Songs For Your Mother

mid-track, and sit there and wait for a door to open, or a cupboard to close, for music to play; for anything at all. Most of all I find myself waiting for a voice (‘Hey where did you leave the remote?’). Only there’s nothing but absence. There is no voice, other than my own, and it is a constant reminder that Will is gone, and it is my fault.
Slowly the days start to pass and then the weeks too. I graduate from crutches to a single crutch. I get stronger every day, and I’m okay, at least this is what I tell other people. It’s a lie though, as inside I am dead, and while my bones might have healed everything about me feels broken. I no longer feel like myself. I feel like I’m impersonating the person I used to be, and that I am a poor approximation.
I manage to get out of bed every day, and my days rotate through a series of slow arcs of Netflix and PlayStation, books and takeaway with a little work creeping back in. I only really start to feel okay as I force myself out of the flat to the nearby park. I still have that thing from when I was a kid and would go to the park with my grandmother. ‘The ducks and us,’ she would say, ‘it’s all you need.’ It’s only me now, but I still need the ducks.
With every day that passes, I’m waiting to be taken by the desperate desire to seize the day and shake off the shroud that I wear and live like there’s no tomorrow. You hear it all the time: people who have near death experiences having epiphanies and throwing themselves at everything and anything. There was a guy at school called Stevie who was one of our extended group of friends. He was a cool guy and you knew he would do something interesting. He looked like Heath Ledger with curly blond hair, and he got a motorbike at seventeen. He then promptly got wiped out in a hit-and-run crash. He almost died, and it was touch and go in the hospital. He made it. A year on crutches and then that was it for him. He declared his life until that point had been meaningless. He quit his plans for university and his chosen medical career and, after school, he got on that plane. He was going to see everything and do as much as possible. We thought he’d be back after a year like every other gap-year kid. Only he never came back. Last I heard he was living almost entirely off the grid in a beach hut on some Indonesian island with a girl he met at the Tip of Borneo where the oceans meet.
But I am taken by no such desire. Something does happen though, and it is in its own small way an unexpected development.
That time I played guitar in the bar in Santa Cruz was the first time I’d done so in a long time. Since being home, I’ve been looking at my guitar sitting on its stand tucked in the corner of the room, and then I picked it up. I immediately felt closer to Lauren, and found something of myself that I had lost.
At first, I strummed a few chords, and put it back down again. From there, I tried a few songs, and then I tried something else. I bought an A4 pad, as I realised I wanted to try and put a few words down, and this felt like the best way I could do that. I feel I should write a long love letter, and explain why I never made it back, and maybe I will do that.
Right now, however, my guitar keeps gently calling. So, a page at a time, I start to write, and on the cover of the pad, I scrawl ‘Songs for Lauren’, as that’s what they are. I can’t stop thinking about her, and I can’t believe that I let her go. It seems an almost incomprehensible thing to have done. At the same time, I also know that I am not the same person I was when I met Lauren. I feel diminished in so many ways, and for ages, I haven’t known what to do about that. However, this is something I can do.
Throughout my return to the flat, TSP has been amazing, dropping around, bringing me food. I know it’s because she wants to talk as well, and that’s been okay. We mostly talk about the old times, we remember the days and the nights, and we share our experiences. I think talking like that helps us both lift the darkness that hangs over us.
Eventually, I work up the courage to ask TSP to go with me to see where Will is buried. She takes a day off work, and we drive out of London on a bright November morning, taking the road to Cambridge and into the Hertfordshire countryside, where everything is green and flat in comparison with the grey urban Lego-sprawl of a city that we leave behind. We drive north for more than an hour to a village full of rickety-looking Tudor buildings and large Victorian houses. There’s an old village church with a steeple, bordered by a low, moss-covered stone wall. We park nearby and enter via a wooden gate and take the pathway that criss-crosses picturesque and neat gardens dotted with trees and flowerbeds, quiet in their autumn slumber.
Then there he is. Or, at least, there he lies. Looking down at Will’s gravestone, at the flowers and the dirt, I am not sure what to say. I should be able to communicate something of value and I don’t know what that is. So, I say the two things that rattle around my head most when I think of Will. I tell him I’m sorry and that I miss him.
TSP is very still. I lean on my crutch,