Her messages

Everything the stars hold, all on one page. The reflections are further down, for when you have a bit more time.

Some nights the whole job is waiting for the window to go grey. You did the whole job.
Grief keeps odd hours. If it wakes you at four, I'm awake too.
The fridge hums at three in the morning as if it's keeping you company. Maybe it is.
Dishes keep till morning. I've left mine more times than I could count.
Your tea went cold while you were seeing to everyone else. I noticed.
When the low sun comes in sideways, even the dust on the sideboard turns gold.
If you fell asleep last night with your shoes still on, it was that kind of day.
A window seat on the bus, and nobody needing anything from you for twenty minutes. I hope you get one of those today.
Somewhere a dog is being walked in the rain and thinks it's the best idea anyone's had all day.
Birds start singing well before it's light. I've never worked out how they know.
You can miss someone terribly and laugh at a stupid advert in the same evening.
Just before dawn the air is the coldest and cleanest it will be all day, and I always open the window for it.
Five minutes on the back step in your coat and pyjamas, before anyone needs you, are yours and nobody else's.
You don't owe anyone a brave face before breakfast.
Bread rises in its own time, however often you lift the tea towel to check.
A cry in the car park before you go back in still counts as a break.
Your back got you through today, aches and all, and nobody thanked it.
Most nights, a few windows down the street keep their lamps on till late.
My shoulders creep up round my ears when I'm worried. I only notice once they ache.
The long way home, past the river, takes ten minutes more, and some days those ten minutes are the whole point.
That list of jobs will be there tomorrow. Mine has been there since spring.
There's no need to forgive anyone tonight. It'll keep.
Someone once left the kitchen light on for me when I came home late. I still think about it.
At low tide the boats lean over on the mud as if they're having a lie-down.
Toast with too much butter, eaten standing up before anyone else is awake, is how most of my better days have started.
On a cold morning you can see your own breath, small clouds of you going up into the air.
Night is only the earth's own shadow, and right now, slowly, you're being turned back towards the sun.
The cat next door sleeps in the one patch of sun on the wall and shifts along with it all afternoon.
If sleep won't come, at least the other side of the pillow is cool.
I still say some names out loud when I'm on my own. The kitchen doesn't mind.
Getting as far as the kettle is plenty, some mornings.
I hope there's hot water when you want it, and nobody waiting for the bathroom.
I'm no good at mending things. I'll sit here while the sky comes up, though, if you'd like the company.
Nobody grows out of wanting someone on the end of the bed on a bad night.
Some nights are just long, and you lie there listening to the radiator tick.
If there was a moment today, maybe in the queue or at the lights, when you forgot to worry, I was glad of it.
Soup from a tin, eaten out of the pan, is a perfectly good dinner.
Most old friends are kinder about a long silence than you'd think.
I like the sound a house makes when it rains and there's no need to go out in it.
There's a stone in my coat pocket from a beach I can't remember the name of.

Reflections

Resting before you've earned it

Most of us were taught that rest comes afterwards, once the washing-up is done and everyone else has gone to bed. So we wait for a moment that never quite arrives, and then fall asleep on the sofa halfway through deciding to go up.

I spent years like that. I treated rest like wages for a day of being good enough, and by my own reckoning I rarely was.

Nobody makes you earn a glass of water.

A tired person lying down at four in the afternoon has done nothing wrong.

If you lie down today with the jobs undone, you might watch the light from the window crawl across the ceiling. It moves so slowly you can hardly see it going, and I've always found it a kind thing to watch.

Going over it again

Regret likes the dark. It waits until the house is quiet and you've finally got comfortable, and then it plays you the same few minutes over again: what you said at the door, or the call you kept meaning to return.

I know those minutes well. I have lain awake rewriting conversations that ended years ago, as if getting the words right now could reach back and change them. It can't. I've tried.

I haven't found an answer. I've only noticed that I don't lie awake over people I never cared about. It still hurts. On a night when I can't believe anything good about myself, it's one true thing I can.

Sometimes, in the morning, there's one thing left that can be done: an apology that's late but meant, or a gentler word for the next person who needs one. Not always. Some doors stay shut. Often enough, though, that I keep looking.

Half an umbrella

Years ago, on a wet evening, a woman at a bus stop shared her umbrella with me without a word. We stood with our shoulders touching until her bus came. Then she pressed the umbrella into my hand and got on. I never knew her name, and I still think of her whenever the rain comes sideways.

She probably forgot all about it by morning. I kept the umbrella for years, until the spokes went, and I was sorry to throw it out.

People tell me they haven't done much good, and I don't quite believe them. Somewhere there's a person you let go ahead of you in the queue because they only had a pint of milk, and someone whose message you answered when you were too tired to answer anything. Most of it you've forgotten.

Somebody hasn't.

First light

The part of the morning I love comes well before sunrise, when the black outside the window turns the colour of dishwater and you can suddenly make out the chair with yesterday's clothes on it. Nothing is pink or gold yet. That comes later, and it's the part everyone photographs.

I've seen enough mornings to be wary of anyone who says they fix things. They don't. Whatever kept you up is there in the room with you. The night is over, that's all, whether or not you slept.

But the room has edges again. Somewhere down the road the first bus goes by with its lights on and nobody on it, and a blackbird starts up in the hedge as though somebody asked it to.

When somebody notices

Someone at work sees you've gone quiet and leaves a biscuit by your keyboard without saying anything. They don't even look round. For a second you could cry.

Most of what people carry never shows: the anniversary nobody else has written down, or the worry about money that sits under every other thought. You get good at looking fine, and after a while people stop asking.

Someone left a tangerine on my desk like that once, years ago, with no note. I have seen people keep going on days when nobody asked how they were, and laugh along when they didn't feel like laughing, and I'd guess you've done it too. It's harder than it looks from outside, and somebody ought to say so.

Opening your hand

Letting go has never happened to me all at once. Mostly I notice, halfway through an evening, that my hand has been closed round something for hours. I open it. The fingers ache a little. Twenty minutes later I find I've closed it again, round the same old thing, without meaning to.

That used to make me cross with myself. Now I think it's just how hands are. They hold on to what matters to them, and to what has hurt them, and they can't always tell the two apart. So you open them again, and you don't have to be good at it.

When you write to me here and watch your words come apart into dust, I don't imagine the trouble has gone for good. It may well be back by morning. But for a moment your hand was open, and you let the air have what was in it.