The fantasy I’d been harbouring since the day she died—that everything was okay, because she hadn’t really died—was not actually true.
And it struck me on this night, clear as a death knell, that it was never going to be true.
As far as this world was concerned, my sister really was dead. She really was gone. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I could do, now or ever, that would make that right.
In that moment, an abyss of despair opened up so wide inside my chest that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to go on breathing, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.
I can’t remember how many nights I lay awake in that backpackers in Oxford. I can’t remember whether I ate, or drank. Whether I talked. What I do remember is that one night, after I had almost drifted off, I was woken so suddenly by one of the girls coming into our room that my heart started racing in my chest, and it scared me so much that I just gave up on sleep after that. I was too tired to keep trying. The old me would have grabbed her diary and written a list. Maybe had a cup of tea. Eaten something. But those comforts were beyond me now. They felt too hard, required too much effort. All I knew is that I could no longer stay there, I could no longer stand these feelings, so I got up, got dressed, and decided just to walk, and keeping walking, until something changed.
Every nerve in my body seemed to be on high alert that morning. I was aware of every moving thing—cars, ants, clouds. When the clouds went grey, I felt greyer. When the sun popped out, so did a fleeting burst of hope. A passing car sounded so loud I felt it in my chest like a train hurtling right through the middle of me. I leaped back in fright, and had another disturbing thought: what if I had jumped the wrong way? What if I was under that car now, my head all squashed on the road, and they had to call my parents and say, ‘There’s been an accident,’ and they never recovered?
That morning, the unspecified, all-encompassing dread was no longer shadow, it was in me. I was in it. And as I paced I felt there was no separation, no skin at all, between myself and the people I saw. An old lady in a blue coat walked past me and I felt, bizarrely, as though I knew her, could feel what it felt like to be her. Of course, I didn’t but, in that second, I felt that I was her: felt that I knew every pinprick of her hope and sadness, that there was no separation between what she felt and who I was.
Later, much later, I would find a name for this feeling and a way to live with it. I would write songs about it, songs about being ‘born into this skin, that feels just a little too thin, skin I’m never sure if I belong in’. I would draw on this depth of feeling, this acute sensitivity, this ability to imagine, to write every song, to fuel every tiny act of outspokenness, of passion, of courage. But in that moment, in Oxford, I had no way to imagine anything so bold as a future. All I had really was one step, another step; that was as far forward as my mind would allow me to think.
None of my memories had walls that day. They bled into each other, made a mess inside me: pictures of my childhood homes, schoolyard, the hurts, slights, things I had done badly, the angry words. Most of all, the times I’d stood next to Rowena in her bed in the hospital, knowing something bad was happening, trying to ignore the barnacle of my guilt, the voice in my head saying I could have done something, but I didn’t, and the impossible question of why I had lived, and she had died. That day, and for many to come, these memories flew around inside me like a colony of bats that I could not swipe away, could not see through.
Too many feelings. Too much.
My mind was getting stuck that day on words, on one word in particular—‘dead’. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t. But I couldn’t seem to stop thinking the word. I kept repeating it, in cycles of three: a song, dead, dead, dead. So I walked close to the houses, as far away from the road as I could. I stepped over cracks, counted house numbers in my head, matched fence colours, rearranging them in colour order in my imagination, looked at angles and shapes, sorted them into stacks, anything to crowd out the bad words, the bad feeling. These sorting games had always worked, until today. That’s when I got really scared, actually; when I thought, There is nothing left to help me now.
I walked over a bridge and, although I willed myself not to look down, I couldn’t resist and imagined my body flying over the edge, breaking the surface of the shallow water below. Dead dead dead. Terrified, I ducked my head, put my hands on the sides of my face like blinkers, and bolted as fast as I could to the end of the bridge.
My last memory from Oxford is of standing at the bus stop, the one I’d arrived at only a few weeks before. I was shaking so much by then that I
