Conversation, what conversation?

One of the things I miss the most about our old life is the conversation.  Being able to come home and tell Ash what I'd been doing; being able to tell him some small piece of information about someone we both knew which would then lead onto a full blown discussion about something else; being able to plan, even loosely, something which might or might not happen in the future.  All of that's now gone.  This morning I thought I'd tell him about a weird plant in the garden.  It's been there for a while and for some reason I thought a friend had given it to me so, although I didn't like it (and definitely thought it looked weird), I'd left it where it was.  When I mentioned said plant to said friend a couple of days ago it turned out that she hadn't given it to me and in fact it had self set so I was free to dig it up and put it in the bin.  I thought this was quite amusing so told Ash this morning and was rewarded with a blank look and nowhere to go with the conversation. Instead I was left looking, and feeling, completely foolish while he worried that he should know what I was talking about but didn't.  For a while I wondered if I'd imagined that we used to talk to each other, I didn't think so but not all memories are true so maybe this was one of the false ones and possibly in reality we'd sat in silence for the past 40+ years.  However, sometimes when I'm awake in the middle of the night, I remember holidays we've been on over the years, how we loved spending time together and where we'd just sit chatting or watching the world go by in companionable silence.  In Antigua we stayed in a town house on a marina and each night when Jake had gone to bed we'd sit on the terrace at the back and feed the fish which swam around our feet;  we took Ash's mum on a ski holiday to Canada and she commented on how much we laughed together all week long; we stayed on Comino which is just a rock in the Mediterranean between Malta and Gozo and snorkeled together every day; we stayed in a second floor apartment at the top of a citadel in Corsica and each evening sat on the balcony watching the fishing boats and huge yachts sail into the bay beneath our feet;  when we went to Santorini Jake took two of his best friends with him, they had one apartment and we had another.  We were on the edge of the resort with nothing between us and the sea so each night Ash and I sat out on the balcony gazing into the dark and putting the world to rights while the boys entertained themselves.  That was also the holiday where Ash and I would give the boys money to go out to eat without us while we went to a restaurant overlooking the sea just the two of us.  So those nights when I haven't been able to sleep haven't been a waste of time, instead they've allowed me to look back at what was and realise that there have been many, many times over the years where we've made time to be together, where we've sat chatting about not much at all, where we've been interested in each other's day and with those memories to look back on I know I'll be ok.

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