Evening

Driving home through the early evening gloom this evening.

The grey light catches on two tall, skinny girls loping up the pavement.
Two heads of long, fair hair.
Bags slung with casual grace on slender hips.
All elbows and knees and friendship bands and lip gloss.
Head gently bent together, bodies turned slightly inwards.
Their trainers hit the pavement synchronously.
They move on, unaware, engrossed in each other.
Unaware of the woman driving past
In a car not a few metres from them.
A woman whose gaze is caught on them,
whose heart snags on the sight of them.
Who suddenly finds it hard to draw in air, to catch a breath.

The sight of those two heads leaning so conspiratorially together.
The casual intimacy of  those two inclined bodies, that leaning towards.
The secrets, the memories that I imagine thicken the air between them.
Those two girls, probably not even sisters, maybe not even friends.
Those two girls who seemed so close, who appeared so familiar.
Walking home in the early evening of a cold, grey March day.

They'll never be my girls.
My daughters will never walk together.

Who knows, perhaps they would never have walked that way together anyhow.
Perhaps they would have been distant, have fallen out with each other, have been on a 'no speaks' since the age of three, been embarrassed by each other.

Perhaps it is because my own sister has been visiting, making me sentimental about sisters.
Perhaps because Jessica has been ill and sits in lonely state on the sofa, watching cartoons with glazed red eyes, wrapped in a Waybu.loo blanket with her arm around her teddy bear.
I still see a shadow next to her, her equal in misery.
I still hear two coughs where, in reality, there is only one.

But I like to think of Jessica and Georgina as those two leaning girls.

But I'll never know.
They'll never know.
Never.

Never.

It is a very long time.
Longer than I realised.
An expanse that unfolds and unfolds continually.
Without her.