Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage. . .

Your coffin reached the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.

And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.

For a moment amongst the crowd, I saw you. I've since found out it's common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.

When someone dies they can be any age you remember can't they ' she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued 'You probably think about the grown-up Tess because you were still close to her. But when I woke up I thought of her when she was three wearing a fairy skirt I'd got her in the Woolworth's and a policeman's helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger so tiny they didn't even meet. I remembered the shape of her head and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times she's thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her everytime I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses is my daughter.