silence.

i keep thinking that she will invite me round for one of her beautiful meals before all this happened, before she died. come round, she'd say, i am gonna make a glorious meal, a red wine sauce or lime chicken or her sublime egg on toast.bring the children. one of the last things she made me were crispy salmon fish cakes.

she will chat and talk of new things. she will bubble with excitement of living, we will laugh and gossip in the way you do when there is no threatening cloud of anything but what you'd just expect. the usual.

i look after her boy and i still think i will see her to make sure i am doing it OK, doing the right thing. being the right way. but she is all quiet now and won't tell me anything.

it is weird the way her absence hits you even though you buried her and even saw her to the end as she left this mortal coil. even then it doesn't hit home where she has gone, why she went or if she even really did.

am i sure she is not still gazing out of the window in the hospital at the whispering trees or watching the ebb and flow of the trees above the roof tops from her sitting room window. how can i be sure she is gone?

it is her silence. her long silence.