fragments pt 2

The photograph is

faded now, colours washed thin by time. She is there, holding me against her shoulder, the quiet authority of someone whose arms exist to catch and shield my mother, though I barely knew her, her face tilted toward mine as though listening for something only I could say. The world around us blurs, only her and I are in focus, as if the camera knew to frame what mattered most.

When I hold it,

there is a strange weight to the paper, heavier than it should be, as though memory itself has sunk into its fibres. Looking at it feels both like discovery and loss, a door half-opened to a room I cannot enter.

I imagine the room:

curtains breathing in and out with the breeze, sunlight brushing her skin, caught in the strands of her hair, and the soft fragrance clinging to her, the rhythm of her heart beneath my cheek. Every detail is magnified in my mind, each one a thread connecting me to someone I never really knew.

I notice the way

she tilts her head, the brief narrowing of her eyes, as if she is reading something in me I cannot see myself. Her fingers brush mine, a touch so fleeting yet definitive, and for a moment, the world feels whole.

And then it isn’t.

It is not abrupt,

not cinematic. The air just shifts. The warmth recedes, leaving a chill that doesn’t belong to the room. Her voice, once a presence that could anchor the walls, is gone. Only the photograph remains, still in my hands, capturing what can never return.

Sometimes I linger

on the edge of that memory, tracing it with my eyes, willing the folds of paper to fold back into life. Her presence lingers in the stillness, an unspoken rhythm that makes the empty room feel both familiar and impossible.

It is strange,

how absence can be so loud. Absence leaves its own kind of fingerprint not visible, but pressed into everything. The silence stretches long and thin, threading through ordinary moments a birthday, a quiet afternoon, a street too empty for comfort.

Loss does not

always enter with a bang; sometimes it arrives in a doorway left open, footsteps that never come, a presence that dissolves into suggestion.

I carry her in fragments.

A tilt of a head, the curve of a smile, the imagined rhythm of a heartbeat. The world moves forward, indifferent, but she remains in these small, stitched-together pieces, a shadow I recognise in the corners of memory.

I do not know

if these fragments are enough. Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are all I will ever have. And yet, even in absence, she lingers a pulse beneath the edges of my life, felt more than seen, known more than remembered.