Down the Rabbit Hole

I have a giant Cadbury's dairy milk Easter egg sitting on the floor of my bedroom, in front of my washing basket, nestled in between the side of my desk and a large stack of library books. Despite the fact that my friends and family know I love Easter chocolate quite a lot more than ordinary chocolate (chocolate shaped like an egg just tastes better to me) I haven't eaten this one. In fact, it goes out of date in 21 days. And since I have lived in gym leggings (despite not going to the gym in two years) and frequently raided both my stash of biscuits as well as my emergency chocolate drawer since Lockdown started, I should have eaten this Easter egg by now. There's a reason why I haven't eaten this Easter egg yet, why I've been putting it off for the past three weeks it's been sat in my room. That Easter egg is the last physical present that my late grandma gave me.  And it doesn't matter that she had died before I could travel home for her to giv...

My world changed on Friday 16th April 2020. My phone rang at 8.34am, and I thought it was my mum calling to make sure I was awake and up (I was still in bed) and editing my dissertation. I teased that I'd beaten her to it. Instead of laughing, she told me news that changed my world forever. My loving, wonderful, amazing grandma had died. Writing that sentence is difficult, because seeing the words there in black and white makes it real. And even a month later, I still don't want it to be real. How can someone be there one moment and then gone the next? So quickly, so quietly, without a goodbye?  I had seen and spoken with her on Skype five days before, on Easter Sunday. And suddenly she was gone.  I hardly left my room in the days that followed. I cried a lot, stared blankly into space as my brain repeated over and over that she was gone . I slept a lot, lived in my pjs, didn't eat.  I still had my dissertation to finish, as well as 4 more university assignments. I didn...