love, death, distraction ✿ musings.

Roses and lilies remind me of her.

They were her favourite flowers. My nan used to grow red roses in her garden, and we’d always stop to smell them whenever we were visiting. I don’t know where the attachment with white lilies came from. All I remember are filled vases on the dining room table from time to time, orange stains on my fingertips whenever I tried to cut the stamens. They were too messy to leave as were, and our cat, Possum, was too curious to leave them be.

Now, 23, in a home of my own, and I don’t have a proper dining room table like the one back home. Instead, I’ll rest a jar of white lilies atop my bookshelf, and long for the way things used to be.

Buying flowers is a ritual on days like today. It makes me feel closer to her when we can’t be together anymore, in every sense of the word.

But leaving home wasn’t hard – I was grateful to be free of those ties. No. The difficult thing in moving was being away from the place where all those memories were made. In a house of my own, I had to begin again. A new chapter without a mother, hundreds of kilometres away from the place she was buried.

I get worried that nobody visits her anymore. Dad has a girlfriend and my sister has moved out of that small town now, too – even if it took her two years longer than it took me. My grandad passed away long ago, and my nan can’t look after herself anymore, let alone remember where we buried mum’s ashes. My aunts have their own burdens to tackle these days – an autistic daughter, a cheating and abusive ex-husband. These familial issues keep piling up, and where does that leave room to remember a woman who’s been gone for so long already?

I’d drop off a single white lily by her grave and sweep away the weeds climbing over her plaque. Not just on the days that meant something – Mother’s Day, Christmas, October 23rd – but on the ordinary days, too.

The small photograph by her grave has weathered the battles of time. Her face is unrecognisable, despite the patch of dark brown hair that stands out against the yellowed background. She is faded from the Summer heat and damaged from the deluge of cyclone season.

There was a time I thought I would forget her face, but I know now it’s simply impossible.

I see her in myself.

I took her blue eyes and her middle name and her favourite flower and her cold hands and her inability to swallow tablets just to keep her alive, somewhere. But not everything can stay the same.

Chronic illnesses, accumulated like the cancer cells in her body, have led me down a path of life long medication. They say I can’t live without them, but I thought that once before, too, about you. These days, I don’t even gag as I take tablets eight at a time. I wonder how that stupid adaptation can make me feel so alone.

Luckily, there’s more than one way to fight loneliness, or that longing for things to be different. I’d know; I’ve tried them all.

So I’d sit by her grave and find peace in the crematorium. Crouching in the dirt, eyes closed, as the wind swept my fringe across my forehead. The world was softer. Sharing sad smiles with the elderly women come to spend a moment with their late husbands, or the young mothers who shed a tear for an angel baby. Connected to grief and loss, so human.

“You look so much like her,” – words I’ll never get tired of hearing, because it’s like you never died.

You’re still here, mum.

And even though I can’t be beside you and tell you about how stressed I am right now – how I can’t handle that stress properly and want to drop out of school because it’s just too hard, how I take it out on everyone around me and hate myself a little more every single time I do – I’m still here with you.

White lilies on my bookshelf. Photo albums strewn across my bed. A memory journal gifted to me by my psychiatrist eight years ago – still unfinished, as if it could be anything else. I’m drowning in you, and it hurts in the best way.

Even though I can’t tell you how much I love and miss you, I hope you know.

It’s okay to be sad. Repeated. It’s okay to not always be strong.

I’ll sleep through the day, because it hurts to be awake.

And I’ll cry into the night, because it hurts to be alone.