writer's life

Back to the Future

Bloganuary writing prompt
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
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On the whole I neither think about the past or the future, I tend to be in the present. Unless something has gone wrong, or I have something to look forward to. At the moment something has gone wrong and my head is in the past, mostly, reminiscing.

I’m in Kent, and not at home in Moffat. I’m staying in the home of my youngest sister, Angela, because she died on the tenth (10.01.24) and her daughter is broken. I cannot leave her just yet. Being in Kent, where I grew up, and having lost my beloved sister, I am exploring our past and mapping our personal combined geographies, and remembering. I’m remembering the names of places we loved as kids, and that I’d totally forgotten: Allhallows; Minster; Leysdown; Camber Sands… And revisiting places we visited, both as adults and children.

Whitstable harbour

Angela loved Whitstable. We pretty much always went there when I came to stay. We took our children there when they were little and, once they’d grown up, we went by ourselves to eat oysters and wander the old streets and harbour. I took my Scottish husband there on Friday and he loved it just as much as we did, Angela would have been delighted!

Angela delighted in many things, but the thing she delighted in most, apart from her two children – ‘they just seem so happy!’ she told me with glee when I asked her about them last summer – was the theatre. And the play she loved the most, she’d seen it umpteen times, was Hamlet. She went to see every new version, every re-staging, and would travel pretty much anywhere (in the UK) to see it. Now she is my Ophelia, taken, not by a broken heart but by a cancer that began in her pancreas and spread across her body before anything could be done to save her.

When I think of the future now it’s too abstract to comprehend, an amorphous blob with little detail. There will be a funeral, and we have been choosing coffins and discussing music and the like, but beyond that, who knows?

So I dwell in the past, remembering.

9 thoughts on “Back to the Future”

    1. Thank you, Scarlet. A good thing to arise from this is that I’m really getting to know my niece and nephew in their adult form and they are delightful, compassionate human beings. And I’m seeing more of my brother than I have since we were kids. X

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  3. This is just so sad, Eryl. To lose your beloved sister. And what you write here, such a journey back in time. The poignancy of loss. And how we locate it within physical places within our minds. The past and our memories the best way to hold onto what once was.

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