About a week after John died I started having problems with time. Serious problems. Problems of such magnitude that I began to question the conventional perception of its passing – namely, a steady unfolding of events along a ruler’s edge. Time, or my appreciation of it, fragmented. It seemed to come apart in my hands. There would suddenly be bits missing. It lost its linearity. So that not only would I fail to remember how I got back from the shops that morning, but rather worryingly the memory of my getting home would feel as if it had occurred prior to my going out.
It was a sort of temporal dislocation. Which is a terribly clinical way of describing it, and much too neat and tidy. Because the reality is utterly terrifying in its abstraction. As if one’s grip on life has slipped – keeps constantly slipping. As if all the things which are meant to be solid – the very ground on which you walk – are suddenly untrustworthy, and prone to collapse.
What I’ve endured these last few days is actually quite different. Rather than a sense of fracture or slippage, time has simply stopped. It’s not that the clock is malfunctioning. It’s that the bloody thing’s broke. Moments fail to unfold. And all I’m left with is a dreadful stasis, with just me in it. Nothing but me and my terrifying thoughts.
*
I suddenly feel dreadfully vulnerable. Exposed to everything, particularly John’s death, which has somehow hit me again these last few days like a juggernaut. Which is rather curious, because what have the last three or four miserable months consisted of, if not the reality of my husband’s death making itself known to me in a million different ways?
All I know is that it’s a different appreciation. As if I’d managed to run away up here, and perhaps even briefly escape it. Or at the very least put some distance between me and all the pain. Then one morning I looked out of the window to find a removal van pulling up. Packed to the roof with all my emotional baggage and general fucked-upness. And a minute later some bloke is standing on the doorstep, saying, ‘Where would you like us to put it, love?’
*
The old food-to-booze ratio has gone a little pear-shaped. The balance keeps tipping towards the gin. Which would be all very well if it wasn’t for the mornings after. Or, rather, the middles of the night, when I suddenly wake, with a small piece of coal burning in the pit of my stomach and another burning in my soul.
I’m slowly pickling myself. I’m going to be a biological phenomenon. Perfectly preserved, in all my widow’s glory. They’re going to put me in a big glass jar in some dusty museum. The accompanying notice will say, ‘Due to all the booze sloshing around in her system this woman managed to live to be 250 years old. Unfortunately, the last couple of hundred were a complete and utter blur.’