The Sleep

I'm just going to ignore the fact that it's 00:30 in the am of Tuesday 22nd January, yes thats Tuesday, not Monday. Monday 21st January when a visitor was due, and has not shown their face.
My mind is in a heap and I've no doubt that sleep will also be a stranger tonight.

As if I wasn't melancholy enough this evening, I received the most remarkable email from my sister in the United States. She sent me a photograph scanned in from an old copy of an Irish local paper from 2 years ago. The picture is of a group of national school girls from a rural County Cork primary school in 1946.

Sitting on the far right of the front row - my mother.


I had never even thought of her as a child, let alone see a picture of her as one, there she is, the biggest smile of them all, just an 11 year old girl.
By the time I reached that age, she was gone.

A message, a sign, or a simple coincidence perhaps, but I've never wanted to believe as much as I do right now.

Good night, sleep well.