Nobody talks about how boring grief makes you. People are too polite to mention it, but you know deep down that they’re counting seconds in their heads after they ask, “so how are you really doing?” They don’t actually want to know, they’re just waiting for the moment they can slap their thigh and go, “well, I’d love to stay, but I should be getting on now.” You know they wouldn’t love to stay. They’d rather be anywhere but here, talking to you about how you’re feeling three months down the line. It bores them senseless.
The things you want to tell them aren’t boring, but you don’t think that they deserve to know. The way Andi used to make you a cup of coffee every morning and you drank it without hesitation each time, knowing there was a non-zero chance that she’d add salt to it instead of sugar because she thought it was funny, liked to keep you on your toes. The way you’d count her freckles in the early morning light whilst she slept. The way she called you five hundred names and none of them your given one, all souvenirs of things you had seen on television, conversations you’d had about life. Your favourite nickname for her, tomato, because she’d been making pasta one day and had yelled “I need tomatoes!” and without thinking you had shouted “you’re a tomato!” back at her, listening to her giggling through the kitchen door. The things that make up a life. Not boring at all.
You understand that the concept of Andi not being here anymore also terrifies them. They don’t want to think about the fact that it could be their loved one under the soil, their own brain slowly rotting from the inside as it clings on to the memories that it has, because you can’t make new ones now, not new ones with Andi anyway. They don’t want to think about her but they know that’s all you can think about, an ache in your chest that won’t go away, the loss palpable in the room. If fate had been different it would be me, they think, and leave you in your sad little living room with your rotten memories and the lingering traces of their boredom, their fear, their guilt at feeling any way other than sympathetic. You can’t wait for them to leave.
Andi wouldn’t want to see you like this. She always told you how strong you were, how #girlboss you both were, how much you had to live for even on your worst days. Now you’re living for two, in the worst possible way. Doing all the things that Andi won’t get to do. You spend your days thinking about how fragile life is.
In the dark of the night, before you fall asleep, you start to think about how fragile health is.
If you’re going to live for two people, really live, you need to be strong and healthy to do it. Andi wanted to do so much – rock climbing in Switzerland, ice skating in Canada, swimming with dolphins in Mexico – and you’re in no fit state to even think about those things at the minute. So, four months after her death and two months after you were supposed to go back to work but just didn’t, you start to focus on your health.
It starts with a kettlebell. A pretty unassuming kettlebell all things considered, only five kilos and a solid midnight black colour, the weight printed on the front in blazing white. You find a 10-minute workout on YouTube with a smiley Scottish fitness instructor who has muscles like thick cords of rope and you swing that kettlebell over and over again until she tells you to stop. After the first day you ache like you’ve been out in the fields, but it replaces the aching in your chest in a satisfying way. Ten minutes turns into twenty, turns into an hour a day. The kettlebell gets heavier. The aching gets deeper.
If you’re going to get healthy, you can’t just lift a kettlebell. You take up running and experience a different kind of chest pain, one that leaves you breathless half a mile away from home. Half a mile becomes 5k, then 10k. You consider signing up for a half marathon, and then you remember the conversations you had with Andi about “insufferable Lycra people” and nearly fall over laughing on the way home from a short 10-mile jog. You’re an insufferable Lycra person now, but you’re healthy. Healthier.
But you can’t just run and lift weights if your nutrition isn’t on point. The pizza you eat almost every night is undoing all of your hard work and it’s practically like you haven’t exercised at all, you understand that now. You start to listen to podcasts on nutrition and wellbeing, and a whole world opens up in front of you. People have stopped calling by this point – you’re usually out running when they turn up anyway, and they seem happy that you’re not obsessing over Andi’s death anymore. Only one person seemed concerned about your new health focus, and she leaves you alone now after you explained the benefits of probiotics to her for over an hour. She doesn’t understand how healthy you’re becoming, how perfectly you’re going to be able to do the things that Andi always wanted to do. You’re getting closer to your goals.
Your diet undergoes a complete overhaul. Beige is out – no more ultra processed foods unless you want to die ten years early – and instead you snack on raw nuts, eat pulses, fruit, steamed vegetables. Whole foods, plant-based, but that still doesn’t give you the optimum nutrition for a woman in the 21st century. You need more. Green powders, ashwagandha for the anxiety that you’re not sure you feel any more, spirulina-wheatgrass-blended kale shots on a morning washed down with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, calcium tablets for your bones, probiotics and prebiotics for your gut microbiome, kimchi and kombucha that you make yourself at home, pairing your tomatoes with olive oil to increase the bioavailability of lycopene, organic everything of course. When you look in the mirror you glow with health, as if lit from inside by an antique wall lamp. You’re so nearly there, you can feel it.
It starts around month six, ten months after Andi’s death and three months since you properly tightened up your diet (no more kimchi; turns out the salt content is deadly). You’re in the kitchen chopping up an apple after taking your usual morning smoothie (almond milk, frozen fruit, seventy different vitamins and minerals in one handy powder, collagen, 300 times your RDA of B12 and vitamin D, seaweed extract, chia seeds, flaxseeds, banana) when your vision starts to shimmer out of the corner of your eye. This isn’t new – since starting your health journey your vision has become better or worse depending on your blood pressure – but the strange light you see there is a little different to what you’re used to. If you try to focus on it then it shifts out of your awareness, but if you concentrate on chopping the apple and clear your mind you can almost see flashes of purple and green, can almost make out a face in the haze…
Andi.
The knife slips, and you cut cleanly through the tip of your index finger. You lift it to your mouth, tasting the coppery blood that wells up from the cut, and as you hunt for a bandage you find yourself thinking about what’s beyond the veil.
You find yourself smiling.
*
You begin to experiment with the limits of your consciousness. Three hours of fasted calisthenics followed by a wheatgrass shot and a double helping of smoothie can get you to a place where if you sit quietly, almost meditatively, you can see the face, Andi’s face, out of the corner of your eye. A little spirulina added to the mix, and you almost start to hear a voice, Andi’s voice, whispering and faint but getting closer to you every single day. You spend the rent money on super green powders. It’s worth it.
It’s almost torturous, the slowing down of everything in conjunction with your heartbeat, but you realise that the spot in the corner of your eye widens out over time. You’re barely sleeping by this point – is that your third lion’s mane coffee or your seventh? – and time has ceased to have a meaning beyond “number of hours fasted” or “amount of time passed since my last turmeric capsule.” Your only care in the world is Andi’s face, Andi’s softly whispering voice, and you can’t turn your head towards either of those things because it doesn’t matter how much wheatgrass you’ve taken on board, if you concentrate on the spot at the periphery you lose it. It’s the only thing you want, and the thing you have to force yourself not to look at every single day. This is the price you pay for health, you assume. For wellness.
You didn’t know how well you could feel, that’s for sure. Andi was always trying to get you to eat more healthily and you realise that this is why, that she must have known that there was something beyond life, that there was a reason to be kinder to your body other than for your limited time on earth. Andi had been trying to help you, to prepare you for her passing and what you would need to do to see her again. It’s so obvious, you feel guilty that you didn’t realise it sooner.
At some point you realise that lack of sleep isn’t helping matters and you stand up from your yoga mat with the intention of getting a few hours of shut-eye. This time you know that you need something heavy-duty to help you sleep and you take some almost-expired melatonin that you find at the back of your cupboard, which you were planning to throw out after today anyway so what’s the harm? You almost black out as you climb the stairs, the darkness encroaching on your vision for what feels like minutes and only receding as you reach your bedroom. There’s a bottle of creatine-infused kombucha next to the bed and you take a sip before settling down on to the pillows. This, you think later, is the act that blows the doors wide open. The final act of wellness needed to see things as they really are.
You start to feel more and more strange as you try to close your eyes. They resist you, as though they don’t want to close. Every time you feel that you’re starting to drift away, your eyes spring open and you’re gripped with a sudden anxiety, a sudden anticipation. You find yourself staring at the ceiling and you’re not sure how many hours pass, but you notice that slowly, softly, the spot in the corner of your eye is spreading. It streaks across your vision in stages, crackling all the colours of the rainbow with a deep, dark centre like a crack opening up in the ceiling through which you can see the entire world.
As you peer through the centre of the fissure you see a vast, dark ocean with lights bobbing under the surface like glittering stars. The image reminds you of the stories Andi used to tell about angler fish luring unsuspecting creatures to a watery grave. The sea stretches for miles and if you concentrate now you can feel the ocean air, arid and almost painful on your skin. There is a taste to it that’s not quite salt but has a quality of salt, like lemon juice. Like blood.
There’s a voice on the barren ocean wind that calls to you from the depths, and you can almost see her face now, rising from the water in front of you. You can hear what she’s saying and it hurts, and you instinctively put your hands to your ears to block out the razor-sharp words. When you move them later, your hands are slick, and darker.
It’s not Andi.
It was never Andi of course, how could you have been so stupid, but the veil is almost fully pulled back now and you lie there like Icarus, eyes wide and wild, too close to something destructive and wrong. The woman – if she is even a woman; later, your brain can’t even confirm this for you and you definitely don’t want to think too carefully about it – the creature is walking towards you, is slithering towards you as its clawed hands reach through the gap on your ceiling and stop inches from your heaving chest.
And then the melatonin kicks in, and the world ceases to exist.
*
When you wake up you’re sure it’s morning. The sun is pale and slender against the curtains that you don’t remember closing, and last night feels like a horrible, sick dream. You almost convince yourself that it was a dream, until you see the scar on your chest – a thin, silvery, almost-healed mark just over your heart that wasn’t there before. That could have been made by claws. Or razor-sharp teeth.
You throw away the super green powders, the spirulina, the wheatgrass, even the blender. You stop brewing your own kombucha. You keep the kettlebell, as you never know when it might come in handy. You buy some bread for the first time in a long time, and almost eat the whole loaf in one sitting, toasted, hot and slathered with margarine. You start looking at jobs, and holidays to Mexico. You know now that if you want to live a good life you have to go out into the world and live it.
The scar on your chest throbs every night, a pale reminder of what you’ve seen. You don’t want to think about what it means, what might have been taken from you that night. Or worse, what might have been left behind. You don’t think about what’s behind the veil anymore but you know it’s still there, just outside of your peripheral vision.
Waiting.
About the Author
Sarah Blackshaw is a psychologist and author who haunts the north of England. She is an MA candidate at the University of Manchester, and her work appears in a number of online and print magazines.
www.clinpsychsarah.com
