Five months

Music is really important. It always has been, but more so right now.

Music has power.

It’s a catalyst for working out all kinds of emotions, remembering happy times and sad times, hard times, car times, calming times and crises.

I’m stuck on a song – The Night Will Always Win by Elbow. This tune is one I knew about for a while – as one of those extras between the songs you really like on an album, most often skipped.

Elbow – the night will always win

Now though, it has new meaning, a richness, and that quality of great songwriting that makes it sound like it’s was written for you. It almost doesn’t matter who Guy Garvey was thinking about when he wrote the song, it’s mine now! A connection in the tone and the lyrics that surgically, precisely states how life is.

“I miss your stupid face…” he laments; “I try to clothe you’re bones with scratchy Super 8s, exaggerated stories and old tunes”

This is where I am, living this refrain in hourly cycles between housework and keeping Millie busy.

I talk to his photograph, stroke my fingers across his Batman onesie folded on his bed, hug Rabbit, cook his favourite dinner, smell the dried flowers from his funeral. Emotions stick to objects as much as to sounds. Each pass, each touch and memory carries a charge that builds and builds until a song or sound or smell or sense suddenly grounds me and the high voltage reality of Kip’s absence shocks a crippling assault.

Days pass of these sequences, becoming months. What can be done? The universe carries on. We carry on.

Sometimes we almost feel like we’re ok…