Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

Certainly, she thought it was old-fashioned to need love as much as she did, but the world was hard. She was afraid all the time, and she only sometimes felt beautiful, and yes, to enjoy her own company would be a fine thing, but getting a boyfriend seemed easier, and what was so wrong with the path of least resistance?

In the moment of Ali’s embarrassment – her smile bashful – Maggie swells with love for her friend and wonders why she loves people best when they are at their most vulnerable.

‘And I’m jealous of you, babe. I wouldn’t mind getting out of London.’ ‘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.’ ‘We’re all too busy trying to pay rent.’

In any case, Frank said that Phil is in the best position of all. All that yearning! Sumptuous. The decadence of always being left, lolling about in bed afterwards with just too many feelings to put into words. 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.

‘I’m suggesting,’ said Frank, ‘that desire is about lack. You’re not in love with Keith: you’re in love with the distance between what you want and what you can have.

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.

Ed is blurry, to even himself. 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.

That feeling was irresistible though, of being part of something.

Not for the first time today, he asks: why am I like this?

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 turns the receipt over. It’s for a dressing gown she bought in Marks & Spencer. More money than she’d spent on herself in a decade. When she bought it, she imagined the ways her life would change. She imagined being leisurely, easy, content by herself. A hefty ask from a flimsy bit of fabric. She’d been the same way with London, and Pauline before that: always seeking to be transformed by things that were indifferent to her.

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.