Loss

I wrote this using my non-dominant hand - which happens to be my right hand - as an exercise. It is supposed to access different areas of your brain. As I'm not sure where this came from, perhaps it worked!



Prompt: Winning or Losing



What is the loss that changed you and your life irrevocably and forever? Was it a thing? A feeling? A person? An important number? Your reputation? Your mind, your heart or - God help you - your soul?


I don’t have many things I care about deeply. Mostly they are just things. But we had a burglary when the children were much younger. An invasion of our mostly happy, always chaotic family home. I would have said it was about twenty years ago but that just shows I have also lost track of time! It would be more like thirty. 


They came in through the back door, kicking it open, splintering the frame. They stepped over one dog and we think the other showed them round. When people asked would the dogs not have been scared by the noise of the door being broken down, I had to explain that they probably thought it was my son coming home for lunch. 


The only thing of worth they took was a handful of bits from my jewellery box. Nothing there would have been of any value to them nor would it have netted them more than a few pounds. Not even enough for a night out. But they took my Mum’s ring. My Mum who had died when I was sixteen. When I lost her, I lost links - to the past, to the stories she could have told to a daughter who was too young to listen when she died. 


The ring was itself a link to her Dad. who she loved with a depth which spoke of the troubled relationship with her own mum. It was a plain little ring - just a gold band, worn by the years of contact with the fingers of people I loved. I don’t remember my Mum wearing it. I think I was told it was a plain band when my Grandad wore it and the stones were put in for my Mum but I might have dreamed that, made it up or got mixed up with another story. My mind plays these games with me. But the stones were there - two pearls like abbreviated traffic lights across the width of the band, flanked by two amethysts along its length. Worth nothing to them. Worth everything to me. 


I still occasionally look for it in the windows of second-hand shops. I bought myself a consolation ring in India. We visited a jewellery store and it was waiting for me, similar but nothing like. A sliver of a ring with a central ruby and a diamond chip either side. See? Nothing like. But I saw it and I heard my Mum and now I call it ‘my Mum’s ring’ and it fills a space and holds the memory.