I cried in the lingerie department of the Marks & Spencer just off the high street in Oxford, one hand on a rack of bras, not wishing you were there, exactly – it would have been weird if you were since I was in my 30s and I didn’t need advice to buy a bra – but just because you never would be there again, and because I couldn’t tell you about the ridiculous scratchy one that I had just felt with the fingertips of my left hand, that looked like it had orange feathers embroidered on it, and that I knew would make you laugh, and because I can’t thank you now for the times you did give me advice about bras when my own mother didn’t notice I needed one and didn’t know where to take me to buy one that didn’t make me look 40 when I was 10, and I can’t tell you that I didn’t follow your other advice about not following men across oceans and because I can’t stumble out onto the high street with my eyes blurry with tears and call you and get on the bus to Eynsham and feel less alone, because they found you in the morning in bed and I can imagine you the way we always found you in the morning when I filed in with your own children to pile on to the foot of your bed and you always had a paperback and would put it down spine-up on your knee and bite your lip to try to look cross at the interruption, and I don’t know if I thanked you for the time I spent part of the summer in your downstairs bedroom reading Orlando and read the parts I liked the best out loud to you, like the part about walking and crying over someone at an open air market in Southwark, which is a much more impressive place to be cried over than the lingerie department of the Marks & Spencer off Oxford High Street, but the last place I went before Marks & Spencer was the bookstore – your favourite one with the steep stairs down to the lower level that you took slowly, gripping the banister after your first stroke, but that you went down anyway because the linguistics books were all down there and that was what we both came for, and the stairs in your house were just as steep and you were stubborn – and I wanted you to know that I forgave you for the time you told the waiter it was my birthday and a whole restaurant sang to me, and that it’s okay even though there was a tambourine and we split a whole bottle of arak with your second husband, because we sat at the front of the bus on the way home and the rain and the dark made it feel like the bus was alone in space and not on the road to your house, and because the bag was getting heavy on my shoulder and I was getting a rash from the canvas strap right next to my bra strap and the last time I called you I was on the train platform waiting for a train to London with a bag full of jars of your marmalade that I had wrapped in the faux pashmina scarves you had helped me choose from the covered market because I arrived at your house cold and with a rip in my suitcase that we covered with bright pink duct tape, and you called me “nowhere girl” and said you were my “mum-away-from-mum,” and so I cried in the lingerie department of the Marks & Spencer just off Oxford High Street where I came in because I didn’t bring quite enough clothes with me traveling again, and I know you would laugh about that and also tell me to bring my own duct tape even though I still have most of the bright pink roll that you slipped onto my wrist like a bracelet the last time I left your house and I drag it around in my bag between places that aren’t really places, like train platforms and steep staircases and busses in the rain at night and aisles between clothes racks and everywhere else where I realize I have something left to say to you and can’t.

By Sarah Kasey

Litro Magazine