Yours

November 21st

Dear Sophia,

I love you. I’m home now. It’s pretty late. I don’t know how I feel at the moment. I hope you had a good day. I hope you were ok.

I couldn’t really sleep last night. I felt really far away and the bed was all bumpy. It looked smooth and padded but however I positioned myself I felt like I was getting prodded in the back or the leg.

The room came with breakfast in the morning. It was one of those breakfasts where everything is sitting out in metal trays and you pick up however much you want. All the sausages looked like they were made of plastic and the beans looked cold and slimy. I tried to eat a bit. I thought it might warm me up before I spent the day outside. I couldn’t stomach it though. It was terrible. I’m not a big fan of fry ups anyway but it’s even worse when every bit of it looks like some horrible brightly coloured plastic food toy that kids play with.

I’ve never been to a funeral before. When my mum died I couldn’t make it back to the actual funeral on time. It was winter and the trains down were all cancelled. There was an extra memorial thing a couple of days later in a hall near the church. I made it back for that. Everyone told me that was the more important bit anyway. By that time she was already in the ground so I didn’t see her get buried. Apparently it takes a while for a gravestone to be ready so she was just under a pile of mud when I got there. It didn’t look very friendly. There’s a stone there now though. Sometimes when I’m walking I stop by the church to make sure it still looks clean and kids haven’t put graffiti on it or anything like that.

I didn’t realise there were two bits of funerals. There is the sort of memorial bit you see on T.V lots and then the actual burial bit. On T.V they only ever seem to show one or the other like it’s a choice between the two. They show people standing around a hole in the ground giving speeches and looking sad or they show people sitting in a church while everyone tells stories about the person who has just died. Today there was both of those bits.

I got to the church and there were a few people hovering around. I thought it was funny that even at a funeral everyone avoids each other trying not to have to talk to people they don’t know like it’s the first day of school or something. Not even someone dying can get rid of how awkward everyone feels. It was good for me though as it meant I didn’t have to talk to anyone or anything like that.

A woman handed me a leaflet that had the words to some hymns in it. It had a picture on the front. It was him. It was definitely him. I’d never seen the picture before though. I thought it was a bit weird that the picture everyone would remember him with was one I’d never seen before. It was a picture of a man I’d never really met. He was much older than the man I knew. He had less hair. He did different things.

The priest or the vicar or whichever kind it was did a speech about Jesus welcoming him home and stuff like that. It all sounded stupid to me. It sounded cliched and empty. It didn’t mean anything. It was really impersonal. It’s like how at weddings everyone does the same ceremony. It ends up not being about the people but about the ritual of it. This was just like that. It was a funeral and the guy talking must have done a thousand funerals and said the same thing every time. I don’t get the point of doing that.

Another man gave a speech that made some people do a weird sort of laugh and cry at the same time which made their faces screw up all uncomfortably. I didn’t really get the jokes he was making and it wasn’t making me feel sad either. I didn’t know the guy talking and I didn’t know the guy he was talking about. I just felt cold. Really cold. The seats were wooden. I could feel the cold on the inside of my trousers and it made me not want to move my legs in case I touched another cold bit. I kept thinking about whether Jesus would really welcome an adulterer into his house. I don’t think he would.

After a while it ended and everyone stood up and the coffin was carried out past us all. I hadn’t really noticed it until that point. It was brown wood and had a cross on it just like everything else in the church.

On the way out a woman asked me how I knew him. I told her I was an old colleague of his. She didn’t ask me anymore which was good. I couldn’t be bothered explaining and I couldn’t be bothered with lying either. Someone came up to her and asked her which car she was going in. She told me the burial was at the other end of the road. Not far she said. I saw people pile into cars and I walked down the street after them. I saw Aunt Angela through a car window and she waved at me but I pretended not to see.

I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I was just walking. I knew I wasn’t going to get back to see you today so I didn’t really feel like doing anything. I ended up at the cemetery or graveyard or whatever the proper name is. I saw people getting out of cars. I saw them up at the front. I saw her. I hadn’t seen her before and I didn’t even know her name. She was crying and she had a couple of other people hugging her. They were much younger than she was. The girl hugging her looked quite young. The boy looked only a few years younger than me. They were all hugging and I knew it was definitely them. I hated them. I was glad they were sad. They had no right to be sad but I was glad they were.

I stood further back than everyone else and watched it all happen. I watched them chuck some dirt down into the hole. I think that’s what they were doing anyway. That’s what it looked like and I’m sure I’ve seen that happen on T.V before. Then he was gone. He was covered up and couldn’t come back and leave anyone ever again. I was leaving him. It was my turn.

I walked away from him and felt like I was escaping something. I felt free. I started to feel in charge of things. I’d left him. It made me realise how simple it is. Leave things that hurt you and hold onto what makes you happy as hard as you can. It’s really that simple.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew