No More Brambling

We haven't gone blackberry picking this year. I'm pretty sure we won't. Not never - just not this year. Makes me sad and wistful - it's been a part of our Autumns since you were a baby: purple, prickled fingers and lumpy, sugary crumble. And Mabel plucking them with her front teeth to keep herself amused while we wander slowly round all the bushes on the Common, filling up Tupperware containers.

It'd just be pointless. And yet another mean reminder that you're not your usual self - that simple pleasures are now on hold - boxed away until we can revisit them. I don't know how I'll remember everything you and I will need or want to reacquaint ourselves with. Maybe a list:

• Brambling.
• Going to the cafe on the Common.
• Me making you a bite to eat.
• Me making you a cuppa. You making you a cuppa.
• Going to fast food places with your friends on the way home from school.
• Spotting things you might fancy in shops and buying them for you without mentally slapping myself.
• You having a monster peckish evening and enjoying eating every single thing you make for yourself - crackers and cereal and crisps and carrots and hummous.
• You saying - "Mmm, that smells nice".
  
• You saying "I'm starving" and me not wanting to cry for the time when you really were. Just typing that makes me want to cry.
  
• You saying "I'm not hungry" and meaning "I'm not hungry" instead of "I'm going to punish myself by withholding nourishment".

That fast became a general eating-related wish list. Not what I intended.

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A different list:

• College.
• Rachel and Lily and Alison here. Mixed feelings of pleasure in Lily's sweet company and irritation at the noise of that dog and the crowding and the slight disintegration of your carefully practiced and well worn routine - your safety and familiarity has taken on a tinge of chaos and you're striving valiantly to not mind, to not show that you mind, to not shout and scream and throw your blender at them for doing normal things in the kitchen and not being able to read your mind.
  
• Diane gone. Strange but true. And how quickly we pushed her into the box marked "Forgotten". The lid keeps slipping off a bit.
  
• You feeling like you're getting fatter when actually you still feel like a bony, tiny waif in my arms and your Size 4 clothes show no signs of getting snugger.
• Scared to be different in front of your friends at College. Different is weird and weird means losing the few friends you have left and that means being alone and lonely and pretending that's what you actually wanted all along.
• Wanting to be invisible and glide soundlessly and ephemerally through your existence outside of this house.
• Seeing girls you used to think were slim and lovely and envied slightly and realising you're now so much thinner than they are: pride fighting shame. Always the dichotomy.
• Crying with the fear and dread of College and coping with such a huge shift and so much that is hurtingly unfamiliar - it makes my stomach twist with worry about how you'll cope - not knowing and having to wait and see and force yourself and try try try to be normal and to be just like all those others who used to be your close-knit band of comrades. Now, you speak of them as though they were dangerous strangers who will invade the new, rigid, safe existence you have carved for yourself. As if their teenage exuberance and carelessness and recklessness might ruin you. It won't, my darling. It makes me so sad.
• Knowing you've given thought to chucking it all in and getting a job instead.
• Antidepressants. I thought this was what I wanted for you - that they'd give you a boost and the room to heal. Now the time has come and the Doctor feels you need them, I absolutely do not want you to have to take them.
• Your obsessions and compulsions getting worse and more complicated and time-consuming and annoying and making you weirder and more different - as if there was any need for more.
• Hearing you say "suicide" and wrapping it in a sentence of reassuring words and "I never have/never will/don't want". But the damn word was said and I keep hearing it echo in my head. Goddammit.
• Sleeplessness night after night. Yours as well as mine.
  
• I love you.
• Please get better.
• I love you so much.