One way or another she fills my day. She goes out and I stay, working from the attic as I struggle with correspondence and a tricky client or two. Then breaking away I face the kitchen for the first tea of my morning. I find bottle tops not replaced and keys left discarded where no one will ever find them.

Sometimes it is like living with a teenager.

I think about the sofa and our next embrace, but there too she will be young. Pouring over i-pads, i-phones, i-pods, i-everything you can think of that leaves me behind. Sometimes she makes me feel old and young at once.

She plays games as she works on a business project and I am astounded. Even more so since Judge Rinder, Modern Family, David Mitchel, Stephen Fry or something else plays out on TV… sometimes I think she would watch them all at once if she could and she certainly could. Clever girl is she.

But still toothpaste tubes get unended and drape contents along Armitage Shanks. There is also a trail of discarded shoes marking the route she took to the bathroom or her little den where she sometimes sews.

She will ask me later where her shoes are; this as if I have some special powers in this regard. For one thing she has so many. Imelda Marcos would have been impressed.

The journalist who reported on that story was a single man. I remember I laughed along with all other single men at the monstrosity of a 108 pairs of shoes. Was it?

I know better now. After all she did, ‘you want to criticise her tiny shoe collection,’ women must have thought. But of course you can’t wear black shoes with that dress or those black shoes, they are the wrong shade.  Everyone knows that, everyone who counts. She knows.

But I don’t care about shoes excepting that they are hers. She is all around me, inside and out. She is in the undiscarded food in the fridge and the extra bunch of uneaten bananas that I will someday throw away. She is in the painting on the wall that has followed her since she was a student. The antiques too we bought scream her name and reaffirm me in our home. Even if drawers earmarked by her for purposes unadhered to are left unclosed or sometimes scattered in giggled haste.

This girl-woman is a pretty mess in her sophisticated beauty; a contradiction to be wrestled with. All this and she is not even here.

My days are long and too short without her, but they are defined by her return.

“Where are my keys?” she asks on arrival.

I smile and count.

“Oh never mind, found them,” she giggles, where I put them away you will remember, as she well knows.

But sometimes there are other matters to attend to and she sees my face as peer down at her over my forgotten reading specs still hanging off my nose.

“Whoops, am I in trouble?” She is so cute.

Spankings are rarer than they should be, too rare she would agree if she could ever admit it. I should spank her for every little mess she leaves me, but then she would never sit down and the corner would be ever troubled by her nose. Besides, I like her little messes, they remind me that she has passed this way and will again all too soon.