How to Stay

"Despite the years he has lost, sometimes a memory flies back. It can be very small, the detail that sparks a piece of his past. Glancing at it, another person might not look twice. And yet an insignificant detail can zoom out of its ordinary setting and induce such sorrow he feels twisted inside."
from "Perfect" by Rachel Joyce

I choose them carefully, the little pieces of my life that I take to show her in a quiet room with a softly ticking clock. They are fragments of something bigger, something scattered that I can never gather and hold together all at once. My counsellor is patient and kind. It's like archeology - this piecing together of parts with no sense of the whole. Someone suggests a timeline might help - my life in linear going from A to B. My life has never felt linear - sometimes my past is in front of me, my future behind and the present nowhere to be found. I try to pin it down on paper. It takes many days of flicking backwards and forwards through pages using different coloured pens to differentiate between the years, the places, the people, the events and experiences that make up who I am right here, right now.

I spread the decades of my life out on the table between us and see them for first time through someone else's eyes. She is struck by how much loss there has been and wonders, with so many endings and leavings, how does a person learn how to stay?