This month’s blog is late, but for good reason.

When something happens, something deep and changing, it’s difficult to focus. Difficult to concentrate. As someone that writes for a living every day, writes for pleasure, writes for the sheer love of it – I’ve barely set a word down in a month.

And that’s ok.

One day I’ll write about what’s happened this last month, but right now it’s too raw. But what I will say is that dipping into poetry has helped me to find a voice again. Grief locks you in your mind. No doors. Just walls and one floor-length mirror, which never lets up its portrait of you in all your grey-faced loss and salty misery. A silver puddle on the floor.

But reading little bits here and there is a crack of white through a skylight. A window I can’t look up to right now but at least I know it’s there. The ability to imagine. To place my heart outside these walls. To escape grief.

Soon we’ll be reading lots of retrospectives from the last year. It’s what we do – when a new start approaches, we instinctively look over our shoulders. And with the dawn of 2020, it’s a whole new decade, so we look back over the last 10 years too. I’ll do it just like everyone else does, and write about it nearer to New Year’s Eve. So much has changed. So much has been experienced, and learned.

I don’t know what 2020 will bring, but the only thing I’m determined to be right now is brave. To not be afraid of reaching out in case I end up having to let go. Life is about the connections we make, and the lost pieces are just as important as the living ones.

For now, I’ll finish with a haiku I wrote a few months ago, which turned out to be strangely prophetic as 2019 ends;

“If we didn’t brave

reaching out into darkness –

We’d never find light.”

/CH