Writer

"There's stuff that you wanted to say ..."

Ella's voice is quiet, but encouraging. You want to tell her that coming here is a mistake, that you should never have thought therapy could help, but before you can get the words out, she finishes her sentence.

"... but didn't say it."

All you can do is breathe a "Yeah" and wince at the sound of your voice breaking. You know what she's going to say, want to slap your hands over your ears, but again before you can do anything, she does it anyway.

"Say it now."

"No." You close your eyes, trying to stop the tears, shake your head. "Sorry. I can't."

She waits until you've got the crying under control, hands you a tissue and you blow your nose, self-consciously. This isn't like you, but right now you don't like yourself, so what does it matter?

"John, you're a writer. If you can't say out loud what you're feeling then write it down. You know that works."

Again, all you can manage is a slow shake of your head, while you get your breath back. Balling up the used tissue in your hand, you finally, almost defiantly, announce. "The blog? It only existed because he did. I'm done with that."

"Write a book, then; tell the world what he was really like."

You shake your head. Impossible. How could you ever manage to capture the mercurial madman who had become the centre of your life? Every line you would write about every case the two of you solved together would remind you of his absence; the ink on the page would bleed red with your loss.

"Can't do that. I won't feed the trolls."

"Then try something new." She leans back, tucking her long slim legs beneath the chair again. "It doesn't have to be a blog or a journal; write fiction, write poetry. It doesn't have to be about him. Just write. Let some of what you are feeling out. Expose your thoughts to the air, to the page. Better out than in, as the old saying goes."

"Poetry?" You bark out a laugh. "Ridiculous. Dirty limericks and cockney rhyming slang are the only things that've ever stuck in my memory." You hated poetry in school, all those silly verses about daffodils. Ella is giving you a side-eye, a look that says she isn't convinced, so you try to explain. "I'm not one for pages and pages of useless stuff about wandering 'lonely as a cloud'." Your dismissive sarcasm is worthy of… well, Sherlock's reaction. He'd been hard enough on you about the blog. You can imagine him leaning over your shoulder too closely as you typed something and then unleashing his vitriol. No idea of the boundaries, either in terms of personal space or constructive criticism.

She can't hear what's going on in your head. "Not all poetry has to rhyme. And it doesn't have to be long. In fact, it's harder to write something short."

Ella's patience is irritating, so you snap, "If I can't even say what I feel, how on earth can you expect me to write it so other people can see it?"

She shakes her head, "It isn't necessary to make it public; you can write for yourself, not for publication. Anyway, there is poetry that is not confessional but still allows you to express a feeling." She reaches over to a bookshelf behind her. The slim volume she gives you has no title, only what he assumes is the author's name, Suzuki Masajo. You raise an eyebrow.

"Haiku. It's an ancient Japanese art of writing poetry, with strict rules — a line with five syllables, followed by another of seven, and ending with a third line of five. Nature, the seasons, just what you see and experience in ordinary life… it's a distillation of words, carving everything down to the minimum, allowing the reader to complete the thought."

You take the book if only to stop her from talking more about poetry.

oOo

The book lies unopened on the coffee table. You've cleared away the piles of Sherlock's papers, journals, the debris prised off the wall over the sofa —his last evidence board, his attempts to track Moriarty's thinking.

The wallpaper looks bare somehow, the smiley face is accusing you of all the things you failed to do: to keep him tethered to this world, to help him believe that being the World's Only Consulting Detective didn't mean he had to solve Moriarty's puzzles. You failed him in that. Didn't give him enough reason to resist the temptation. And when his reputation had been destroyed, cases stripped from him, when it came down to what you could tell him from your position on the street, looking up at the lonely figure on the parapet of the hospital roof, your words failed him then, too.

It's so odd now. You hear his voice all the time in your head. Uttered in that rich caramel, his words slide in and out of your head constantly. You voice your arguments in there, too, inside your head, giving him now all the reasons why he should have stayed, should have walked away from the edge of the roof. You'd be there for him. You should've told him what he meant to you, and that Moriarty wasn't worth dying for. That you loved him and that he should stay. In your head, you tell him all the things that you should've said, but didn't.

It might be as silent as the grave in the flat, but in your head, it's a war zone. Words are flying like shrapnel and you're bleeding out.

oOo

That night the telly is useless; you bin uneaten what Mrs Hudson came up with, trying to tempt you into eating. Everything tastes of ashes right now. You think you might just go mad.

You consider whether it is worth heading off to the Tesco Metro to buy another bottle of whisky. The predecessor bottle had gone in the bin, too, emptied too quickly over the past few days. Hating yourself for the desperate need to drink yourself into oblivion, you argue with yourself, throwing the memory of your father and sister's alcoholism in front of the wallet that sits on the table, promising a way to stop what is going on in your head. You've woken up too many mornings with a hangover to know that this is going to be a long-term solution. If you want to end it, then there are better ways of killing yourself.

You pick up the poetry book, desperate for something different, something new that doesn't reek of Sherlock.

Half way through, the structure becomes visible; you can see it. Five, then seven, then five. It makes you curious. Is it the same in Japanese? Do their versions of haiku rhyme? Can a translator ever really match the sense of what the poet intended? The Japanese syllables would be quite different from the English ones, making it even harder to translate. You wonder whether something is lost in translation.

Even in English, here is something oddly cleansing in reading the poems. Some are quite sad, or is that you, putting sadness into the words where the poet had not meant it to be like that? One in particular worms its way into your consciousness and mocks you for hours as you stare at the ceiling from your bed.

No escaping it…

I must step on fallen leaves

to take this worn path.

You puzzle over how many different ways this could be read, before sleep finally takes you.

Magpie

Haiku by JH Watson

You look at the words you've written on the blank sheet of paper at the front of the notebook. Inspiration had come to you when you'd returned from the Tesco metro, your first trip out for days because you needed a walk and supplies. (Oh, who the hell do you think you are kidding? Whisky — that's what you seem to be consuming these days) On a whim, you'd put the notebook of blank paper and a new black fibre-tipped pen in the wire basket.

Somehow, typing on a computer doesn't work for you anymore. You haven't opened the laptop in two weeks, because you know that you won't be able to avoid the news sites, the social media hashtags. If they still resonate with his name and what happened, it will sicken you (even more than you are already). If they have gone silent, then that might be even worse. How could the world be so fickle, so shallow as to have destroyed someone so brilliant and then moved on? You can't move on; you're stuck in this limbo trying to deal with what had happened to Sherlock, his life so brutally destroyed by being exposed to the world, surrounded by lies and I told you so smugness. You can't banish from your head Sally Donovan's comment on that first night you met her: "One day we'll be standing around a body and it will be Sherlock Holmes that put it there."

She'd been right, but not in the way she'd thought back then. The whole damned world seems to be standing around Sherlock's dead body, and he is the one who put it there.

" NO, damn it. I didn't, he didn't; it was fucking Moriarty who did it." You say it out loud, breaking the silence.

The dust has accumulated on your laptop for another reason. When you start to hunt and peck at the keys, you still hear Sherlock's sarcastic voice snarking "braille-typing would be faster." You've never learned how to use more than two fingers at a time. Right now, that voice is in your head too often so you'd rather do anything to shut him up. Sherlock is haunting you, talking to you when he's no longer there.

Writing by hand feels easier than typing, even if the fibre-tip goes straight in the bin when you realise that because you're a lefty the damned ink can't dry fast enough to avoid being smeared by as your hand moves across the page. You scabble around in the desk drawer for a pencil and a rubber. Both should be better for writing haiku anyway as the words keep having to be deleted and moved around to work with the syllable rules.

In the drawer, you spot the feather. You're used to Sherlock's packrat habits; he'd always been collecting things. You remember the day that Sherlock had found it in Regent's park. "Magpie, Pica pica, of the family Corvidae family. A most remarkable bird, John. Their brain size relative to body mass is equal to that of great apes and dolphins and only slightly lower than humans. They have extraordinary cognitive abilities, considered by many researchers to be greater than that of the great apes. They play elaborate social games, an avian version of king of the mountain and follow the leader. They have a sense of self, recognising themselves in a mirror." As he turned the long feather over in his hand, showing its iridescence to you, you can hear him say, "And a handsome bird, it has to be said."

Looking at the feather now dulled with dust, you realise that Sherlock had a natural affinity to the bird wearing this plumage, in more ways than one.

You'd told him that you always thought magpies were shot by farmers because they stole eggs and poked out lamb's eyes. You recited that nursery rhyme —well, as much of it as you could remember which didn't go beyond four.

"Ridiculous, John. Of all the corvids, magpies are the least dangerous to lambs. They do prey on other songbirds, it has to be said, but only for the eggs."

You mentioned that opera, the one called The Thieving Magpie. "Aren't they collectors of things?" At the time, you had been looking around the sitting room, eyeing all the stuff that Sherlock had surrounded himself with, including a cut-glass ashtray from Buckingham Palace. Sherlock had merely sniffed, "Rossini has a lot to answer for; research has shown that magpies actually avoid shiny objects. The bird has had a bad press."

Well, he should know. Sherlock was like a magpie in that regard, too.

Black, brown, blue, and green-

Fallen feather gathers dust;

magpie thieves no more.

Dust

"There's really no excuse anymore." Mrs Hudson is standing there with one hand on her hip and the other is holding the ostrich feather duster as if she is threatening you with a weapon. "This place needs a good clean, John. If you're not feeling up to it, I understand, but I need to do it to protect the furniture. Left too long, it gets into the wax and dulls the finish."

You wave a weary hand in submission. Energy to protest is sorely lacking at the moment. Whatever she says, it's still not as bad as it used to be. Sherlock had taken the art of clutter to a new extreme in John's experience. After the police had trashed the place, John had tidied away the piles of paper, closed the open books and replaced them on the shelf.

It had taken you about six months after moving into 221b to stop asking where all the things had come from. Strange antique scientific devices took up residence on the window sills, cheek by jowl with piles of obscure chemistry journals. Coptic Egyptian organ jars jostled for space with bug collections that were nothing short of bizarre.

"Sherlock, who puts a bat in the middle of a beetle collection?" Your question had met with dead silence for almost seven hours. Then suddenly, with his mouth full of pilau rice and chicken jalfrezi takeaway, Sherlock had mumbled, "I did. It's mine. I was nine. Mummy wouldn't let me put a bird wing into the box. I wanted to understand how beetles could fold their wings inside the carapace."

Everything in the flat that had come with Sherlock has a similar story, but you'd never got around to finding out the backstory on a lot of things. They sit there, all those bits and pieces of his life, accusing you of just how much you had failed him.

The thought propels you out of your seat. "Let me help, Mrs Hudson."

She hands you a spray can of Pledge and a yellow cotton duster. "You can do the bookcase behind his chair."

Funny that; you've always noticed how Mrs Hudson was quick to identify the things that Sherlock had brought with him the flat. "His chair" and "his sofa" had come with him from his former flat; more a bedsit, you think, according to Lestrade who had told you a little bit about Sherlock's past over a pint about a year after you had moved in. Greg had always been careful not to say too much, leaving you with the impression that he and Sherlock had some history.

As you take the duster and can from her hands, you can't help thinking bitterly that whatever had been behind Lestrade and Sherlock's relationship around a crime scene, it hadn't stopped the DI from arresting him. With friends like that who needed enemies? You remove the fan, the piece of coral and the skull with half a spine inside the glass dome. Averting your eyes from the huge hole chiselled out of the frontal lobe, you place it on the table. You'd asked him about how he'd gotten his hands on a trepanned skull and he's laughed. "Not a medical procedure. That's the effect of a war hammer. He's from the eighth century."

You get to work on the top of the bookcase, spraying and then rubbing until a shine comes up. Mrs Hudson and Sherlock had waged war against each other on the subject of dust. She would do some cleaning when they were out of the flat, but no matter how carefully she re-positioned an item, he would notice and almost flinch in pain. You notice that she isn't being as careful now.

The little bronze kneeling warrior is moved to the leather and chrome chair. She puts Billy in your chair. In the reflection from the mirror at the back of the display cabinet you are dusting you can see her rubbing her hands on her pinny.

"Whatever happened to his jack knife?" She asks.

"Police took it."

"Oh…" she starts dusting. "Just as well. This poor mantelpiece has got so many holes in it now."

Bills have stopped coming to the flat. According to Mrs Hudson, they'd been re-directed to Mycroft and would be paid for as long as you want to stay in the flat. Even so, every day it is getting harder.

You start moving things off the bottom shelf. One of the two framed Egyptian hieroglyphic papyrus; you'd never got around to asking Sherlock for a translation. It gets deposited on the desk, along with the black polished orb. You wonder if you still need to heed Sherlock's warning not to touch the inside of the bronze mortar and pestle ("poison traces implicates the pharmacist") after learning that it was from an unsolved murder in 1823.

The various books lying on the shelf are very dusty. Looking at the spine of the one on top, you wonder why Sherlock would have been interested in Peter Hawker's Instructions to Young British Sportsmen, published in 1833. Opening it, the title page gives you the explanation. The full title is Hawker's Instructions to Young British Sportsmen in All the Relates to Guns and 's one thing you shared in common. The pile of journals and magazines under the blue skull print contain issues of Gun Mart Magazine; you and he used to argue over who got to read it first.

You put the Hawker book down on the table, noticing that you've left fingerprints on the dust on the leather cover. Now there is no one here to notice it no longer matters, so you leave it uncleaned.

Late that night, looking around at the newly gleaming surfaces, the tidier room mocks him. Everything is in its rightful place except the one person who should be.

Eloquence silenced

Dust motes fall on the mantel

Now undetected.

The Fridge

You've got to clean out the fridge. One more time, for posterity's sake. You couldn't leave Mrs Hudson this one last chore. You wonder if you will ever be able to look at a fridge, pull out the crisper drawer or check what's in the shelves on the door without remembering how and why these spaces had been colonised for Sherlock's experiments.

You've said your piece to that black headstone. Not that you expect him to have listened. (And why should you listen to me? I'm just your friend.) When he'd said that he didn't have friends, rather than argue that you were one such friend, you'd snarked back, "Wonder why?"

All those things you'd said to him, Hurtful things. (You machine!) The words come back to haunt you. (Friends protect people) Your words line up to accuse you, rotting in your brain; the stench is enough to make you gag worse than the first time you found an unlabelled Tupperware box at the back of the fridge and rashly opened it to take a look.

Sherlock had replied to your outrage, "How was I to know you'd do something so stupid? And you've ruined the experiment by the way. Opening it up introduced new oxygen so will have changed the bacteria growth timeline. I'll have to start over; it takes six weeks."

You'd put up with it at first, accepting it as simply a necessary part of him being a mad scientist. Now, of course, you know better, having seen the cases cracked, the puzzles solved, the lives saved and justice delivered because of what went on in the back of the fridge.

Body parts in the fridge

"What's the crisper drawer for?"

"It's my mini-morgue".

Author's notes: for those who are interested in poetry, you may be interested to know that I am adopting (adapting?) in this story a poetic form first coined by Bashō in 17th c Japan. The idea of linking a "prose poem" with a haiku is called haibun. The prose is a focused testimony or recollection; the haiku at the end is a postscript, a sort of murmuring echo, a distillation. Bashō set some guidelines for haibun, which emphasized that it should evoke a sense of aware (pronounced ah-WAR-ay) which is the quality of certain objects or places to evoke longing, sadness or immediate empathy. In How to Haiku, Bruce Ross writes, "If a haiku is an insight into a moment of experience, a haibun is the story or narrative of how one came to have that experience."

Kitchen Table

One last look around, to make sure that everything you want to take with you is securely packed away in the cardboard boxes on the landing. The taxi will be coming in less than an hour to move your life on.

In the end, there is surprisingly little that is worth taking. Clothes and shoes, toiletries, your alarm clock radio, the metal box of army memorabilia, the RAMC mug, a few books and journals that you'd accumulated over the past two years. Two suitcases and two boxes.

Is that all? It's a reminder of how little your life is now that he's gone. He'd been so full of life and had filled your life so much.

You wonder if there is something of his you should take with you — a momento mori. He would have sniffed and murmured, "Sentiment." Anger flares and you reject the idea of taking anything. He's left enough scars for you to remember.

A last glance into the kitchen. Too clean now, too ordered. But, there's that nasty scratch that Sherlock had never explained. So much that he'd never said to you and will remain a mystery now. You wonder if you will ever be able to look at a kitchen table again without being reminded of what is missing.

Kitchen table? "No!

A dedicated lab-bench

for forensic work".

Sirens

You move south of the river. A change of scenery is called for when one is trying to move on. It's a place in the middle of "The Dog Kennel Hill Estate" and the area lives up to its name, but it's all you can afford on the army pension and surgery salary.

Sherlock would have warned you off, citing murders and muggings, illustrating his point with some particularly gruesome details stored in his Mind Palace instead of the names of planets and how they orbit around the sun.

The new job at the nearby GP surgery is full-time because you have no appetite for looking at the four walls of what is the brochure had called a "studio flat, ideal pied-a terre for the hard-working professional." A caramel voice in his head snarks "grotty little bedsit".

When you shout at him to leave you alone, he has the decency to do so, unlike the neighbour two floors above you who likes to party all Saturday night with speakers that are probably the size of your fridge. You know better than to ask the neighbour to keep it down; besides, it drowns out that voice in your head. What you like most of all here is that no one knows you. You are anonymous, just another nearly-middle-aged boring bloke. When you drag your weary body home from the clinic, it's to a microwaved ready-meal, consumed while sat in a threadbare chair in front of the telly.

Tonight's walk home detours to Sainsbury's for three carrier bags of ready-meals, tea bags, milk, laundry powder and whisky. As you head home, there is a scream of sirens and blue lights flashing on the main road. Old habits kick in, and your instinct is to run towards the danger. Then your heart sinks as the police car and ambulance turn into Pytchley Road; your flat in Petworth House is on that road.

By the time you cross the intersection, police constables have already taped off the entrance way to the block and you're left there standing on the pavement with three heavy carrier bags. "Let me help; I'm a doctor" doesn't get you past the constable because he tells you that the victim is in need of an undertaker, not a doctor.

When you're finally allowed back in, other residents are hanging over the balcony watching the show below. They tell you that it was Kendall, the Robinson's boy on the fourth floor. There's a lot of head-shaking and hand-wringing; one woman he vaguely recognises is crying and shouting at a constable who is doing door-to-door. "Who gonna solve this crime? Why don you do som'at about that gang? Where's justice gone?"

You wish you had words to console her, but you don't.

After you put your groceries away, you pour yourself a glass of whisky and open the notebook to a new page.

Blues and twos scream by

London crime chills blood in my veins

The game is over.

Nightmare

Shocked into wakefulness, you turn your eyes away from the unfamiliar ceiling. A sense of where you are eludes you until someone slams a door upstairs and the sound allows you to locate your current position: pinned down by a nightmare, lying in bed, at Number 32 Petworth House, Pytchley Road, East Dulwich, SE22 8DD, London.

Or is this the dream, an escape from the reality of the sand, the sun, the sound of gunfire?

Odd that here all you can feel is numbness, the absence of pain, like someone has administered a nerve block, cut off all feeling. Your limbs lie unmoveable, your breathing is far too calm. Are you on a respirator? Is this some figment of your imagination? How have you escaped the pain of the battlefield? Are you in a field hospital being seen to by someone in a bizarre switch of your usual position, tending to a comatose patient? If so, the morphine drip has taken you away and landed you in this bit of south London. Why here? You have no idea.

You struggle to remember, push through the fog, reaching for the moment when you were bent over a dying soldier and then your shoulder exploded. You can taste the sand and dust, feel the sweat running down the inside of your uniform, so encumbered by body armour and kit that you feel more turtle than human. But your shell of protection had been torn aside. That was real, even if you can't feel the pain now. It must be because they've sedated you. Unhinged from the reality by drugs, your mind has put you in this strange room in south London.

"You invaded Afghanistan." The voice uttering those words made the two of you laugh, leaning up against a wall, breathless after running from something. No, wait. That's not it. You and he were running toward something, not away. You remember bravery, adrenaline pumping through your veins. "I said danger, and here you are." It felt so real. You felt the way you do in dreams, superhuman, every sensation and emotion magnified into one glorious exalted moment of pure joy before ending in utter terror and loss.

The fragments are dissipating; the way dreams do, tendrils of memory that thin out and disappear even as you reach for them. What the dream means escapes you now; leaving you only the thought that the moment of agony felt so real, the way that nightmares do.

When will you wake up?

Harsh desert sand, savage sun-

Gunfire and blood punctuate

My battlefield dream.

Pavement

You step around a suspicious-looking stain on the pavement outside the surgery. Not everything is blood. It could be mud; the soil of south London has a bit of reddish tinge to it from iron. Or maybe a child spilt their carton of fruit juice; cranberry by the look of it. In any case, you give it a wide berth, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Perhaps the years spent at crime scenes gave you an innate sense of caution about evidence.

It's when you push open the door that you spot the bloody handprint on the glass. It's enough to make you run into the reception room, looking for the injured party.

A row of startled faces turns in your direction — patients waiting patiently in their chairs, the usual collection of elderly, mums with children, the occasional male of working age, trying to get the sick note that will keep them away from work.

The receptionist sees you and shakes her head. "All over now." You get the rest of the story from her more quietly. "Mrs Salisu; she fell outside. Landed on her groceries and ended up with a piece of glass from a broken pickle jar in her hand. Blood everywhere. After first aid, we sent her off in a taxi to Kings. She needed an x ray to see if there was any bone and tendon damage."

Your shift starts in ten minutes; in your office you need all that time to get rid of the shakes, driven by adrenaline. The rest of the day and early evening appointments pass in a blur of bog-standard complaints and prescription renewals, soothing you back into a state of comfortable numbness.

When you leave the surgery after dark, the street lamp illuminates the blood stain on the pavement again, now rendered harmless by the explanation you'd been given. Less harmless is the chain of thought it sets off, a sense of loss and foreboding that follows you home, keeps you company on the stairs, slips in behind you when you close the flat door and go about fixing yourself a ready meal.

"When you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield." His brother had said that to you, accused you of missing the war. He'd implied you'd been willing to hook up with Sherlock as some sort of methadone for your addiction to the adrenaline of war.

When the meal is done, the washing up over, you sit in your chair and rue the fact that the feeling is still there, lurking in the shadows. What Mycroft didn't understand about you and what drew you to Sherlock could fill a dozen notebooks like the one you've opened on your lap. You're hoping something — anything — will inspire some poetry to take your mind off what you are sure will haunt your dreams tonight.

It had taken a couple of months of living with Sherlock to shake off the worst of the Afghanistan dreams, but they've returned to haunt you. Weird how your subconscious mind works, conflating your tragedies. Now, the nightmares don't end in you getting shot. It's a different wound this time, one that hurts more and will take much longer to heal.

A different war

London's battlefield ends with

Blood on the pavement.

Walking

Your quick march of life has slowed to a cautious amble. What was once a pavement parade has slowed to a perambulation. Everything now happens in slower motion, shoulders more rounded, proceeding at a funereal pace. Where you once lengthened your stride to match his, now you have no one to please but yourself, no one to keep you moving forward, eyes fixed on your common objectives — getting back to Baker Street as quickly as possible, off to New Scotland Yard, or best of all, a crime scene.

That's the oddity of life now. It's something that happens to you, rather than you making it happen. A dull routine. The walk to and from the surgery is boring, a chore, the daily commute that sometimes happens without you even being aware of your surroundings. Your very being seems to have switched to auto-pilot. There is no destination, no sense of forward movement that keeps your step lively. You are inert, de-activated, demotivated. You don't walk for pleasure any more.

Nor is there any need to walk off the occasional frustrations of living with a madman, a twelve-year-old public schoolboy with the arrogance and manners of someone who's been looked after all his life by others. "Getting some air" is what you used to call it, those marches around Regent's Park when you blew off the steam of living at Baker Street. Those walks were the way you came to terms with what it meant to you, living with Sherlock, sharing your lives together. With every step you took on those walks, you counted up the pluses and subtracted the minuses, always coming to the same conclusion; you were lucky to be with him. That decision re-affirmed, your walk always took you home, back to the life you loved and the person with whom you shared that life.

Nowadays, nothing and no one seems able to propel you into motion. Walking is no longer a synchronisation of yourself with him. It's no longer a prescription for setting aside annoyances and resolving your differences, leading you back to him. Walking is no longer a pleasure. Sometimes, when the ache in your leg reminds you of the time you needed a crutch, it's positively painful. You try to ignore it. It's only transport.

Slow march by myself

My stride no longer matching his

I've been left behind.

Smiley

At first, when you moved south of the river, the spray-painted walls bothered you. It was vandalism, ugly property damage inflicted by youth who were bored, unemployed, uninspired. Of course, Sherlock would have been able to decipher the tags, read the runes and identify the territorial markers of various gangs of south London. He'd tell you that painting their street art was harmless — a two-fingered salute to authority, an act of rebellion against what life had dealt them — unlike the knife crime that claimed too many young lives.

Within a couple of months, you'd grown used to seeing it, so much so that it became a sort of East Dulwich wallpaper that you no longer notice.

Then some idiot had to paint THAT — the big yellow circle with the two dots for eyes and an arc of a smile. You tell yourself it's just graffiti; it doesn't matter. Every time you walk by it, the smile leers, knowing you to be a liar.

It's bad enough that everyone these days seems to use the emoji at the end of their texts. When the surgery started using the smiley stickers to reward kids who got their tetanus shots, you'd baulked and refused to issue them to any patients you see.

"What have you got against a smiley?" the practice nurse had asked. "Everyone loves the smiley; it's happy."

You won't, can't explain to her that it brings up such painful memories that you want to cry. You shove down the pain and try to move on.

You've found a different way to get to the surgery. Going out of your way to avoid that particular wall adds ten minutes to your walk to and from work. It's worth it to avoid the wound.

Graffiti smiley

whispers "ASBO" as it makes

bullet holes in your heart.

Footprints

You wake with a start when the alarm rings. As your eyes blink open, the thought that this is another early day shift at the surgery pumps a bit of adrenaline, enough to make you sit up. It's then that you realise something odd about the light in the room. Despite the curtains being closed, it's surprisingly bright in the room, making you wonder if you've somehow overslept.

A glance at the clock reassures you: seven o'clock. The odd light gets you out of bed; the cold makes you hiss a breath in when your bare feet hit the floorboard. Two steps to the window and the curtain pulled back to reveal a surprise.

White! It's snow that has reflected off the roofs and the pavement.

It snows so rarely in London, especially south London that you can't resist a smile. It puts you in a good mood for once. The shower, shave, breakfast and tea rituals keep you in motion and soon out the door. The roads are clear of snow; gritters keep the traffic moving. Pedestrians have tramped their way along, spoiling the effect, grinding snow into muddy slush. It's only on the shortcut through the park that you see what you'd forgotten happens on days like these. At the gate, a cacophony of footprints —mostly human but dog paw prints, too—cut the pristine snow, making visible to your eyes a memory of an earlier occasion. Snow in Regent's Park, a gate with the same sort of evidence carved into the snow. The flood of deductions returns to cut your soul with an icy dagger.

"See this one here, John?"

The voice in your head doesn't try to conceal his excitement. Sherlock had loved snow like this and he'd gone down on his knees into the snow beside the confusion, deducing the footprints at fever pitch, telling you exactly how many people had passed this way, what sort of people they were and why they were walking here.

You'd smiled at his enthusiasm and laughed, warning him not to let Anderson see him or he'd accuse him of being the real sniffer dog. You'd challenged him to find your own footprint amongst all that mess. He'd not hesitated. "This one, John," pointing to one which looked like anyone else's to your eye.

"How can you tell?"

He'd looked up with those startling eyes of his, taking their silver colour from the whiteness all about him. "I know every one of your shoe prints."

"Others could wear the same shoes, Sherlock," you'd challenged him.

"No one walks the same way you do. I know your step better than I know my own."

Looking at the footprints now, they mock your loss. You will never see his again and no one will ever look to see where you have walked.

Snow paints the grass white

Many footprints hiding yours.

No one sees you now.

Epilogue:

You're in the kitchen, packing up the few things that you will need when you move back to Baker Street. So many things here were Mary's; you'll not miss them at all when they're gone. The house clearance sale will deal with all the debris of your failed marriage. You're moving because you can no longer face the accusations that stare at you here: her clothes, her choice of furniture, carpets, the wallpaper — everything screams of her lies. There is nothing of the real Mary here; it was all just a cover story, camouflage, a way to hide, to pretend you and she were a normal happily married couple.

You want to go home now; you're finally ready.

While you do your duty in the kitchen, Sherlock is in the living room, picking his way through the papers in the desk. You'd delegated that task to him, knowing he's quicker at deciding what needs to be saved, what can be shredded, what to bin in the black rubbish sack. Receipts, old correspondence, the detritus of your time with her. There are too many painful memories in there, a neatly pigeon-holed hell that cannot contain the demons that drove her to lie so much. When you can face it, in the comfort of 221b, you'll go through the box he's filling and decide what should be done with what little remains.

You should have done this months ago, but there were things in your head you needed to work through. Sherlock's return from the dead, your wedding, the debacle with Magnussen, the unmasking of Vivian Norbury, Mary's death — so much has happened, so many excuses not to do what your heart has always wanted to do but was too afraid to admit: to seize a second chance with both hands, to start over again and do it right this time.

You make tea for the both of you and take the mugs into the living room where you find Sherlock isn't at the desk; he's sitting in the chair reading a thin book. As you put his mug down on the coffee table, on the coaster that Mary had always insisted you use, you recognise the notebook.

Embarrassment brings a flush of red to your cheeks. "Oh, that. Just throw it in the rubbish bag."

The startled blue eyes that look up at you are wet, grief etching lines of pain in his face. "No…these are important, if not to you, to me."

You have no answer at first, then try to explain. "My therapist thought I should write something, anything really. I couldn't face the blog, so I dabbled with this haiku thing."

"Why did you stop?"

It's a hard question for you to answer. "After I met Mary, she said I didn't need that anymore; told me to stop."

Sherlock looks at you, eyes filled with pain. He closes the notebook and holds it close to his chest. "All this time, I had no idea the amount of pain I inflicted on you. I only saw your anger and knew it to be justified. I am so sorry, John."

You shrug. "Yeah, well, I'm sorry, too. Sorry that it took me so long to realise that the anger was my way of hiding the truth from both of us. Mary was wrong." You shake your head. "Wrong in so many ways; wrong for me, for sure."

"You loved her."

"Is that why you tried so hard to be friends with her? Even after she shot you?"

He looks away, "You chose her. I chose to respect who I thought was bringing you the happiness I had denied you."

"Everything about her was a lie. That's all over now." You can't resist an incredulous laugh.

Sherlock closes the notebook and gets up from the chair. "You should keep writing poetry. You have a gift."

The thought makes you smile. You haven't written in a long while, but the habit of counting syllables and honing your words is one you'd found comforting. "Maybe. Only this time, I won't be so damned sad about everything."

The expression he gives you cannot be summarised. There is hope, affection, even love in there, too. Softly, a bit tentatively he says gently, "Write about your life now." He holds out the book.

You take it and put it in the Baker Street box.

Later that night, in the comfort of your home, you take it out and write:

Thoughts carved into words

Now honoured by sharing;

You inspire me!