Resolutions

January 1st 2021

I always feel like I need to justify myself when I start one of these, even though I suppose no-one but me will ever read this.

To be honest I don’t even really know why I’m doing this. I’ve tried to keep diaries a few times before I met Mina, and I never managed to keep them up all year, they always ended up feeling like a chore. But Jane got me this notebook for Christmas and I may as well put it to use. It’s small enough to take with me if I ever go anywhere so that won’t be an excuse for not sticking with it. I guess if nothing else it might help to get my thoughts and stuff down on paper, it will at least get them out of my head for a little bit, hopefully.

And of course, if you are going to keep a diary then New Years Day is the proper day for it, only madmen start diaries on say, March 12th.

I don’t normally do resolutions but I’m having to do a lot of things I wouldn’t have done if things were normal. Might as well make some of them positive.

So I guess to start I could say I’ll drink a bit less. Though having said that it is currently…2:46am and the empty cans in front of me looked at me mockingly as I wrote that. Dad invited me to theirs for New Years but they all understood… I thought about going to the quayside to watch the fireworks but no, I didn’t want to punish my liver with the inevitable consequences I’d need to cope with that.

I wouldn’t say I’m a big drinker but it has been creeping up on me and it wouldn’t be good to carry on turning to the Merlot as a substitute for happiness. So yeah, cut back on drinking. A bit.

So that’s the cliche one out of the way; I had a look online for common resolutions people make and I didn’t really take a fancy to any of them: lose weight (meh, I’ll get round to that eventually, but one step at a time); stop smoking (never started); learn a new skill/hobby (who doesn’t want that, but I have no concrete ideas yet); spend more time with loved ones (if only).

So I had to think outside the box, I can’t have what I really want so what other things can I try to do that are actually possible? I’ve always wanted to learn a new language, I always meant to learn Turkish properly, but I only ever did the basics. I learned a lot of the dirty words, but that was just to make her laugh. Now there doesn’t seem much point in it. There won’t be any bilingual babies to try and keep up with. And I haven’t spoken to her parents in months, pretty much since the funeral. I don’t really know what our relationship is supposed to be now. We’ve lost the person that translated for us; that connected us. What would we even talk about? How much we each miss her? Yeah, we could do that, but it would be a 2000 mile trip and a conversation in broken English-cum-Turkish, for each of us to be sad together. We can just be sad apart. They are my family, and they’ll always be my family but I don’t intend to insert myself into their lives to serve as a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost.

So I could try to learn another language, Spanish or French or something like that, but I think it would just make me feel guilty about not learning more Turkish when I had the chance. So no, no new language for me, English will have to be enough.

I think one that I will definitely do is to be more charitable or give more to charity or whatever. I have some money now, money that I don’t really want too much to do with. I still can’t believe it: £20,000! I had no idea that she had that much saved away, well more really but after legal fees and all the other inheritance nonsense its £20,000. I knew she had savings, we both did, money for the future, whatever that means, it sounds quite optimistically hollow now. A house maybe, or a second honeymoon. She did leave a note but I can’t read it now, my eyes are bleary enough from the tiredness and the cider, but I remember she said in it that she hoped the money would help me and I could use it to be happy. Hmm.

***

I fell asleep last night before I could finish writing my entry. Well, that’s not entirely true, I couldn’t go on, not then. I will try now.

So the question of the money. Like I was saying, I want to be more charitable and seeing as there isn’t much in the way of happiness that £20,000 can give me, or not in the kind I want anyway, I thought I’d give most of it to charity. There are plenty of good causes: animal shelters; wildlife preservations (I think she would approve); and of course cancer research. I’ll split up the money and share it between them. But I will keep a little of it, enough to do what I should have done before.

Mina always wanted a dog. Well she always wanted a cat too but there’s already one miserable bastard living in this house, I don’t need another to help me wallow. So I’ll keep enough to get a puppy, at least that will give me something to focus on, something positive and happy. And I’ll name it something that she would’ve cringed to have to shout when out walking it, something like Samwise Gamgee or Boromir.

Jane is coming around this afternoon to drop off a lasagne Mum made, so I’ll see if she fancies coming to a shelter with me this week. I think she’ll be pleased. To be honest, I think I’m getting to that stage now, where my grief is becoming a bit tiresome to them. Of course, they’d never say it or even show it really but I think you can sense it. There seems to be an expiration on these sorts of things, at the start it’s totally natural and expected to be an utter wreck. And that lasts a while. But eventually, and I think we are approaching (if we have not already reached) the point where I am expected to be returning in some way to normality. And that point is apparently after 8 months. So Jane will be pleased that I am getting a dog, that’s a thing normal people do.

I’ll have to have a think of other things people do when they are not deadened inside and do them so that I can appear to be feeling better. Maybe that will be my last resolution. I’ll pretend to be starting to feel better. For my family’s sake. Even though I know, even if they don’t, that I won’t ever be feeling better. There will be moments, indeed there have already been some, where I have not felt sad. But they are fleeting and to be honest they make me feel worse than the almost non-stop misery because in those brief moments it’s as if I’ve forgotten her. The guilt when reality crashes down on me is as if she has just died all over again. There will never be a time when everything is alright again. It can never be as it was.

People always say: "it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all”. This may be true, I wouldn’t trade my time with her for anything. But I always joked with Mina that I hoped I’d be the one to die first. Only I wasn’t joking.