I was about to take a bite of my panini when you told me that after I had left home you slept with a photograph of me under your pillow for months.
You’d have been about five years old at the time. Long golden brown hair, a cheeky smile. My daughter. The thought of you lifting your pillow every night and picking up my photograph with your little finger and thumb breaks my heart.
Your brother is here, too. He has just told me that he had a photograph of me and him stuck to the side of his bunk bed so he could see it every morning. He’d have been seven; smiling eyes, spiky hair, dancing to Michael Jackson.
Now, nine years later, we’re on our way to Somerset for a week, and you both laugh at me when I rest my panini back on the plate, unbitten.
The next day we go to the theme park. Your brother and I go on all the rides, weightless stomachs lurching as we spin and swing. You are stubborn, refusing to go on anything which looks remotely scary, but as the sun passes overhead your confidence grows and in the end you’re next to me, gripping onto the bar with white knuckles, staring at your feet.
After we get off I ask if you enjoyed it. You say no, but I catch a flicker of a smile.
The beach. The tired sun is almost at the horizon; I try to watch it set but end up bleaching white circles into my retinas and have to blink them away. The cool sea breeze comes in off the Atlantic. The sky is turning a dusty blue.
We find our names, carved into the wet sand the evening before. The tide has not come in far enough to erase them.
Seagulls laugh overhead; a half-moon looks on, face beaming. You throw a ball to each other and play-fight in the sand, my son and daughter. The sun slips gently below the horizon, the last gasps of orange in the clouds. I hope you’re both okay now. You seem like you are.
you seem like you are
sits with me.