The Months That Had Gone Badly

Months remembered as difficult, while many of the ordinary things that sustain life never actually stopped.

We were sitting at a small table near the window when he said it.

Outside, the afternoon traffic moved slowly through the street. A bus stopped at the junction and released a brief sigh of air before pulling away again. The café was quiet except for the soft clink of cups being cleared from nearby tables.

He stirred his drink once and looked down at the surface of the cup.

“It was a bad few months,” he said.

He said it as though it were a simple fact. The kind of sentence people use to summarise a stretch of life that has already passed.

“It was a bad few months,” he said.

For a moment we sat there quietly.

Behind him, a woman near the counter was choosing a slice of cake from the glass display. Someone laughed softly at another table. The barista rinsed a metal jug beneath the tap.

Around us the afternoon continued in its ordinary rhythm.

There had been uncertainty at work. A decision he had been waiting for took longer than expected. Plans he thought would move forward stalled for reasons he could not control. For a while, everything felt unsettled, as though the ground beneath him had shifted.

He called it a bad season.

As he spoke, every part of the story returned to the same uncertainty.

A delay at work led back to it.

A conversation with a colleague returned to it.

Even small decisions seemed to circle around it.

It had become the measure of how he remembered those months.

He paused and looked toward the window, watching the traffic gather at the junction.

“At the time,” he said, “it really felt like everything was going wrong.”

He did not sound bitter when he said it. If anything, there was a hint of distance in his voice, the way people sometimes speak about a period of life that has already moved away from them.

The table beside us had emptied. A staff member wiped it down with a cloth before stacking two cups carefully onto a tray.

He continued, but more slowly now, as if he were walking through those months again.

He had still been living in the same home. His parents still called him regularly. Friends still met him for meals when their schedules allowed. Each morning he still woke up, made his way through the day, and returned home in the evening.

None of those things had disappeared.

They had simply faded from view while everything else felt uncertain.

He lifted the cup and took a small sip.

“I suppose,” he said, almost to himself, “it only felt like everything had gone badly.”

None of those things had disappeared.

Outside, the traffic light changed again. A group of people began crossing the street, moving past the window in slow, steady steps.

We sat there for a moment longer, watching them pass.

The afternoon continued much as it had before the conversation began the quiet movement of cups, the sound of chairs shifting across the floor, the steady rhythm of people moving through the day.

Nothing about the room had changed.

The months he had been describing sounded different now.

Made In His Image

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