The door creaks open and in shuffles a tiny woman whose hand is held tightly by a man who follows her in. The woman’s appearance tells of a great age, her skin crossed by time, her body bent over with a dowager’s hump, her neck no longer visible, retracting in to her body as the essence of this woman, wife, lover, mother disappears into herself. She has melted away; her body hangs wrongly on her bones.

She looks up, and into my eyes, and I see gates into chambers full of darkness and fear. Her face searching mine for something that I cannot tell. The man and the doctor guide her to a chair but she cannot settle and wanders around us looking for something but she is already lost inside. My sight tells me this woman is his mother, separated by decades, but this is deception, this woman is his wife. The man sobs in the corner as the story unfolds, the woman unable to rest, trying to escape. She wants to go home, as there she feels safe. Her husband has watched her fall away in six months, his face known so well for over forty years sometimes foreign to his wife.

I cannot listen any more and just watch this woman in her confusion, and the man in the corner who has already buried the living. Then I look down, my vision obscured. When I look up they are gone but in the room the feeling remains. As the doctor turns around in the chair I make an excuse and leave, I go outside in the autumn sunshine, but the wind is cold. My eyes water, and as I look to the road, I see the tall figure of the man, leading her away.