Triskaidekaphobic

I am a triskaidekaphobic, which is essentially the long name for thirteen phobia. Not of the thirteenth day, more of thirteen when it crops up round written words and books. For example, the last post I left was the thirteenth post, which I would consider to be unlucky. If I'm reading a book and want to stop, I can't stop on thirteen or its multiples, especially 169 which is thirteen thirteens. Page 169 is bad news. I also don't like pages that end in 3 because it's ten away from thirteen. So, say I feel my eyes beginning to close on page 260, I wait till I get to 270 (because, as it's a ten multiple of thirteen, it is so unlucky I have to read the whole ten pages. I stop on page 270-271, because 273 is also a multiple of thirteen). I wouldn't actually classify this as a phobia because it doesn't affect my life, apart from making me read further than I would normally but that doesn't matter. I check the page number before I put it down.

Thirteenth days of the month are fine. My Grandma died on December the thirteenth, but that was years ago, and not the reason for my phobia. Actually, she probably died on the eleventh or twelfth but was found on the fourteenth. She'd had a haemmorhage, and she'd been sick in the toilet. My Mum went over and found her. Weirdly, I had a sense something was wrong when I got off the school bus. I didn't get told about the sick till a while after her dying, a year in fact. I suppose its fairly extraneous information, but I think I would have liked to be aware. I got asked if I wanted to see her in the morgue, but I didn't go. I'm glad I didn't because I wouldn't have wanted to remember her pancake faced and on a slab. I went round her flat and tried to take photographs, because I was worried I'd forget how it looked. But I never have. She had a little front room, and it had her L shaped sofa in it and a pouffe and a rocking chair. All plush. And lots of ornaments on the windowsill, glass mostly, bells, a crinoline lady I adored. It was always warm, and there were thin magazines in it and a fire and a Tv you couldn't get reception on. A big picture of all of her grandchildren. none of us especially good looking then. All chipmunky. I suppose my youngest male and female cousin, and my sister, were the most aesthetically pleasing children. They still are. Her kitchen was narrow and all yellow, and it had a clock, a plastic one. She had a bureau in the hall that's mine now because she said she wanted me to be a writer. That was clever of her; she knew I wasn't pretty but instead of saying it she said I was good at writing. And her two bedrooms, hers with a vanity mirror and lots of her clothes in a cupboard and a double bed.

She was very clever. I read her cards a few months ago, one of her friends was completely honest about her and said she sometimes thought she was manipulative at meetings, but that she was good at organising and sadly missed. I thought, well, being honest is the best of things. I'd far rather someone wrote about her faults than pretended she was completely perfect, because that's like writing over someone's personality and akin to just blitzing them off the face of the earth altogether. If you erase the bad bits, you're blocking out the truth and that makes the good things you say ring hollow. There isn't any point in pretending things aren't the way they are, or that you don't think what you're thinking. You're just kidding yourself.