june 6th, 1981
Idonia Street, St Paul Deptford, GREENWICH
•••
Dearest little birdy,
My diary entries are becoming annoyingly inconsistent. I wish I could find time to open up the pages and write my thoughts more frequently, but something feels different. Everything is changing and I cannot figure out how or why, it's more of a feeling.
While mama believes I am becoming better, I know that something big is coming. Something bad. I don't know what it is but I have never been more terrified of such a feeling.
Another reason I am inconsistently opening up these crumpled pages is because I have been busy. Busy with life, if you will believe such a thing. I went over to fathers home today and as I sat on the bus watching the trees merge with the green horizon and the horizon merge with the blue sky, I sighed because it all looked like a mess. A beautiful mess—as paradoxical as it may sound—it looked like those paintings that seem as though they might be worth not a single dime, and yet are put up in auctions and galleries for all the world to see. I never do this—visit my father—not often anyway. He was never home much when Jema and I were little. We were not close much, but Jema was ever the father's girl and when our family disintegrated, she went his way and I went mine.
I knocked on his front door and it felt strange to have to be invited into your own fathers home, as I walked in I saw Jema was there, sitting and talking to her fellow fifteen-year-old friends in the living room. When she smiled at me excitedly, I did not realize how much I had missed my sister. I smiled at them but shyly did not join and walked away before I received an invitation to sit down and braid hair. She looked so happy and I wondered if she knew my current state of mind.
I don't usually speak to Nancy often, not since the split. She always seemed busy even before: cutting our vegetables, preparing our meals, doing the laundry. But today I felt as though I should speak to her. I was there to see my father but Nancy is a lovely character and I absolutely adore the intellectual conversations we sometimes have.
When I walked into the kitchen she saw me but didn't look surprised—I suppose after all she'd been through with us, not much was surprising to her. I'm sure she was getting used to it. She was preparing lunch. I sat on a chair and we quietly exchanged greetings. She was still kind, Nancy, but more stern, mean even.
Hello, Nancy. I said again. She smiled at me awkwardly, like something in the air between us had changed.
What brings you here Little Lucy? it was said painfully formally, what had happened to her?
There was something about her that made me tell her about you, I told her everything, not caring how much she knew about my insanity or even if she was meant to know. I told her that I felt like a wallflower.
That I didn't really matter.
~INDYLULU
