TAKING FLIGHT The process of grieving, I have learnt, is not dissimilar to the process of falling asleep. It comes upon you gradually – as though someone has pressed their thumb onto the slowmotion button, each moment suspended in this new reality – and then all at once. You feel yourself spiraling swiftly down into its lethargic grips. When morning comes, your limbs are heavy and you are not yet ready for the world. But the world keeps on coming…
*** Once upon a time, it was noise that woke me – noises that pierced the thick silence of the pre-dawn hours. My grandfather’s stale cough, his lumbering footsteps ricocheting off the floors of the flat as he passed by my sleeping body, stretched out on my blanket-pile bed. I was awed afresh each morning by my grandmother’s ability to stay slumbering. The routine whistling of the kettle was forever followed by the heavy clunk of china meeting bench top. One clunk first, then a second. The voice of one-or-other early morning radio host as they came crackling through the static of the radio that sat on top of their fridge. The slow and measured clink of a tarnished silver teaspoon as my grandfather made strong, sweet tea – a momentum that rapidly increased until the spoon and the little teacup rang into a deafening crescendo. This morning, it is the silence that wakes me. In a familiar space, the psyche is attuned to the familiar sounds, which do not come. The sun has not yet lifted her sleepy head from behind the horizon, though the black sky outside the frosted windows has been softened to a cobalt blue with the approach of dawn. I rise tentatively, shuffle a few feet to the petite bathroom, and turn the faucet on the basin. It gulps and screeches to life; I splash the icy water onto my sleep-wearied face. The water is far too cold for a shower, and I’m wary of the noise of the old pipes waking my grandmother, so I take a face washer and gently sponge the cool water over 35