A Letter to the Stars...

Dear Mum,

There are so many things I'll never say to you. Most of them are things I'm desperate to say, things I know would make you so proud, things I know would make you smile.

Or my favourite thing in the world, laughing until you cried.

I would give anything in the universe to be able to make you laugh/cry one more time.

I'll never get to tell you that my daughter is upside down on a trapeze more often than not. That she's Autistic and ADHD and wonderful and hilarious and brave. I'll never get to see you beaming with pride at everything she achieves. I'll never tell you that I'm learning watercolours, or that I got another tattoo... for you.

I'll never get to tell you that I'm medicated now for the chronic anxiety that all started on the day you told me how sick you were.

I'll never tell you that I was so angry after I found out it was worse than you were saying. You had lied to try and ease the path. Unluckily for you, your brain full of cancer was eating you from the inside and made you forget what you were planning. So you told my sister-in-law that things were bad. Still, I'll forgive you.

I'd forgive you anything.

Sometimes I think about whether I told you how much I loved you. How brilliantly you brought life and light into the world every day with your creations. How you embraced everything that I ever valued.

You never questioned me when I told you that I needed some crazy outfit made. It would be sewn and hanging on my door before I was awake the following day. Gods, I wish I'd kept more of them.

So I wonder sometimes why I never told you everything.

I guess we just didn't talk like that.

Our family isn't great at honesty, I think sometimes. No one wants to rock the boat.

That's why I never told you that the boy who died in England wasn't just a friend of mine. I had been so in love with him. I could not have even begun to explain how instantly I felt drawn to him. That was magic, that was looking across a dingy nightclub basement and seeing the only other person dancing to The Faint and knowing that you'd found someone who was a piece of you. Some tall, thin, handsome, musician. All the dreams I had in a package.

It was a brief time.

Such a brief time, and not ever the romance I so craved when I was twenty-four. Too soon, I was overwhelmed by confusion and longing, and he was out of my life. I am so much older now than he ever had a chance to be.

I forget what twenty-seven even felt like.

But you didn't understand when I couldn't be around the English tea drinkers and their quiet grief. I wanted to scream and rage and wail. I wanted to never stop crying. I wanted to pull those loose threads that hung from the world until the whole damn thing unravelled and changed into something else.

The world wasn't right without him in it.

Now, I know that was dipping a toe into the ice water of grief.

Knowing someone less than a year and loving them, nothing but a shiver in comparison to plunging full body into the rapid decline and sudden end to your life.

I've still not found the surface, after nearly five years.

Half a decade of you not hearing any of my words.

Half a decade of my child's decade long life.

If I had known when I moved home that you would be gone in two years I would have told you everything... everything everything.

So here's a few more-

I'm non-binary, and I don't recognise my own face in a reflection. Even though... in so many ways... it's your face. I feel more male than female, but not male and certainly not female. I have always known and never knew and maybe if I'd spoken about that, I might have figured it out.

I'm pansexual. That I've known as long as I knew I liked anyone. I never wanted to date boys. But I really wanted to date that boy who later on turned out to be a girl. She loved you too, I found out years later. She told me how welcome she felt, and how accepted she was in our house.

She tried on my school uniform when no one was around.

Really, the both of us should have figured out all that gender stuff a long, long time ago.

The girl who was my friend... well you had to have known what was going on. We were terrible at hiding it. Again, maybe if I'd spoken to you, maybe if I'd not been so afraid, you might have told me to love her. You might have told me to get both of us out of toxic relationships and just... be... (She's still around, her baby was born just after you left us.)

You know what I think of sometimes, when I think about our relationship? I think that in all the years you were my mother, there were two negative occasions. So for that, I feel like we should win a prize.

Maybe another twenty years of your life. That would be great.

One, was when I was some kind of angry-at-everything-but-with-nothing-to-really-complain-about teenager. Raging against the system while living with a mother who would do anything for me.

I made you cry.

God I will never forget it, though for the life of me, I have no idea what I said. Whoever that young version of me was, they regretted it forever. I never told you how much that weighed on my mind.

I never told you that when you made my wedding dress and announced it was the "biggest I had ever been" the words echoed in my mind for years. Pretty sure you were just being a little over blunt. But still... Not the best choice for a bonding moment. I never said anything to you, never complained that you really weren't supposed to say these things to your child while creating their wedding outfit.

But seriously, Mum, if that is as bad as it gets, I really think we must have done something right.

I sit with the ache in my chest, every single day.

I keep thinking it should just go away, be less, shrink and diminish and soften like something composting back into the earth.

But grief, apparently, doesn't play that way.

I'll never tell you that a couple of weeks ago, I thought I saw you coming out of an art gallery shop and I nearly lost my mind.

Just for a moment, you were standing in front of me.

Just like always. Out shopping, enjoying life.

I ran into you all the time.

But maybe two seconds of that joy were so rapidly replaced with the tonne of lead that dropped on me with the realisation that it wasn't you.

A stranger.

A stranger in your shape, with your hair and your clothes and not an inch of your smile.

Not an inch of your heart.

Just another woman out with her friends, enjoying the sunshine and never knowing that she was sabotaging my day, pulling the ground from beneath me and letting me just fall until I hit something sharp.

She'll never know that and neither will you.

People have asked me a lot if I feel you with me. I would love to say that I do. I'm not without spirituality, I believe in things.

But you're not here.

I'll never say these things to you because you're travelling, just like you did your entire life. Over fifty countries in your life time. (Not bad for a girl from a family who'd never left the state.) Now, you travel in the stars and otherworlds. You visit worlds we will likely never see. You move through space without the travel sickness that weighed you down. You see endless wonders of jewelled stars scattered before you, a pathway to new adventures. I wonder if you even have time to miss us.

With endless love,

Dan

P.S.- Maybe I'll just start telling you things anyway... Who's to say you don't hear?