6 months ago.

Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago, sometimes just like something that happened a week ago.
Sometimes customers ask about me, ask what I did to end up in the shop or ask about my folks and I tell them. I'm not looking for sympathy or anything.
And they tell me that they're sorry and you smile at them and thank them politely but inside you feel like shaking them and screaming in their face.
They're not sorry! How can they be? They have no idea about any of it. They have no idea who we are, its just names to them. They dont know him, they dont know us. About what we went through, the things we never speak of, not to each other, not to our closest friends and family, stuff that I've never even put in here but yet is always in the back of my mind. You wonder how much you can talk about before they mentally drown you out or start avoiding you.
And They don't know what we go through now.
How Mum is odder than ever, how she panics when either of us is even ten minutes late home. About how her Brothers are all bullying her to do more with Nanny and Granddad, how we should sell our house and move in with them and care for them so they don't have the burden of it all.
Did I ever tell you guys about how my Uncle J suggested that to my Mum just a few days after the funeral?
So far she's resisting but how long?
About how she greeted pretty much virtual strangers on holiday with "Hi I'm.... and I'm a widow.." Thats not coping surely?
About how she's already putting the pressure on me to not move back out, or to take her with her.
About how much she relies on me. "Her Rock." I dont want to be anyones rock anymore.
And the customers tell me how selfless I am. How much of a big heart I must have and you feel like screaming at them. "No! I'm not! All I did was what was right. What everyone expected of me."
And I think of now and how its affected me. How I find it hard to sit still for a few minutes, with out the need to do something, to occupy myself in some way, but yet how I can't concentrate on anything.
How I lie awake for ages after I finally give in and go to bed, and how you miss him so much it physically hurts.
and of then, and how much I hated and resented being trapped with them, in that situation, when being at home was the very last thing I ever wanted to be.
And how much I'd give anything, do anything to have him back with us, even in that awful state he was in the last month, and that's not being selfless at all.