Sunday Morning
London - Feb 2020
Mica always kept the curtains open at night. She liked being woken up by the sun. She’d had such a lovely dream. The sun filtering through her windows looked just like the one in her dream. Today was going to be a good day.
She slowly stretched and reached for her phone. Six thirty am. Good. That meant she could have some quiet time before getting up. She asked ‘Alexa’ to open her ‘yellow’ playlist, the one where she’d downloaded all of her happy, mellow songs.
As she listened to Sam Cooke singing ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, Mica closed her eyes and rocked her head in time with the music.
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Beneath Your Beautiful by Labrinth came on next. She knew she should never have included it on her happy playlist. This belonged on the green one, the one for love. How she wished she could ‘see beneath his beautiful tonight’. But that would never happen again, not in this world.
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She turned the music off and no longer able to relax, got up and headed for the kitchen. She put a capsule in the coffee machine and waited for her wake up drink to steam into the cup.
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Why, why, why? As usual Mica failed to find an answer. Why did he have to die? So young! She tried to think back to happy times like taking the children to the Alps when they were just two and five. It was Sean’s first time in the mountains, but he’d loved them just as much as she knew he would. Mica started to smile as she remembered how he’d taken their son on a quad bike ride through the forests. His grin wider than a river… Then her face fell as the memory fragmented and fell to pieces.
A phone alert broke her reveries. Oh God! How could she have forgotten? Today of all days?
21 July 2017
Sean’s anniversary
Ten years. Ten years today. And she’d somehow managed to forget. Well, not exactly forget. She knew it was coming and had thought of little else for the past week. But now that it was here, it still had the power to shock her. It still had the power to change her day.
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But she didn’t want to be sad today. She didn’t want her head filled with images of his sunken cheeks. Images of his wasted body. Images of his lifeless eyes. She wanted to get to the point where she could remember him without crying. Remember him happy and healthy. Remember good times and smile. Maybe today could be different.
She put Sam Cooke back on and smiled as he repeated the words; ‘a change is gonna come, oh yes it will’.
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