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He remembers, like his first kiss, the first time he put the key in the lock, turning first the wrong way, then the right, fumbling over the not-yet-familiar gesture.
Ephemera, it’s called. From the Greek. Like those frail-legged mayflies, with their lace-and-stained-glass wings, who live only for a day.
and we hadn’t quite realised the magnitude of the problem until Uncle Teddy dead lol, and by then it was too late to do anything.
You don’t really fall in love with a house. You fall in love with the life you could have in it.
Looking back, I don’t know what I was trying to keep. Because all I’ve got are responsibilities and empty spaces.
“She appreciates ornamental young men in their natural habitat.”
I waved at her through two panes of glass and a rainstorm.
Book-ending each other’s days to stop them collapsing into heaps of jumbled time.
They were our friends. Even now, when I see them, which isn’t as often as I should, I feel less. Less than I used to be. When I was with him.
We were going to end up as newspaper headlines: Pensioner and Homosexual Found Dead in River—Coincidence, Tragedy, or Satanic Ritual Gone Wrong? “It could be dangerous.”
Living in a city, it’s so easy to forget how absolute the night can be.
Tried not to think how ridiculous I looked, bare-legged in the hall, with nobody there to laugh and make it mean something.
My own helplessness welled up inside me like dirty water. I hated this. Life is so full of rough edges—small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you’re naked and alone. And without a fucking car.
“Ayup, petal.” Oh. Ayup: from the Old Norse se upp, watch out, or look up. Usually a greeting.
Tonight there was something different. Something both deeper and shallower than friendship. Familiarity, perhaps, the sudden realisation that we lived our sealed-up little lives in closeness to each other. That we had something to share and something to lose. Something to protect together.
but it had all felt so meaningless, the pleasure as random as notes hammered on an out-of-tune piano by a man who couldn’t play.
This man who would make a rational choice not to be annoyed with his colleagues, where I would simply marinate in bitter quiet and sip my inadequately brewed tea.
But mainly what he remembers are moments in the dark, stirring to wakefulness in a pool of shared warmth, and lulled back to sleep by the rhythm of another’s breath.
How it would feel to be really alone, and for my loneliness to be written on the landscape rather than merely upon me.
too full and too empty of memories and things, half wishing the water would come and ruin it all, wash it away, and make me start again. Half-wishing, but mainly terrified.
“You met someone, you fell in love, you were together a long time, you broke up amicably. That’s not exactly a tragedy.” “But isn’t that worse? Devastated by not exactly a tragedy?”
It was waiting with a purpose, with an outcome, and it felt different. It was a waiting that danced with me, and on my skin.
“You had an evil grandmother? That sounds . . . so wrong.”
myself the speaker, not the listener. Vulnerable.
I’d thought myself such an expert at listening, at fading, at creating space for others. It was power of a kind.
sandbag philosopher who listened because he wanted to listen, not because he was afraid to speak.
I’m not sure how you draw the line between thinking about feelings, and feeling about feelings, or even just having feelings.”
“You look like the Weasleys.” “Oi. My mam’s blonde.” “Sorry.”
All that was left of Marius: the places he used to be.
or the fact this was a frankly peculiar conversation to be having with your ex-boyfriend’s mother—but none of them would have been helpful. “I’m sure David Cameron will look after me.”
Because I knew it was the final piece of grief. Moving on.
“There w-were scenarios?” “I’m an engineer. There are always scenarios.”
Always remember to ask permission from the witch who inhabits the elder tree. Or you may be cursed
