Latin script phrase along the ribs

The last bus has just gone past under the window, so I know it's gone half eleven and you'll be asleep in that narrow room above the launderette, with the dryers thumping through the floor like a heartbeat you have to get used to. Your mum says you didn't cry at the station. She says you just nodded at the platform clock as if it had told you something you'd already guessed. I'm proud of that, though I'd rather you had cried a little. It's allowed.

I found my old exercise book from Halloran's Latin class while I was clearing the sideboard. Third form, all blue ink and crossings-out. On the first page, in his rounded capitals, he'd written the motto of that American state he was always going on about, and underneath, in my own handwriting from years later, the words I'd spent two terms translating badly. Alis volat propriis. She flies on her own wings. He made us say it aloud until it sounded like a bird.

I kept that book for forty years and never once thought it was about me. I thought it was about some girl I'd never meet, somewhere with more sky than sense. Tonight I read it again and saw the fault was mine. I'd kept the words and forgotten the flying part.

So here is what I'm asking. Eat something green on Thursday. Phone me on Sunday, even if it's only to say the buses are useless. And when the city keeps you up at three, go to the window and look for the one lit flat across the road. That'll be someone else awake, flying their own way. Love, Gran.