365 Days

A year ago this week, life as I knew it changed. It happened in stages, moments, over a span of days and three hundred and sixty five days later I'm still trying to make sense of it all. It's been a long year, and I'm a rubbish poet, but I didn't know how else to express what I've been feeling and thinking the past few days. 

365 Days

Marie Monday was normal, a side by side,
elbows touching kind of normal, nothing 
extraordinary back then;
But incredibly rare these days.
We watched clips of Carrie, no face masks,
just the human shield I made out of my fingers
over my eyes.
I glimpsed through the cracks the figure of a 
blood soaked girl, a grim premonition to end
the last normal lecture I'd ever have.
I'm going home, whilst I can, 
one of my course-mates told me after, and I
haven't seen her since. 

Crime on Tuesday was cancelled
Temporarily, the email said,
365 days later I am in another city,
and we are still online.
I stood with my supervisor in her office, less
than two metres away, back when we didn't 
know that pretty soon two metres would 
feel like two miles. 
If campus was a beehive, the buzzing had now
faded to a low hum, my tutor lounged against
his office door, crunching an apple like it
wasn't the end of the world. 

Time ran unchecked, in a whistling kettle and 
panopto powerpoints, yet
Fridays remained my favourite day.
You okay?
Chat later?
It's funny now, I think, how phone calls were
what kept me together.
Between the crackle and hiss of static
there are hundreds of minutes of 
laughter. 
If I could, I would draw them out the ether,
threads of happy moments I could coil neatly,
just to know they're there, hit replay on those
little pockets and live in them again.

On Easter Sunday I skyped my grandma,
I love you.
I miss you. 
Stay safe, I'll see you
soon.
120 hours later, soon became
a lifetime sentence that I still do not know how
to serve. 
I talk about you so much that people, they
mistake my tongue for your tombstone and try
to plant daisies in my throat,
as if my grief could grow into something
beautiful without you there to witness it. 

You can't drop out now
became a mantra that my friends repeated
whilst I hid,
huddling underneath my duvet, trying, crying,
into the foil wrapper of an Easter egg
because it was all I had left of her.
When I went home, it was to arguing aunts and
an empty bungalow;
hugs that hurt, and memories that were sharp
to touch.
After her funeral, I submitted an essay about
being buried alive,
I was an expert at that back then.

One hour a day outside, a blanket fort to hide
in, a holiday to Tenerife became a paddling
pool on our driveway.
I dangled wishes on a wishing tree, built on
desperate times, desperate love, desperate
hope.
I filled my student kitchen with cheesecake,
brownies, truffles, cake; a delicious coping
mechanism I still use now.
10 weeks in and I dyed my hair, looking for
something, for someone, who was no longer
there.

14 weeks later I hugged my best friend, armed
with fresh brownies and episodes of Staged.
Kevin got blocked in, and so was I, wrapped in
layers of love; a head on my thigh.
We've made it, I thought naively, forgetting
that separation is inevitable when you will no
longer live in the same city.
It's been 246 days since I saw her last, and 
I still cannot figure out the best way to post
cake, how to contain a hug in an envelope,
how to make the miles seem less. 

It's lockdown 2 now, or is it 3? I'm in a new city,
I've barely seen.
But I went to Roath lake, got mobbed by
swans, saw the sunrise kiss the water and time 
move on.
It's been a year, I should be back to normal, I 
think, but recovery is not linear and even now,
even here, I am hesitant to hope.
No longer afraid of social distance, but scared
to come close. 
Afraid that if I did not write these words down,
they would grow like weeds in the crevices of
my brain,
wrap crawling vines around the walls of my 
vocal chords and choke everything I say.
It's been a long year, but really, 365 days feels
like yesterday.