Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

It’s not that he doesn’t tell her he loves her – he tells her all the time – but the words ‘I love you’ are famously inadequate for describing the depth of the feeling. Sometimes only gestures suffice.

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

Cynicism is a safety valve: if you accidentally place too many eggs in an unfashionable basket, you need to be able to pretend that the relationship between eggs and basket is, and always has been, part of an ironic metanarrative.

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.

That’s when she knew that she loved him: when she started thinking of his death. She knew she’d found something good when she knew she couldn’t stand to lose it.

She remembers herself as a six-year-old child. Going to hell for her bad insides.

Truly, nothing had happened, and yet, it was the biggest thing in his life. It was gigantic, the love.

The love was like this: it was like every text message was grammatically incorrect if it didn’t include the words ‘I love you’ at the end. It was as if each loveless text were written by an inexperienced speaker of English. He wanted to say it constantly.

Most of us know in our hearts but don’t say aloud: we are living through a period of history during which certain kinds of queers have been granted certain kinds of freedoms, but those freedoms are precarious. They may not last our lifetimes.

The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.

I just want to spend my life taking another person’s happiness very seriously.