Into the last week now. Approaching ‘the anniversary’. I don’t want to mark this date. It makes me feel sick. But it’s unavoidable.

The tap tears are back. Slightly delayed/derailed by the continued magic of #107days. A strange standoff between the awfulness of what happened and the awesomeness of what is happening. An aw-battle.

That’s good really. Less than a week to go. And no collapse. I steel myself over and over to think about the good stuff, the years of happy and hilarious memories. Yeah. That’s comforting. A shedload of awesomeness.

Then I come back to the enormity of life without LB. Of the canyon size space he left. That there will be no new memories. That the stories and memories have stopped. He packed em in. Giving us the richest bank imaginable. But they gotta last and spread across however many years. Maybe losing colour and texture along the way. [Howl].

And every ‘special’ day – birthdays, weddings, Christmas, Easter, even holidays – has become a day of sadness. Or more sadness. Sort of anti-special days.  Days I’d rather avoid. How crap is that?

I don’t know.

What do you do a year to the day your beautiful, funny and off the scale of quirky dude drowned in the bath in hospital?

I flew to Madison on Monday on a work trip. This involved two flights. On the first, to Chicago, I took some work to do then planned to watch a film and chill a bit. There were no freely available films. I worked till my laptop battery ran out. Leaving three hours left of the flight. This was a bit weird as I always look up at the sky when I think about LB. (Dunno why really. I just do…) When I was up there, without much to distract me, it felt odd.

I sat next to a woman who did sudoku, without break, for the entire length trip. On either side of us were elderly couples. One of the women flicked through her holiday pics on her camera. I couldn’t help having a peek. Sunshine, sea, her and her partner, other people, celebrations, sunshine, blue sky. I felt consumed by an intense and raw sadness about what had happened to LB. And to us.

A few hours later I was on the second flight to Madison. Without taking off. Storms meant we did a slow taxi for a couple of hours, in and around the runway spaces. Trailed by a queue of different sized and decorated airplanes, passing catering trucks, transit vans and stationery trucks. It was like a careful tour of the inner world of the outside space of an international airport. ‘LB would bloody love this’, I thought. Looking up at the sky.