Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

I can’t find my footing in this conversation—I lurch from desperation to indifference.

Never has there been a worse time for all of my algorithms to understand my interior life better than I do.

I watch the story four times in succession, making the most of the fact that it’s eight in the morning and I’ve already fucked it because she knows I woke up and looked at her Instagram page so I might as well luxuriate in my own patheticness.

I just want to be cosy with people I’ve known my whole life.

Poetry is the most reviled and redundant art form, everyone rolls their eyes at it and takes the piss out of it. But the second that something shit happens in our lives, it’s the first recourse we have.

It’s like I was off sick from life for a while, and sometimes it’s nice to be off sick. Sometimes it’s nice to not be a thing, in the world, trying so desperately to be a person.

She was the one with all the power. Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.

Because I am starting to think that talking about the sadness might be the same thing as processing the sadness. And if we’re not doing that, then we only have our thoughts for company, and our thoughts are unreliable and they invent things and they lie to us and give bad advice. Not talking about the sadness is what leads us into The Madness.

The answer always was, and always will be, her.

“You don’t let go once. That’s your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you’ll hear a song or you’ll walk past somewhere you once went together—something will come to the surface that you’d totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.”

“Right,” she says, necking the last of her drink. “I’m off to bed.” Her committed avoidance of the awkward will always be my favourite thing about her.

I say all my goodbyes, ready to no doubt meet her again tomorrow to say goodbye all over again.

Heal well, my friend x x x

As thirty-five approached, nearly every woman I know got pregnant, keen to hand in their homework to mother nature before the famous deadline.

I couldn’t measure what the reality of long-term love was; what was settling for something when I should be asking for more.

“You’ve always been alone, my darling. That’s one of the things that makes you so unique. You were alone when I met you, you’re alone in a crowd of people, you were alone when you were with Andy.”