Grief is a funny thing, isn’t it? I don’t mean funny like “ha ha” but more like funny “I really couldn’t say how this is going manifest itself”.

When I was told my Grandma had been given only two weeks left to live, I completely crumbled. I wailed like a child and I didn’t care who saw or who heard. I was at work at the time, in the staff room, with one very uncomfortable onlooker trying to pat my shoulder reassuringly and another two out on the shop floor, lingering around the doorway. It was visceral and undignified, and I did it all over again at her funeral for everyone to see and hear, because I simply couldn’t contain it. I didn’t even want to try, because the pain was so terrible. I was thirty-one years old.

This week I heard that a very good friend of mine died. A close friend. He was the same age as me, and he took an overdose. The last message I sent him was “Stop being such a fanny-apple and answer me!”

This time my grief has been quiet. Heavy. Still as painful as when I lost my Grandma, but without any outlet. There hasn’t been a tidal wave of tears, no body-shaking sobbing fits; just early nights, difficult mornings, no makeup, and lots of dry shampoo. I’ve been weak and clumsy and stuttering all my words, but trying to keep all of my focus on each task in front of me at that very moment. I caught sight of myself in a mirror today and realised how utterly haggard and ill I look. It struck me then how very different my reactions were, and for a moment I started to wonder why that might be.

There are always people who try to rationalise these things, I suppose. Like if we can make some sense of it, maybe it will help us recover? But I realised today that much like the guilt I feel for my friend dying hopeless and alone, I can’t do any more than simply feel what I feel.

I’ll have to come to terms with it. I’ll have to come to terms with the idea that he won’t be coming with me to Pride this year, that I won’t ever be able to listen to Kate Nash without remembering him, that we’ll never have drunken poetry competitions again, that he’ll never finish teaching me all the moves to Poker Face, and that all of our inside jokes –which used to make me laugh until my ribs hurt- are forever as gone as he is.

I have to feel it and accept it, and as I’m sitting here right now, my heart tight and painful as I will the tears to come, I remember how he used to roll his eyes at me and tut.

“Alright, Emo-Queen, that’s enough of that shit!”