Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

Finding the party was never the point. The point was travelling towards it.

‘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.’

I feel like living in London is like being on the constant verge of an orgasm but never being able to cum.

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.

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.

At times, it’s seemed like every decision Ed ever made was simply because it was a hot day and he was horny or angry or both. He never knows what he wants. It changes completely from minute to minute, and he has no decisive inner voice that says This is the real you, this is what you desire. 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.

Today has been one of those rare days – only one or two each year – where time works differently, where the day is so long that it can house each of your desires. You can wake in South London, go to bed in North London and travel between East, West and everywhere between, and still have time to stop for McDonald’s. On days like this one, you don’t have to choose between one thing and another thing; there is time for everything.

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.

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. I feel like marriage could be a useful tool for that.’