Clouds and sadness: Missing Jonny

Feel so sad today. The lack of sleep, combined with the grey clouds and the feeling of loss have all come together to leave me feeling flat and sad. I wish the tears would come more easily, rather than this flatness, the empty feeling, the yearning for old times. I put on Jonny's CD this morning. I'd been thinking about him and feeling low, so I thought it would be comforting to hear his voice and get the sense (which I know is reality) that he is living on. Anyway. The sadness is partly because I went on a trip down Memory Lane last night. I went through old photos, trying to put them in order... was this before this one? etc. Trying to piece together those days, times. I was scribbling dates on the back of them, as though I'd figured out a bit of a puzzle. Anyway. I also went through the messages between us. Since I can't find my box of letters (where have they gone since the move here?), where I might find some correspondence of another kind, I've had to revert to technology correspondence.  I'm so glad I have at least that, though. It made me realise how much easy banter we had, always a sign of a friendship that is so comfortable. There is nothing like reading someone's words to you to see, how clearly, how much someone means to you, how important they always were. 

It made me feel so wistful, looking through the photos and seeing Jonny's many smiles. Just like I felt today, when I put on his CD and heard him singing Morrissey and Jason Mraz. I put it on before I left the house for a bit and left it playing when I went for a walk, liking the idea of leaving him singing. When I came back, I opened the kitchen door and was met - or rather, hit - by his voice singing Hey there Delilah. I hadn't been expecting it. The tears came straight away. I stood in the door to the dining room just listening, hoping I could - finally - cry more and get to some of the sadness, perhaps find some release, but as soon as I tried I was blocked again. Just short tears, every time. Maybe this is why they say not to hurry grief along. It can't be hurried. The mind cannot be made to take something in. There's still denial and it makes sense that it can't be forced away. There's part of me that feels if I can look at enough photos or remember enough conversations, Jonny will never really go away and will just come back sometime (and there's some truth in that, of course). But no, that's not quite right, or what I mean or feel, it's not quite like that. I don't know how it is. I just know I feel sad and I miss him and our friendship. 

So I need to write again today, even though I had 'promised' to not write any more about my grief and just keep to reflections about Jonny himself. But the sleep deprivation and grey clouds (did I mention those?) and memories and loss all mingle into one and leave me needing to write, write, write. Feelings of sadness that someone so wonderful, so bright, could be gone, have to find an outlet. I have to say again that I wish the tears came more easily; I feel like it would take away some of the numb flatness which is just so... grey. That line from A Grief Observed 'when did the world get so flat and shabby looking, so worn out?' (or something like that) came to mind on my walk earlier. I wish I could cry the many stuck tears. Just feels too... I don't know, buried. It doesn't have the agonising freshness of grief that it would have if I'd still seen him as often as I used to or if this had happened back in, say, 2007, when I used to see Jonny most days. I wouldn't have been able to get through the last number of weeks in the same way at all. Time has put a distance, a remoteness, there somehow. But the loss is still very real and it runs deep because, firstly, he was such a wonderful person and it's a loss for the world that he's no longer in it and, then, because I've lost an amazing friend. It's also the loss and regret of the last three years, when, if I'd just phoned more, we would have had the friendship of those few years, as well as the many years before, and it wouldn't feel like it had just come to a slowing halt after I moved away. 

And I feel such childish resentment towards Manchester for disconnecting me from my old life, from part of who I am. Because Jonny is part of who I am, in some way. Those friendships that run deep, they leave an indelible mark. The conversations that you have with someone who understands you... are ... invaluable. You make different decisions because of the friends you have. You share - and discover - a part of yourself; maybe they bring out a certain humour or a thirst for intellectual debate that you didn't know you had. They bring out admiration and fondness and tender parts of your heart and you're just not quite the same as you were before. The world or your faith or your worldview doesn't look quite as it did. 

Places, too, take on a different colour because of who you've been there with. Salvo's, the Grove, Clock Cafe, L'oranaise, my flat... they wouldn't be what they are had Jonny not been a part of them. And it's been cut off. I won't get that chance again to revisit it, rejuvenate our friendship, I won't. I'm so angry that Manchester took that from me, that chance to have got to know the era of Jonny as a father more, and to get to know his children. I saw him being a dad on occasions, with baby Joseph, such a beautiful brown-eyed boy. We'd already, by then,  started to see each other less often - he was married and I felt it was appropriate to have a different level of friendship because of that - and that was okay. And in some sense he needed me less as a friend because he had a family and I understood that. Plus he was very busy with his busking! Becoming ever more successful. But he was still always very good to me and we were in touch, albeit less regularly than before, so that felt fine. No regrets there. And there were times when I felt so alone, so bad about myself and ... Jonny still always made me feel like I was worth something. He was such a good friend. He gave me more than I gave him, I'm sure. In the last few years before I left Leeds, I went through some hard times and I turned to him on a number of them - and each time he was just there, with a listening ear, warm advice. He always picked up the phone. 

And even back in the day, in our early friendship, we'd sometimes go for spates of time where we wouldn't see each other for weeks or even a couple of months and then we'd see each other 3 or 4 times in the same week or so and he used to laugh and say 'that's just how it is with us Hannah', 'it's like with my friend Joel Love'. I don't know, I was teaching and term was always stupidly busy. I was exhausted at the end of a day with teenagers, so I didn't much feel like driving to Beeston, where Jonny lived. But then you always think you've got all the time in the world, don't you..  you think you've got years and years and so you proritise the things that feel so urgent at the time, like your job, or - later - the huge amount of washing that's building up because you've just had a baby. I feel so sad about that. 

And when I look at photos of Jonny now, from the last couple of years, he just seems to have transformed into such a grown-up man. There was always something so boylike and 'bouncy' about Jonny. But he'd really become this man, who so many people respected and admired, and turned to. And he was a Tower of Determination for many, too, pushing for things I would have given up on on a hundred times earlier, with his indomitable spirit. Yet inside always the fragile Jonny, wounded like we all are. Sensitive to beauty and pain, more than most.  

So I miss Jonny today. And I had to write. And it has, yes, helped, even though my words have been rather rambling and disjointed in places. 

Friends never leave us, I realise, no matter how far away they go; no matter if they go ahead of us to the place that's home, after all.