train thoughts.

crossed the country on a whim. Got my least favourite type of train to the Capital. Wrote an entry devoted to my Nana and unconditional love because it is Summer. I miss her more in the summer. She left in the summer. The whole family does. Sent [Redacted] a photo of the cute cows in a field for no real reason. Ran across the Capital to get my next train. Returning to the Motherland. Replanting the seeds in the South Coast summer heat. 

remembered who I am in between train carriages. 

Sometimes I think about that Judge Judy book that sat under my Nana’s telly for years. Collecting dust. Only ever being imprinted by finger tips when my tiny hands would grab for it. Never to read it. Only to make a joke about the famous woman on the cover. Or to move it to get something behind it. I don’t think my Nana liked to read books. I’m not entirely sure if that’s correct. She read the paper at times, if I’m remembering correctly. She’d put on glasses, not oval glasses, but more rectangular in shape. Reading glasses. She’d put on reading glasses and go through the paper. I hope that’s a real memory. Sometimes, what I believe is real, wasn’t. I make up memories all the time. For the longest time, I believed my Nana had told me a story about her older brother. How he moved to America and lived his life as a photographer, with a male roomates, hinted to be his lover. Told my mother this story a year after Nana passed. Nana’s brother did in fact go to America, but he wasn’t a homosexual and we don’t know what he worked as. She wasn’t surprised, said this was one of those stories I probably made to “cope”. Still don’t know what she meant by “cope”. Coping with the sexuality crisis, the guilt, imagining a world where I told my entire family and got unconditional support? No idea. Never brought it up again. I do know quite a few things that are definitely real about Nana. 

She never read Facebook posts because she had a Nokia. She barely read text messages because she couldn’t see the Nokia screen that well.

My cousin, who lived with my Nana, got diagnosed with BPD. My Nana was an older Irish woman. Mental health wasn’t a thing of her time. Anxiety was a feeling everyone had running through their veins and depression was for those less fortunate, who just needed to go for a walk and not talk about it. Don’t talk about those with it. 

My Nana read a book about BPD after the diagnosis. 

I think that’s when I realised my Nana’s love language. Other than slipping us fivers in a ‘Nanny handshake’ or having us all sat in the kitchen. Herself, sat in her chair at the top of the table. Like the Queen of the house she was. I think my Nana and cousin had their rough patches. I think everyone in this family has rough edges and rougher patches. 

I think that’s when I realised unconditional love does exist. I think that’s when I realised where my Mother gets it from. That unconditional love. Showered in many forms. My Nana wearing her wedding ring every day despite the fact that my Grandad died long before I was even a concept in this family lineage. My Mother was my age when her Father passed. I don’t think I could live if my Mother passed. I don’t know how my Mother kept living after my Nana passed. Sometimes, I think she didn’t. That a piece of her was buried alongside my Nana, as we put her beside my Grandad. I think she would agree. I wonder how much my cousin thinks of Nana. If she remembers that unconditional love. If it lingers and stays even after the person’s heart stops beating. If we keep those who left alive through the love they gave. They say distance makes the heart grow stronger. They also say time heals. I don’t think these two statements can coexist.