Daisy Sparrow

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Dear [[Redacted]] (you know who you are)

Like most peoples', my bed has 4 drawers in it.

My bed is also in the corner of the room. Well, almost. There's some pipes boxed in right in the corner so there's a narrow gangway, maybe 12 inches wide, that runs from the foot of the bed about 3/4 of the way up towards the head.

Semi-obviously, the bedside table is therefore on the other side. It blocks the first drawer. It's easy enough to get into it if I really need to, but in here I keep spare curtains, and other things I could go a whole year without needing.

Down from that, in the most accessible drawer in the bed, there's the spare bedding (sheets, pillowcases, etc). All neatly inside one of the pillowcases for each set, apart from the new ones I haven't taken out of the packets yet.

Round the corner, at the foot of the bed on the side that faces the narrow gangway, I keep all the spare blankets. Because they wouldn't fit in the same drawer as all the rest of the bedding. An extra duvet, a spare flat sheet, several knitted things and a large purple throw. In the summers, where I live, a single flat sheet can be too much; in the winters, two duvets, a knitted blanket and going to bed in all your clothes with your hood up to keep your ears warm, is still not enough. Honestly, I tend to just leave this drawer open (half-open) all of the time, so if I need to grab an extra layer, or kick one off, I can just do it.

In the space on the floor next to that, in that gap where I shove the extra pillow that I need for sitting up reading but not for sleeping, there's an extension cord that houses the plugs for my lamp and the chargers for both my phone and my kindle. And sitting on the floor next to that -- most of the time -- is the teddy bear you bought me.

Guarding the vault.

Because in that final drawer, the one that I couldn't access without moving the bed, which in reality would mean emptying the entire bedroom -- the drawer directly under where I usually sleep -- lies my dirty little secret. Every momento I have of you. (Obviously, not including the teddy bear.)

At the other side of the house, in the cupboard in the spare bedroom (the side with a door that bolts shut, right at the back, behind plenty of other things) hangs a wedding dress that I can't bear to part with yet. That I can't bear to look at to get around to deciding how to dispose of it. A dress I've tried on but never worn for it's primary purpose.

The dress I would have worn to marry you.

And in the same vein, I also can't bring myself to look into the vault. It's been years. And not enough of them.

Because as you may have guessed by now, my dirty little secret is that, after all this time, I'm still not over you. Still in love with you. However you want to say it. Personality wise, you're everything that I both did and didn't know that I needed, and on a good day, I only end up thinking about you once or twice, my darling.

But I made one of the classic mistakes, I suppose. Character is not the same as personality, and on that front, I think I fell in love with your potential, and not with actual you. Either that, or I projected a whole lot of my own "when I find a guy I love, he will be like this___" nonsense onto you that was never yours, to the extent that it clouded my vision, and I only saw what I wanted to see.

Or both, probably.

So, am I still in love with you? Or am I still in love with the idea of you?

And, honestly... how do I tell the difference??

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If you could answer me that, I think maybe then I could open the vault... 

I've never been particularly impressed by architecture.

Buildings should be functional. Clever features are clever features and of course they have their place, but to me, fancy stonework and so forth is largely a waste of time and effort.

One earthquake and either way, you're still looking at a pile of bricks.

But that's a house.

Even in a pile of bricks, you can have a home.

Even people who make significant contributions to a society, ones who get a building future pile of stones named after them, will all be forgotten after a while.

It's a hard fact, but the truth is that all of us will only ever be important to a few people. Even in our own families, our memories will likely be gone within three or four generations. Which is fine. If we have loved well in the time that we have, then we have lived well. A full home, even amongst a pile of bricks, is happy.

Hard not to have it, though.

Friends are great, we can feel satisfied with them for up to a few hours at a time. Religious/Spiritual practices can bring peace and joy amongst the darkest of times. But it still hurts to pull the duvet over our heads at night without a shoulder to rest that head on. It's still a fight to contain the jealousy when our (married, younger) sisters are heavily pregnant and getting full time care of their step-kids. Or to remember that it's not actually our baby to invest all of our hopes in. To not throw all of our neediness at someone on a first date, because we know from bitter experience that loneliness + loneliness =/= happiness, if there's nothing else to go with it, even when the loneliness is oh so very strong!

And it's hard. We try not to let it, but it drains us. We lose relationships when someone's life takes a turn into these family adventures and we're no longer in a similar stage of life. Or when we try to ask them to fill roles in our lives that overstep the boundaries that would otherwise be in place. Not completely, necessarily, but it's still not going through the journey of live together. We don't have other relationships building us up that they do. We try to stop it, but we become filled with misery. And then no one wants to see us anymore anyway. And the misery is weird, because it's like acid, so it dissolves and empties us. Nothing left. No heart, hardly, and not much personality either. No future without any hope, no legacy.

We're just an empty shell.

A stone house.

One earthquake away from crumbling.