Live Free lettering on a forearm

The 6.14 to Carlisle has been cancelled again, so I am writing this on the back of the timetable at the far end of platform four, where the pigeons have given up on the crisps. You will say I am being dramatic. You always said I would miss my own funeral if the trains were late, and I suppose you were right, but I have decided this one is nobody's business but mine.

Dad rang on Sunday to ask whether I had thought it through. I said yes, which was true, and that I had thought of very little else since the spring, which was also true. He said Mum would never have wanted me alone in a flat above a bakery in a town where nobody knows where the river goes. I reminded him that she wrote LIVE FREE on the back of the fridge magnet the year I turned nine, with a little heart after it, and that she was the one who taught me to pack a bag in ten minutes. He went quiet the way he does, and I could hear the kettle going on in his kitchen.

A man with a violin case has sat down beside me twice now and got up twice, as if the bench keeps asking him to choose. The departures board flicked over a minute ago and the Carlisle line turned amber. I have a return ticket to the coast in my coat pocket that I bought from the machine out of pure cowardice, and I am going to keep it, because the coast is where Mum took us the summer before she got ill, and I want to see whether the sea still does what it did.

So this is me getting on the next train heading anywhere north of here, or south, or to the sea. Tell Dad I am fine. Tell him I rang the bakery about a room and they said the upstairs window looks straight over the water. Tell him the heart is for her.

Love always, Jen

P.S. The train is in. I have drawn the heart after my name, the way she used to, because some things deserve a flourish before you leave.