"Be Safe."

I'm trying to find a little pocket of calm in a difficult time of change.

It isn't easy. I have to accept I won't be able to reason with the person at the root of it because they're in denial. So I have to come to terms with their behaviour again. I now know this was inevitable, but it's still upsetting, particularly when I consider how quickly they apparently decided to abandon me for good.

I miss my dad: the other day, I had a crisis and my first thought was to ring him for advice, then I remembered a beat later this wasn't possible. Coming to terms with the fact the conversation's over is such a horrible part of grief; I get out of a friend's car at the same spot he used to drop me off at and he's on my mind; I reach the end of a pack of coffee filters I bought when he was still alive and have the morbid thought that he went first.

The other night I had a dream about him, and it was only the next day that I realised it wasn't the first like it: in it, he was at a theme park, queueing for the pirate ship ride, yet in this alternate reality, he was somehow dead, yet still conscious, but on borrowed time. I begged him not to go on the ride as it was too risky and he wouldn't be able to cope with it, but he assured me he'd be okay; he wanted to do it. 

It was like trying to convince him to eat during the last few weeks of his life, and it reminded me that the last thing I said to him in person was, "Be safe."

It's no secret that I'm having difficulties with a relative at the moment, who is making me a scapegoat, having withdrawn their support as punishment for pointing out their dishonesty. The other day they said to me in an email, "You seem to have overlooked that we've lost dad in all this."

The question is, how would they know? They've seen me once since his funeral when we met a solicitor to discuss probate and, before the meeting, they sent me strict provisos to not speak to them around it and when I tried to briefly outline a suggestion to get out of our stalemate they labelled my words as abuse and couldn't leave quick enough.

 But in their world, everything is someone else's fault. And to limit contact is to run away from the truth. But the truth is what it is and they can't change that. So I'll let them wrestle with by themself. 

And they should stop reading my blog posts because this is my space.

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