Read Online The Day We Met by Rowan Coleman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rowan Coleman
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cried. I had to tell Greg: there was no hiding anymore. The next day I went to see my GP, and the testing began—test after test, all aiming to try to tell with as much certainty as possible what I already knew.
And now I live with Mum again, and increasingly my husband feels like a man I barely know; and even though Esther’s name hasn’t slipped out of my tightly clenched grip ever since, other things do, every day. I open my eyes each morning and tell myself who I am, who my children are, and what is wrong with me. And I live with my mum again, even though no one ever asked me if that was what I wanted.
And there’s something else, something important I have to say to Caitlin before she goes back to uni. But whatever it is, it’s standing just out of reach behind the fog.
“Do you want to set the table?” Mum asks me, holding a bouquet of shiny metal in her fist. She is eyeing me skeptically, as though I might somehow do her in with a blunt butter knife. What she is wondering is: am I capable of remembering which implement is which, and what it is for? And what really pisses me off is that I am wondering the same thing. At this exact second, I know precisely everything I need to know about setting the table, and I will do right up until the moment she hands me the objects that require placing in a particular order. And then…will the fog roll in, and will that piece of informationbe gone? Not knowing what I don’t know stops me from wanting to do anything. Everything I attempt is fraught with the possibility of failure. And yet I am still
me
, at the moment. My mind is still me. When will the day come that I am not me anymore?
“No,” I say, like a sullen teenager. I am decorating my memory book. I keep finding little things, little items that aren’t quite whole memories, that wouldn’t fill a page or even a line in the book, but which make up parts of a life, my life, like pieces of a mosaic. And so I decided to cover the book with the things I find. I tape on a fifty-cent piece, a remnant from my trip to New York, next to a ticket to a Queen concert that I ran away from home to watch when I was only twelve. I’m trying to think of a way to attach a hedgehog charm that my dad gave me for my birthday before he became sick; I’m wondering if I can somehow sew it onto the thick cover of the book. It’s small work, in a small world, in a place I know, and it absorbs and comforts me in the way that Diane the counselor said it would. But that’s not why I don’t set the table: I don’t set the table because I don’t want to not remember how to set the table.
“Did you show Caitlin the letter?” Mum takes a seat opposite me, reaching across the table to lay out the objects that make a frame for a plate to sit within. “Did you talk to her?”
For several long moments, I turn the small silver hedgehog over and over in the palm of my hand, rubbing it with the tip of my finger. I remember how delighted I was with it, how even when it was attached to my bracelet I played with it, making it walk over the carpet and hibernate under cushions. I lost it once for a full day, and didn’t stop crying until Mum had found it secreted at the bottom of a box of tissues: I’d forgotten where I’d put it to bed. I can remember all of that in perfect, crystal-clear detail.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, embarrassed, ashamed. “I think I said something. I’m not sure what I’ve said.”
“She’s upset,” Mum tells me. “When she came in, she’d been crying. Her face was red; her eyes were swollen. You should show her the letter.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I have always hated it when my mother has decided it’s time to force the issue, to box me into a corner and make me act. But now, instead of feeling like I’ve got my back against the wall, it’s as though I am lost in a maze, and I’m not sure of the way out. “There’s a lot she isn’t saying, and I don’t know if I can, if I should,
And now I live with Mum again, and increasingly my husband feels like a man I barely know; and even though Esther’s name hasn’t slipped out of my tightly clenched grip ever since, other things do, every day. I open my eyes each morning and tell myself who I am, who my children are, and what is wrong with me. And I live with my mum again, even though no one ever asked me if that was what I wanted.
And there’s something else, something important I have to say to Caitlin before she goes back to uni. But whatever it is, it’s standing just out of reach behind the fog.
“Do you want to set the table?” Mum asks me, holding a bouquet of shiny metal in her fist. She is eyeing me skeptically, as though I might somehow do her in with a blunt butter knife. What she is wondering is: am I capable of remembering which implement is which, and what it is for? And what really pisses me off is that I am wondering the same thing. At this exact second, I know precisely everything I need to know about setting the table, and I will do right up until the moment she hands me the objects that require placing in a particular order. And then…will the fog roll in, and will that piece of informationbe gone? Not knowing what I don’t know stops me from wanting to do anything. Everything I attempt is fraught with the possibility of failure. And yet I am still
me
, at the moment. My mind is still me. When will the day come that I am not me anymore?
“No,” I say, like a sullen teenager. I am decorating my memory book. I keep finding little things, little items that aren’t quite whole memories, that wouldn’t fill a page or even a line in the book, but which make up parts of a life, my life, like pieces of a mosaic. And so I decided to cover the book with the things I find. I tape on a fifty-cent piece, a remnant from my trip to New York, next to a ticket to a Queen concert that I ran away from home to watch when I was only twelve. I’m trying to think of a way to attach a hedgehog charm that my dad gave me for my birthday before he became sick; I’m wondering if I can somehow sew it onto the thick cover of the book. It’s small work, in a small world, in a place I know, and it absorbs and comforts me in the way that Diane the counselor said it would. But that’s not why I don’t set the table: I don’t set the table because I don’t want to not remember how to set the table.
“Did you show Caitlin the letter?” Mum takes a seat opposite me, reaching across the table to lay out the objects that make a frame for a plate to sit within. “Did you talk to her?”
For several long moments, I turn the small silver hedgehog over and over in the palm of my hand, rubbing it with the tip of my finger. I remember how delighted I was with it, how even when it was attached to my bracelet I played with it, making it walk over the carpet and hibernate under cushions. I lost it once for a full day, and didn’t stop crying until Mum had found it secreted at the bottom of a box of tissues: I’d forgotten where I’d put it to bed. I can remember all of that in perfect, crystal-clear detail.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, embarrassed, ashamed. “I think I said something. I’m not sure what I’ve said.”
“She’s upset,” Mum tells me. “When she came in, she’d been crying. Her face was red; her eyes were swollen. You should show her the letter.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I have always hated it when my mother has decided it’s time to force the issue, to box me into a corner and make me act. But now, instead of feeling like I’ve got my back against the wall, it’s as though I am lost in a maze, and I’m not sure of the way out. “There’s a lot she isn’t saying, and I don’t know if I can, if I should,
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