Christine. in And The Rest.

The petty poker-chips of time; a palm-full of pennies we fritter away like loose change on trivial pursuits.

I had so much of it this weekend, a million moments I poured into the slot-machine of everyday life.

I sorted the laundry, segregated the black socks from the white, culled the ones with holes in the heels. I counted minutes in the checkout queue at the supermarket, I counted the calories in twenty-five cornflakes, I counted my ribs twenty-five times. I rode the exercise bike; a two hundred and forty-minute journey to nowhere, the aptly-named gameshow Pointless unravelling on the tv in the background. I flicked through facebook, a rolodex of photographs; the faces we grew up with pasted onto the bodies of adults with Real Careers and a Fiance and a Dog.

I cleaned the kitchen; the fluorescent-yellow antiseptic scent of artificial lemon, a puddle of sunlight a gathering shimmer on the freshly-mopped floor. I sang along to Bad Religion’s rapid-fire rhymes and the haunting acoustic ghost of The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes; a melody that rolls like the hills of a landscape. I picked up the roll of aluminium foil and paused with it still in my hand; I thought of you. Remembering the way you always mispronounced aluminium, because you thought an American accent sounded so glamorous.

We grew up together. We mocked each other’s schoolgirl crushes, we sneaked sly glances at each other’s grades. We wore the same awful brown knickers under our hideous brown P.E skirts; I watched round-eyed as you smoked your first fag.

We played pool together, drinking Malibu and pretending we knew how to flirt in dirty little dive bars with sticky-carpet floors; rank with the tang of Real Ale and cheap vending-machine cigarettes and old-rocker sweat. We had the same baggy jeans with the obligatory wannabe-grunger wallet chains; wreathed in swirls of indoor cigarette smoke, we sang along to Whitesnake and the Scorpions on the jukebox, we chatted to fat straggly-bearded bikers in studded leather jackets and holey Motorhead shirts.

The days when we had everything, and knew nothing.

The dirty little dive bars became classy little wine bars, the smokers were rounded up and herded outdoors; the text messages dwindled as we both moved on and moved away. Our divergent paths, each winding footsteps through our own personal forests, stumbling on the trailing vines.

I had so many minutes this weekend.

Would any of them have been enough, have been something? You could have had them all; I wish you could have known that, I wish it could have mattered. Silence is the heaviest element; the weight of it so hard to lift, sometimes we let it grow roots.

Your mum called me this morning, shellshocked and spacey, but so polite. Shaky gaps in her words, so much sadness, picking up the pieces. My nondescript day of automaton actions was your last; was the day you decided you couldn’t any more, wouldn’t any more. Was the day you decided not to reach out; decided nobody could be enough to change your mind.

I had all the time in the world… just the way we think we do, every day.

The weight of all those breaths I wasted, while you took your last. While I killed time, you killed yourself.

I so hope you finally found the peace your mind denied you.

I just wish. I just wish it could have been different.