Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

and all afternoon he carried the sense that there’s not enough time left. He wants more from his weekend than this. He wants more from his life.

but that was the thing with words: you only knew they were the wrong ones once you’d already said them, and by that time it was too late.

She wanted love enormously, so much so that she felt demeaned by it.

She was afraid all the time, and she only sometimes felt beautiful,

Maggie swells with love for her friend and wonders why she loves people best when they are at their most vulnerable.

‘Don’t you love it here?’ ‘I just feel like I’m always waiting for something to happen, like one of these eight million lives is going to collide with mine and knock me off course towards something else. But they never do! Nothing ever happens. People keep their heads down. They mind their own business. People in London are too tired to be colliding with each other all the time.’

Maggie would argue that his internalised homophobia has left him with a deficit of respect for his own desires.

He chews on Keith’s neck for a few sweet seconds, leaving behind the faint trace of a hickey, then leans back to admire his work – a purple and brown splodge – and admits, with some pleasure, that he hopes Keith’s main boyfriend sees it and knows Phil has been there.

He said you should only ever get what you want for the most extraordinarily brief window of time. The rest of your life, you should spend in the pining.

He moved in three years ago and for the first time became properly conscious of his own happiness. He’d been happy before, but only became aware of it after the happiness was already gone. Finally, his happiness is vivid and big. He can’t help but notice it.

He scrambles the eggs and feels nervous that something in the way he cooks his eggs will give Keith a reason to like him less.

Whenever he looks at art or nature with friends, he feels obliged to express feelings on it even when he has none, and this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.

a wonder at the world that she hadn’t felt since she was little. He helped her to see the world as a place where even the oldest, dreariest things could become new again if you only looked at them sideways.

although she can’t help but feel that she’s invisible to him, not because he doesn’t pay attention to her but because when the moment comes to express some deeper part of herself – say, a memory from childhood or an opinion on a book – she seizes up and finds herself unable to speak, which is to say, she’s sort of invisible to herself as well.

‘Do you ever feel like you’re not alive?’ He checks his pulse. He says, ‘I think I’m alive.’ ‘I don’t mean physically. I mean emotionally, I suppose. Alive on the inside.’ He considers this for a moment. He puts on a Hollywood accent as if he were Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. ‘You make me feel alive,’ he says, and she almost cries, feeling almost certain that the accent means that he’s embarrassed, not that he’s insincere. She squeezes his hand and tries to clear up the breakfast things despite his insistence that she sit down and relax.

men are so deeply annoying

His outlines are vague. This is fine except that you need to be solid for other people. To have relationships, to be trusted, you have to say ‘This is me, this is what I want’ and act as if that were true at all times.

he never told her what happened in Burgess Park because he was afraid of what she’d say: that it was his fault for being alone in the park at night, that he was explicitly looking for sex, so what did he expect to happen, that it was funny, ridiculous, that he was young and gay and male and therefore always horny, always consenting to sex, someone who can’t be assaulted.

It doesn’t matter that they’re looking for Rihanna’s house, specifically. What matters is that they’re looking together.

Of course my sons aren’t gay! – but still, they should never be unkind to gay people, because they lived a lonely life, grew old alone, got shunned by entire towns, lost control of their bowels, died destitute, got skin lesions, had no one to care for them in their hour of need. Phil feels like the tragic figures of his mother’s paranoid fantasies.