Bin Day

I missed the bins today.

Remembered it while showering

Rushed out to drag them outside.

All other bins already

lined up facing one direction.

A clue that they have been done

Perhaps

But i

Put the bins out anyway.

In case.

This is hope

In the aftermath

Or is it just

Chancing it

—

In case.

What is the difference?

The days are like yesterday:

He is not here.

So it’s all rubbish day

Everyday.

in my shoes :

The lowercase “i” is not a mistake.
It is the uncertainty of identity just over one hundred days after my husband’s sudden death. When the person who reflected your full self back to you is gone, you forget how to be a capital letter in your own life.

The breaks in sentences mirror the breaks in everything else. Grammar itself becomes grief – the way thoughts fragment mid-air, the way meaning hangs suspended between what was and what is now.

These pauses are not hesitation.
They are the space where i learn to breathe differently, where i practice putting one word after another when the natural rhythm of language – like the natural rhythm of everything – has been shattered.

This is what the aftermath looks like on the page: incomplete sentences for an incomplete life, small letters for a self made smaller by loss, hope hanging on single words like “Perhaps” and “In case” because certainty died with him.

Even the structure refuses to behave. Lines break where they shouldn’t, thoughts trail off, connections just scatter … this is how i live now – in fragments, in the spaces between what i used to know and what i’m still learning to survive.

But today, in this snapshot, i fancy i have the means of resilience to survive this aftermath. It isn’t permanent – it is in flux. Always in flux. Though perhaps in time the flux is less pronounced, and maybe in longer timeframes, more levelled out. i don’t know for sure. But i can, at this point in time, surmise that is so. It is always a deepest abyss to traverse, before i can get to a more even terrain.

This recognition does matter – not *quite* as false hope, but as evidenced from my own (sigh – and for want of a better word:) endurance.

For those walking through their own aftermath: the weather changes. The fragments sometimes align. The small “i” learns, moment by moment, that she has means of resilience she didn’t know she carried.

It is deeply taxing, this country of new land, this aftermath. i am an immigrant in my own life, having to learn the language, the customs, the basic survival skills of a place i never chose to visit. Everything familiar has different rules now. The simplest tasks require new maps, new instincts. i’m constantly translating between the world i knew (where he was my natural GPS) and this foreign territory where i have to navigate alone.

i am so tired. But in this, today, there is hope. A small kernel, a small dot, an iota. But it is recognisable as a form of hope. Even exhausted, even learning this new geography one bin collection at a time – that tiny recognition matters.

It is enough for now.

nusye