I’ve just been shopping in the town centre, looking for a few Christmas gifts, and buying myself some ‘special’ bits of food, the sort of thing that’s only available at Christmas.  As I walk around town I find myself constantly cross-checking everything against John’s existence, and my loss.  So it’s, ‘that’s the shop I bought him that expensive anniversary watch in’, ‘that’s the shop that used to be Past Times where we often used to look at things together’, ‘that’s the bench where we sometimes used to meet up’, ‘that’s the shop where he bought me such and such’, ‘this is where I once bought him a nice shirt’, ‘we once ate spag bol in that cafe’, ‘that’s the car park pay machine we’d go to together’, ‘this is where he’d wait for me when I went to the Ladies’, ‘that’s a book he would have liked’, ‘that’s the shop I bought some plastic flowers in for his grave’, ‘that’s the street I walked along back from town, the night he actually died in the hospital’… and so on!

I realise that this sort of thinking is becoming totally debilitating to me.  I’m annoyed by it, but can’t seem to stop.  John himself would be annoyed by it if he was here.  I have to get a grip on things, I know.  Put a giant pair of blinkers on, and just walk from A to B, do what I need to do, without thinking back constantly over everything, and being distracted by reminders.  Live for today, not in the past.