Margaret

Margaret Thatcher died when you were sleeping.
Thats what the note said; the one scrawled on the back of a brown envelope and propped up against the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen counter. Lois picked the envelope up, held it close to her face and read the words again, slower this time and out loud. The dog twisted in her basket, smacked her lips with her tongue and sighed. Lois took the envelope, opened the knife and fork draw and slid it into one of the recesses made for the knife edges to sit inside. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair but otherwise stood still, her pink house coat tied loosely around her waist.
She remembered then, a time long ago, her mum and her dad, her, small in her pyjamas, sitting around a television as the country buckled under its own weight outside. She remembered the look on her mothers face, the quiet concern behind her eyes, hands filled with knitting and yarn. She remembered her father yelling campaign slogans at images of angry and outspoken workers fighting for rights she didn't fully understand on the TV set, the wind howling through winter-empty streets.
And then she thought of Margaret, swollen with age, her skin draping heavy like curtains over her shoulders.
The world kept turning.
It somehow grew bigger in the shadow.
Lois took a carton of fruit juice from the fridge, walked back upstairs and sat on the edge of her bed; her feet cold from walking barefoot on the kitchen tiles. She took a pair of striped socks from the chest of drawers underneath the window and put them on.
Later, Lois fell back into sleep again until the sun, a teardrop in the sky, was replaced by night time.

Margot and her hat, illustrated

Gym

I caught myself in the middle of a lie yesterday as I stretched at the gym, a top knot on my head tied in a heap with strands of my own unwashed hair. The clarity with which I saw myself was so startling, and a wave of realisation washed over me so quickly that I stood there still, feeling foolish. A nakedness I had forgotten I had felt before.
I realised all of a sudden that I was trying to convince the girl by my side of something. The girl paying no attention to me, who hadn't noticed I was even there, mid work out and sweaty, headphones blasting music I couldn't hear. In that moment, as the sun had begun to disappear into the sea outside, more than anything else, I wanted her to believe I was a ballet dancer.
I was stretching stretches from a life long ago when I was a tiny somebody else trying to be somebody bigger than I was, pointing my toes and arching my back, small arabesques, fifth position.
How desperate I was for her to imagine me on the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet; masculine and soft, a Rudolf Nureyev type with arms that women felt safe in; arms that could lift them up towards heaven, arms that said I was guiding us to a magnificence so shiny and astounding in its newness.
I wanted her to think I was somebody else and let myself get lost in the identity I had created, her still none the wiser; everybody has to be somewhere. And so I continued until the lie grew so whole, so complete I barely recognised myself inside of it.
And then, with an urgency that scared me, I wanted to run to her and put my hands on her shoulders and make it clear, make it crystal clear, that I probably wouldn't always be lost. That I wouldn't spend forever sifting through the leftovers of lives that never were, that I wouldn't live inside the dreams that hadn't been weaved into the reality of my actual life, that it wouldn't always be an endless list of tasks that I'm better than or worse than or so deep in the middle of that I forget that I am still able to take my days in my hands and mould them into something else.
That I wouldn't always be that guy at the gym, imagining himself somewhere other than there.
That I would one day be enough.

Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack-illustrated

Margot and her hat

She looked smaller than I remembered, her red coat like a gown hanging from her shoulders, fastened up to her neck as precise as a math equation.

Margot was eating toffee pennies, folding their gold wrappers into quarters, putting them inside her pocket and chewing with her mouth open when she finally saw me standing in front of her. 

We had been here once before, some months earlier, when the sun shone a different colour on the trees; Margot in her hat, the sound of water somewhere in the distance.

She popped another toffee penny into her mouth, stroked her cheek with the inside of her hand and smiled the small smile of a young girl embarrassed by the idea of herself. It made her seem even tinier to me and I felt my heart pull inside my chest as the wind played music amongst the leaves and echoed up into the sky. A breath between two moments.

Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack

I sat down to watch a documentary on the life of Ethel Kennedy tonight and as I watched I remembered a book of letters written to Jackie after Jack's assassination that I read greedily some time after Christmas.
As Ethel quietly spoke about that day over black and white footage of people hearing the news for the first time, I saw the grief fresh as clean linen settle on their faces, and I thought of those letters, each written to try and make sense of the senseless. And I wondered if the people I saw, with their set hair and wet eyes, had sat down in the time after to write Jackie and to reach out to her; and I thought of the grief they shared, the man they lost, the dream they said goodbye to.
And then I imagined them all, Ethel and Bobby, Jack, Jackie, the children, in Cape Cod, dancing across blue seas on a big boat, sweaters tied around their necks, the sun making glitter on the oceans surface. And I imagined myself there too, laughing alongside them, before it changed into something else completely.
Before the waves crashed us back to the waters edge to begin again.

Sharing you with memories (all or nothing) illustrated

First

He took me to a bookstore that first day (and the race track a little later, although I'm not sure now if that part really happened at all) and we looked for a book with two grey birds on the cover that he had read when he was younger. I hadn't really noticed his face before or, more accurately, noticed how his features made up his face, and I found myself tracing the lines around his eyes in my head as he thumbed through the shelves looking for that memory from his childhood. Upstairs and all of a sudden he kissed me on my mouth, smiling quietly as he pulled away; a shared joke I was yet to know the punchline to.
Later we lay still on the grass, my head on his chest, his hand in my hand, and I counted his heartbeats out loud until the numbers sounded foreign and lost their meaning, a vain attempt to stop time.

Mirikitani

I watched a documentary recently called ‘The cats of Mirikitani’ about a homeless 80year old Japanese artist living in New York in 2001 (the full story here.) His story astounded me and made me sad and angry and then happy that he made work and that it was this work that pulled him out of the deepest darkness that life could throw at him.  He was difficult and broken and scarred so completely that his history hung like a badge on his chest at all times; he and it could not be separated. That has stuck with me since; how much of all of us is history and how much of it is who we actually are? I cannot stop thinking about it.

Angela Lansbury-illustrated