Following the funeral she didn't return to the large house which she shared with Michael. She knew that he would not be home and couldn't face hours of her own company rattling around the house, torturing herself about what she had done and what she had failed to do. Instead she drove to her flat, the place where she had always felt most at home. The place that she hadn't been able to return to in the ten days since his death. It held too many memories now. Despite this she steeled herself and stepped from the car, slipping the key into the lock and turning it easily, waiting with tense anticipation as the door swung open to reveal the hall of the flat she knew so well. A sense of anticlimax flooded her veins as she took in her surroundings. Light glinted off every surface of the kitchen, it's harsh brightness burning into her mind and causing her to wince involuntarily. On the side sat the note that he had written on the very last time he had left the flat before her to head into work. Through the open bathroom door she saw two toothbrushes – one blue, one red – resting together in the toothbrush holder, just as they had been the last time that the flat was occupied. Everything was exactly as it had been left on that terrible morning. Only time's natural progression had changed things – the once unoccupied doormat was now littered with circulars, loan offers and adverts for take away pizza. The flowers that he had bought her on their last night together lay dying in a vase on the hall table, their petals, once a beautiful deep pink shade, were now brown and withered. It was as if she had never been away. As if the flat was unaware that anything had changed; that one of it's usual inhabitants would never be returning. Irrational as she knew it was she couldn't help but feel enraged by this. How dare everything seem so normal when nothing could ever be normal again? Her normality had perished with him and unless they perfected a technique of resurrection, would stay gone.
Searching for an outlet of her temper she moved through the flat like a whirlwind, disrupting everything in her midst. She disposed of the leaflets on the doormat and the food in the fridge that had long since gone off and the flowers. Even the second toothbrush went in the rubbish bag and she felt only a small pang of regret at this. It was stupid to get emotionally attached to a toothbrush and she knew that if he could see her now, he would be laughing at her. Finally she came to the one thing she had been putting off dealing with. Logically she knew she couldn't leave his note forever but she couldn't bring herself to dispose of it. This simple message was possibly the last thing he ever wrote down and as such, held priceless value for her. Despite it's less than earth shattering contents that detailed simply the need for another pint of milk and the fact that he would catch up with her at work, she held it as though it was the most important document in history. To her at that moment it was.
For a long time she stood in the kitchen, the bin bag held loosely in her grasp, staring unseeing at the note that lay in her hand. Almost unconsciously she realised that she was memorising his distinctive scrawl. Doctors handwriting he used to call it and it was a classic example; on more than one occasion she would find several nurses clustered around a set of notes in a futile attempt at deciphering his illegible scrawl. She took in the long, thin letters that blurred into one unfathomable line and the occasional loops which were his concession towards making each letter in any way different to the one before and after it. She memorised the small tails that adorned the end of each word, regardless of what the final letter was, the small wavy line was never absent. Finally she moved to the large glass cabinet that cast it's shadow over the lounge of the flat and slipped the paper into the small drawer in the middle of the row of drawers. When she bought this item of furniture she had resolved to keep that drawer to hold precious things that she didn't want to be parted from. So far the extent of her collection was her passport and this note.
Standing in the middle of her spotless flat she glanced at her watch and was somewhat disappointed to note that she had managed to waste only half an hour of the interminable stretch of loneliness that lay before her. She had nothing – a dead lover and a job for which both herself and the trust held serious doubts about her ability, always assuming she was allowed to practice again. She only had her marriage because neither of them had ever managed to summon up the energy or inclination to file for divorce. Despite Michael's valiant attempts to salvage her job she couldn't bring herself to feel thankful; he might be able to save her job but she was no longer interested in the career which had once been so precious to her. Without him her job was nothing. Without him, she was nothing. At the thought of this she felt very lethargic. Not tired – she hadn't been able to sleep properly since his death – but heavy limbed and listless. Suddenly she was unable to contemplate doing anything else but lying down so she made her way to the bed and lay across it, experimenting with the unusual amount of space that she now had. There was no longer anyone to complain if her limb strayed to the wrong side; if she so wished she could have an extremity in every corner of the bed. She could pull the covers around her like a cocoon without anyone shrieking because in doing so she had exposed their naked body to the cool air that filled the bedroom. She could make all manner of noises in her sleep without anyone digging her in the ribs to tell her to shut up. These were things that if she had been asked a fortnight ago she would have said irritated her but now she found that she didn't want to lie cocooned diagonally across the bed and snore. All she wished to do was lie as she had on numerous nights on half the bed with half the cover and his reassuring presence behind her. The bed felt strangely empty without him although before him she had been more than used to being alone there. This was her existence now; an empty flat, an empty bed, an empty heart and an empty life. This thought finally delivered her the release that she had been craving for days and she felt tears snaking down her face, salty rivers that flowed from her eyes down until they pooled on the duvet that sat just beneath her neck. She was finally beginning to realise that he wasn't coming back to her and only now did she feel able to cry.
