A month away
Well, it does say Vagrant Muse for a reason, remember...
Still, it's been a month, and not much has happened in my life, but things have been busy all the same. I hate February with a vengeance, even after all this time. My son's birthday is today, which has brightened it a little in the past nine years, but...
I still have to say goodbye to Eilidh every year, February 12th. And every year it hurts, and every year I still miss her. I've married, moved on but it's still there.
Goodbye, Eilidh.
Mar sin leat, Princess.
Still, it's been a month, and not much has happened in my life, but things have been busy all the same. I hate February with a vengeance, even after all this time. My son's birthday is today, which has brightened it a little in the past nine years, but...
I still have to say goodbye to Eilidh every year, February 12th. And every year it hurts, and every year I still miss her. I've married, moved on but it's still there.
Goodbye, Eilidh.
Mar sin leat, Princess.
posted by Moghal at
9:09 AM
3 Comments:
Please share who Eilidh is?
By
Alan Howard, at Thu Feb 23, 05:56:00 PM
Oh, boy... it's one of those wierd realisations, times like this, when I find myself clamming up. I mean, why did I put this here if not to talk about it? So, here goes, with one caveat: this will be dry and formal and technical. It's a defence mechanism, I know it is, but, it's there all the same.
Eilidh was the first person I really fell in love with. I'd had a girl I'd felt strongly for at school, but she hadn't felt the same way about me - we were good friends, never anything more, never likely to be anything more.
Eilidh was a ballet dancer, if you asked her, who happened to be at university at that particular stage in her life. We met when I moved to Glasgow in September, and we were engaged on New Year's Eve 1991/2. I know that seems fast to some people, but I knew that quickly - I've been with my wife now for almost ten years, and I proposed to her after a little less than three months. It's just the way I work.
Eilidh was born deaf, and her parents died when she was quite young, so she'd been brought up by her uncle, a Catholic priest, and was a fairly devout catholic herself. Despite that, we got along, had similar senses humour, liked many of the same things.
In retrospect, we were both fairly needy, attention-deprived people who found someone interested and latched onto it. Whether it would have bloomed into anything in the longer term is difficult to say: the more mature man I am now doubts it, but the intensity of the time still makes me wonder.
On February 12th, 1992, I came back to my room after lectures to find her in the middle of a congealed pool of her own blood on my bed, with a hastily scribbled and rather unclear suicide note left on the bedside table.
She'd been attacked and raped on the Friday before, on the way home from her ballet practice. Exactly what went through her head in those five days I'll never know - she didn't tell her 'father', didn't tell me, didn't any of her classmates or room-mate.
I knew she was quiet that weekend, but it happened sometimes, she told me. I don't know why she couldn't talk to me, I only know what happened because she told her priest at the confessional...
I've felt the whole run, since then, of guilt through to abandonment and back again, until most of those are muted by time and the love I have around me now, but every year, February 12th, I still have to say goodbye just one more time...
By
Moghal, at Tue Feb 28, 11:33:00 PM
Thank you for sharing that. I do remember you sharing that with me in the past, but I can't remember if you told me her name. Maybe it was another February 12th, two or three years ago.
My heart goes to you, and I wish you all the strength to keep saying goodbye, year after year. *hugs* (manly hugs!)
By
Alan Howard, at Wed Mar 01, 07:35:00 AM
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