ‘I sometimes worry that women don’t buy enough flowers for men.’
It’s the sweetest thing, and I don’t think that anyone has ever bought me flowers before. She says she thinks they are my kind of flowers, very low maintenance. She knows me so well.
What can I say about Susan? Susan is one of my best friends. We met at post-graduate journalism school at London’s City University. We both love what we do. Susan is much better and more successful at it than me. She got a great job almost immediately after graduating and, right after that, she got another and then another. Susan is now assistant features editor for the glossy women’s magazine Mademoiselle. Other than watching movies, our main shared interest is dating. We talk about dating and offer each other dating advice. Neither of us, however, has been much good at it. That said, I don’t know anyone who is.
It is the end of the week before it finally happens. When I wake up, TSP is standing by the window not far from my bed and is caught in the streaming rays of sunlight that slice through the blinds. When I first notice her, I’m still half dozing, half dreaming of winding roads.
‘I thought you were never going to wake. It’s so good to see you back in the world of the living,’ TSP says. ‘Your mother called, she said you were awake, but maybe give you a few days.’
I nod appreciatively, thankful that my mother made the call that I would have prevaricated over and put off. I know I needed this week to re-emerge into the world, breaking out of the cocoon that has held me only to find I am far from ready to take flight.
‘I hear you’ve been a regular Florence Nightingale; I figured you toured the wards,’ I say.
TSP smiles and gives me a nod of faux thoughtfulness. Oh, yes, that’s me, she’s saying.
‘I’m bedside vigil girl; feel a fever coming on? Then dial 0800 #BesideVigilGirl. I’ll be there in a swift siren’s swirl. I must have taken the wrong turn at the career revolving doors. I shouldn’t be in law; I should be in the bedside business – you know, mopping brows and saving souls. I bet you spotted that in me at Bristol, didn’t you?’
TSP makes me smile despite myself. She always has, no matter what; but it’s more than that. She disarms me. TSP’s like a Trojan horse, a fifth columnist, who quietly slips in and takes my defences down. I’m a walkover when she’s around. I’m all about surrender, hands up and defences down. We’ve been friends for a long time, and we’ve always been comfortable around each other. Right now, I’m not sure that’s a good thing when I need to be strong. Anything less doesn’t feel like it would be worthy. As the one who survived, I think about this all the time. I worry I might say the wrong thing and act like I have something to hide even when I don’t, even when there isn’t anything to be held back.
‘Right away,’ I say.
‘How are you feeling?’ TSP asks.
It’s that question again. It’s the one that everyone is asking me. It’s the one that I don’t have an answer to, and I’m not sure what I should say. I pause as I consider my response. Maybe the pause stretches longer than it should, and I wonder if TSP notices this also. Maybe she is asking herself why I am taking so long and if I’m hiding something.
‘I feel a lot better than I should,’ I say and shake my head.
The words are barely out of my mouth and I find myself crying again. I cannot help it. It is the act of thinking about Will, it is almost all I have to do and the water flows down my face.
TSP smiles sympathetically and pulls up a chair.
‘It’s alright,’ she says.
I shake my head when she says this, as really, it’s not. I want to talk though. I want to get it out, and I want to tell TSP what happened. It’s like a debt I have to pay, and it is one I cannot weasel out of. Besides, one of us has to go first, and it should be me. It should be me who mentions Will. I don’t get a chance though as TSP beats me to it.
‘I don’t know what happened with Will,’ TSP says. ‘Other than what the police report said: that you were hit by a truck?’
When she says this, incredulous almost, when she mentions that one word, I am back on the road, and I know we are going to die. I don’t understand how I survived. It doesn’t seem possible, and yet here I am. That said, any second I’m expecting I will realise that I’m not here at all, and all of this will turn out to be some form of an afterlife. I know that doesn’t make any sense; none of this does.
‘I don’t know how I survived,’ I say.
‘What happened?’ TSP asks.
And I tell her the story, all of it, right up to the point on the road where we turned around and were heading back to Santa Cruz – and Lauren.
I lost Will, and I lost Lauren. I never made it back. She would never have known what happened, what the rest of my story was. She would have written me off as one of those guys who doesn’t follow through and I am crushed by this thought. I’ll be the anecdote that I tried not to be: Wailing Break-Up Guy. That isn’t me at all. A thought flashes on the edge of my consciousness, telling me ‘you could go back’.