Done, but I’m not going to talk about this, anymore.
Ten - When you have completed all the above, make a new wish list for yourself, for the life you want to have and put something on it that you think impossible.
So, this is now. Let’s see.
I open the drawer and find more coloured paper. Choosing a blue one to go with the colour of the walls, I try to write.
What do I want?
That Lessa and Clive will break up?
I don’t think Liam wanted me to wish for someone else to be unhappy.
Come on there must be something I want that is impossible. To turn the clock back, and have my life again without the mistakes? Although, going through school again is no fun. Maybe a selective rewind.
To spend more time with Liam before he died. No. Find a cure for cancer so Liam doesn’t have to die.
To be young and virile forever. And get my old sexual habits back? Otherwise, what’s the point of youth and virility?
To be a billionaire so I can help millions of people…
I keep writing even if none of them feel right. In fact, even my hand feels heavy and clumsy, and I keep having to cross out words.
Coffee. I need coffee.
I’m even clumsier than ever; I stir the spoon too fast knocking the cup over and spilling coffee on the counter.
Bollocks.
I reach for a jay cloth, and the memory is just waiting for me of that time I used a wet cloth to hold a baking dish and burnt my hand.
Coffee drips off the counter, onto the floor. Cursing again, I get down on one knee to wipe the floor and under the cabinet. There is something far back. I reach under with the cloth to swipe it over.
It’s a baby rattle, the yellow one with the bee design which Malinara used to love. The one she threw down that day, crying and hungry while I tried to warm up her milk. The day she weed on me.
For some reason, I can’t get up. My eyes fix on the yellow rattle until it goes blurry.
Tears.
For the first time since I was five or six.
I slide down to sit on the floor shaking with silent sobs. Raw sobs I never knew I had inside me.
I was wrong about pain, I’d never felt it before. because this is what Liam must have meant. Pain that bends me in half and takes my breath away.
Letting myself feel it? Ha! I can hardly stop it.
I close my hand on the rattle. Minutes pass with me sitting on the floor, legs bent, my elbows on my knees, my head back against the cabinet behind me until the storm passes.
Is this what people call, having a good cry? The source of the pain hasn’t gone, but there’s an easing, a clarity that comes in the wake of crying.
I get up, make another coffee, and sit at the kitchen table. Pulling a new blue sheet of paper towards me, I uncap the pen and write the one and only impossible wish for my future life:
I want my family back.
???
In the village, I’m surprised to find the entire island there. It’s the New Year’s Eve Bazaar, of course.
