I am not the person I used to be

I am not the person I used to be. I used to be a daughter, a partner. Within three months, I have lost two of my names. Now I am just a mother and a friend. I feel peripheral. Loved, no doubt, but not essential to anyone, aside from the children. I cling onto them. For them I must keep living.

"You are everything to me," he said recently in a message. I was his world, on his mind when he woke up and on his mind when he went to sleep. Even though we weren't together every day, I  mattered to him more than anyone else in the world. He wasn't always on the end of my phone but he was the person I said goodnight to, the person I talked to about everything. And he was my future.

Now I am on people's minds, I know. I get through each day with a rota of friends who keep a check on me. Who come round and let me talk. Who offer their hugs and let me cry. But none of them can hold me like he did and they go back to their own families, hug their own partners and leave me alone in this wilderness where I am no-one's core.

I want to call my mum. She wouldn't know what to say. She was never any good with emotions. But she would be there, an anchor to the past. No-one was more important to her.

Now, I float above the world like an untethered balloon wondering what they are doing, all these people who are still living their trivial little lives, longing to float off into the clouds to be with him.

I do have one name left. He called me Beverley Writer. Writing and my children are the things I hold on to.