My mother asks the same four questions every morning now, in the same order, and I have learned to answer them like weather. What day is it. Did I take my pills. Where is your father. Is the door locked. My father has been gone since 2019. I used to correct her. Now I tell her he has walked down to the market, because the truth costs her the whole morning and buys nothing.
I did not plan to be here. Three years ago I had a job with a title that needed two lines on a business card and a calendar other people fought over. Then my mother left the stove on twice in one week, and my daughter started her last year of school needing me to not be on a call at six in the evening, and the arithmetic simply stopped working. I handed the title back. I tell people I stepped away. What I did was get out of the way of my own life before it drove through the people in it.
The days are small and they repeat. Pills, the school run, the drive along the river to the appointments, the drive back. For a while this frightened me more than any deadline ever had, because a deadline at least ends. This does not end. It arrives again, the way the tide arrives.
I walk by the Tejo most mornings before the house is up, which is the one half hour that belongs to me. The water does not know what kind of year I am having. It comes in, it goes out, on time and completely indifferent. I used to find that bleak. Lately it is the most reliable thing I own. Whatever I decide at two in the morning, lying awake doing sums about care homes and money and whether I am a good enough daughter, the water has not heard any of it. It arrives anyway. Grey, then gold, then gone.
Whatever I settle about my life in the night, the water has not heard, and comes in anyway at dawn.
So I have stopped asking what is true the way I used to ask it, as a problem to solve before breakfast. The true things are the ones that keep showing up whether or not I have the energy for them. My mother’s hand finding mine in the car. The particular way my daughter still says goodnight at seventeen, when she thinks I am too tired to notice. The tide. None of them need my belief. They do not even need my attention. They just keep being the case, and some mornings that is the only thing holding the floor up.
I am not wise about any of this. I want to say that plainly, because the version where I have made my peace would be a lie and you would feel it. Some days I am furious. Some days I sit in the hospital car park and cry in the ten minutes between the ticket machine and the ward, then fix my face and go in. The water does not hear that either. It is still coming in tomorrow. I find I can build a day on that when I cannot build it on anything else.