Spooky Sunday

Today has been an altogether strange one. Full moon energy always has me shook. Late to sleep, awoken with a still raging Storm Ciara.

My mum brings boxes of my memories from the loft to sort. I look at the familiar bundle of things I keep for memories sake only without touching anything.

I had a mega productive day, writing, drawing, creating. Ticked a few things off the to-do list and feeling the weight of winter leave me.

I had promised to go along with my friend to a spiritualist church. She and another friend have recently lost people and she is looking for some closure with her mum.

As I sat in my skeptical manner I was aware that I doubted everything about this. But the medium was compelling, quick, full of insight that all seemed vague to me.

She turns to the ‘new’ girls in the room and says I don’t know which one of you this is for. She opens with a young person, and my heart sinks. I know it is for me.

With a few little I don’t knows she completely nailed it, things she couldn’t possible have known. And his name. Was I just communicating with him? What was this? What just happened?

On the drive home I am smiling, hopeful, I feel reassured by the experience. Sitting down to ponder I message friends to tell them of what happened.

I glance at the untouched boxes. My only photo of him is in there. The closest I have been to it in years. I absentmindedly look through the tickets and wristbands of many a night out and there it is.

Aged, battered and torn but that is him. One of the last pictures of him, if not the last. I didn’t think I needed closure. That year was tough, his life he took, ours were left to figure it out.

In that box are two diaries from high school. Horrendous things for me to behold. Full of longing and adolescent idiocy. I scan them, cringing and grinning.

I go to that date, nothing. I flick around the date, nothing. Not a word of his death, not a word of his funeral. And unusually months are blank pages. This year of so much left me unable to write.

I was 15 going on 16.

That year I took some of my first drugs, had a turbulent bad boy boyfriend, I lost my gran, wild nights, fights with friends, some of the craziest sex of my life. I lived like a fucking rockstar and I went to school.

I did fine in my exams. I ditched the shitty boyfriend and replaced him with another, yet to be shitty. I became house captain, learned to drive and moved out by 18.

I didn’t think I needed closure.