Georgina

The day before your birthday, I woke up with a streaming cold.

It was raining.

I'd been trying to get a stain out of your sister's T-shirt but I must have left the stain remover on for too long and, when I went to rub the stain away, I rubbed a hole in the sleeve of the T-shirt instead.

I made your sister some porridge, a strange breakfast for late August, but she likes it. I wonder if you would have too. I still wonder about little things like that.

As I turned around to talk to your sister, I knocked the bowl of porridge off the top of the kitchen cabinet with my elbow and smashed it. Her favourite Peppa Pig breakfast bowl. And her porridge went all over the floor. And there was no more milk.

I picked up the ruined T-shirt, the smashed bowl and the porridge. I put the whole mess in the bin.

Your brother started crying. I wanted to cry too. For the T-shirt I'd just put a hole in. For the porridge that I'd made and then spilt. For the bowl that I couldn't fix. For your sister's bewilderment, still waving her hopeful spoon about, waiting for her breakfast. For all my good intentions heaped in the bin. But, you know, that's not the real reason I wanted to cry.

I can find pathos in anything these days. A broken Peppa Pig bowl leads me back to you. Spilt porridge leads me back to you. To you. The most irretrievably broken thing in my life.

I go onwards, not really knowing what I'm doing.
Hoping that I'm not messing up too badly but suspecting that I am.

I miss you. I wish you were here. I couldn't promise you a perfect life, you might not always have got your breakfast on time. Or indeed, got the breakfast that you had been led to expect. Some mornings we have to make do with toast instead of porridge. Even when you could have sworn that there was porridge cooking five minutes earlier.

Your T-shirts and your prized breakfast bowls might have disappeared mysteriously, leaving you wondering where they went.

But I wish you could be here. Down here, in this mess. Because this is all I know and it is all I have. This strange world where we all stumble around blindly, bash into a few things, knock up against a few other people and then leave.

Occasionally there is a brief glimmer of something that looks like beauty, that looks like sense. Amidst the spoiled breakfasts and rain. Sometimes I suspect that those things do, in fact, actually exist and I'm looking at the real deal, not merely a resemblance or a fraud.

Wish you were here my girl. To catch those glimmers with me.