Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

We made too much comedy of our differences and placed too much meaning on our similarities. It was flirting to a Premiership standard. Any time someone came over to talk, it felt like our match had been disrupted. I was desperate to return all my focus to her and I could feel she wanted to do the same to me.

I refrain from the Full English and instead order fried eggs on toast with a side of sausage, bacon, beans and mushrooms.

What is that thing they say? 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.

“But break-ups have depreciating gains. I’m thirty-five now. I know who I am. I am already sick of myself.”

I want to take my mangled break-up in my mouth and drop it in front of them like a cat bringing in a bloodied mouse from the garden.

“I don’t just want an internal existence. All the self-obsession and the over-thinking. I feel like a brain in a jar with no limbs sometimes.” “And you’re not even that clever,” he offers.

Now, she is unfamiliar and untouchable; someone I have a one-way relationship with in photos and memories and in my imagination.

“YOU’VE RUINED THE SEA,” I shout before I turn and walk the other way. She always was melodramatic.

I really resent being made to feel like this sort of bloke. My useless ex-boyfriend. My hopeless son. And yet, as I find the only part of the shop that can hold my attention (electronic fans), I have to admit that maybe they’re right.

It’s weird not being in our subculture of two any more.

But I’m not a member of that club any more. No one is. It’s been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where do I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I’m no longer in a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?

at my jokes but twice says “That’s funny” in response to something I say. She likes saying “that’s” something. “I’m from Birmingham”: “That’s cool.” “I support Aston Villa”: “That’s cringe.” “I’ve been doing comedy for ten years”: “That’s a while.” “I’m thirty-five”: “That’s an exciting age.”

A good time needs the fires of tragedy underneath it to keep it on a rolling boil.

I am not sure what this feeling is. It’s so different to any other feeling I’ve had when I first start seeing someone. I feel close to her, but distant from her. I feel excited but unsatisfied, caring but detached, invested and indifferent. It’s like we’ve taken all the activities of coupledom and put them in a framework of two strangers who owe each other nothing; who have no past or future. It’s confusing. Not confusing enough to stop, obviously, but it is confusing.

Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.

When someone says they don’t want to be with you, you feel the pain of every single one of those times in life where you felt like you weren’t good enough. You live through all of it again.”

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

Too nostalgic. Couldn’t live in the present. Will always think that yesterday was better than right now. He genuinely believes the peak of his life was when he was in his early twenties and doesn’t understand that he has the power to make the best moment of his life the moment he’s living in.

Made our break-up as difficult for me as possible.

It was like my career was my bad boyfriend—it sensed every time I was going to leave it and, at that exact moment, would promise me all sorts of things to make me stay.

I realized he saw every social interaction as a miniature gig and therefore an opportunity for acceptance or rejection. His mood was so dependent on how he felt these conversational performances went and I hated being wise to it.

We kept missing each other’s meaning—everything we said annoyed each other.

And I realized he’d chosen not to be thoughtful but to be funny instead. To no one but himself.

My subconscious had put him on a probation period, collecting reasons to end his contract without my knowledge. Incidents that were insignificant to him were weighty to me. When I tried to explain why I had doubts about whether we should be together, he felt like he hadn’t been given a fair chance to prove himself. I told him he shouldn’t have to prove himself in a relationship, he should be allowed to just be himself. He asked why him being himself was not enough. I didn’t have an answer for him, because I didn’t know.

that was missing from your partner who was otherwise totally right for you is the thing you look for in the following person. That missing 10 per cent becomes such a fixation that, when you do find someone who has it, you ignore the fact they don’t have the other 90 per cent that the previous partner had.

It’s a weird kind of mourning and a weird kind of celebration, to examine the skeleton of something that was once so magnificent, before you scatter all the fragments of it out into the world to say goodbye.”