There’s a balance to be had when you’ve things wizzing around your head. A balance between thoughts that can build into something that you have to process before you can move forward, and things that you can keep stored away until you have time to unpack them. But it’s not as if you always have as much control as you’d like. Emotions, especially those attached to memories, rarely stay where we put them. They dance and skit about, hiding from us and distracting us when we least want them. Maybe we never want them, that’s the problem.

So yesterday, I took the dog over to his flat as this is his weekend to have her, and in the warmth of the sunny spring evening I was shown onto the newly decorated, laden with pot plants and flowers, just painted table sight of his roof terrace. I looked around at all his hard work, at his choices and effort. And all I could feel was the depth of disappointment that he had never put that much time and effort into our home together.

Don’t get me wrong, that flat really needed decorating, and all the things he has done look good and will no doubt help him. But it’s so hard not to feel that, by committing to our home in the same way, putting in the effort and taking responsibility for the space we had together, we would have been so much better. We could have been something special, instead of just ok.

What a waste. And that’s where the balance issue comes into it. I’m pissed off. But that’s what I have to balance… do I unpack these thoughts, unpick this trail of emotions until who knows what is unravelled? It’s starting to feel like we had a life together half lived. What could it have been if we’d lived it fully? Why didn’t he just go for it instead of running at economy level. We wouldn’t be worse off than we are now. We could have been so much more.

But now he has to ‘be more’. No one to fill in the gaps, do the things that need doing when they need doing. It’s all up to him. He’s been spoiled all his life so maybe it’s the lesson that he couldn’t learn unless he one hundred percent had to. More fool him.