One Day in December

by Josie Silver

I’m not a bitch though; or maybe I’m just a quiet one inside my own head. Isn’t everyone?

Just two resolutions this year, but two big, shiny, brilliant ones. 1) Find him, my boy from the bus stop. 2) Find my first proper job in magazines.

He’s nice enough in a vaguely Ross from Friends kind of way, but I find I’m more intrigued to meet Sarah’s soulmate, which must mean that Ross from Friends would be a regret come tomorrow.

How on earth has this colossal fuck-up happened? He can’t be Sarah’s. He’s mine. He’s been mine for an entire year.

Sarah is my best friend in the entire world, and however much and for however long it kills me, I’ll never silently, secretly hold up signs to tell Jack O’Mara, without hope or agenda, that to me he is perfect, and that my wasted heart will always love him.

but right now I can forgive her anything because her scarlet hair is strewn out around her shoulders on the pillows, almost as if she’s suspended in water. She looks like the Little Mermaid. Though I realize that thought makes me sound like a pervert.

Thank God I’m heading back home to spend Christmas with my folks soon; I seriously need some time to myself while I work out how the hell to play this.

Especially when I’ve had a bottle of wine and I half love you, I think. I really should go to bed now, before I scrub the chalk line out and move it forward again.

Laurie’s eyes are a fucking summer hedgerow.

What would John Travolta do right now, I wonder? And who is Sandra Dee in this scenario? Sarah’s too sassy by far; Frenchy all the way. Not that I’m saying Laurie is Sandy to my Danny, because that would be fucked up.

A guy in white chinos with a Rydell High college sweater knotted casually around his shoulders lowers the chrome bar across our knees, raising his eyebrows at us as he gives it a rattle to make sure we’re secured.

Danny Zuko eat your heart out; but the way he drums his fingers on the top of the car close to my shoulder tells me he’s not as relaxed as his outward appearance might suggest.

I want to bludgeon Rudolph, bump off Mariah Carey, and strangle the next person who pushes me with the nearest string of tinsel.

The wine is blood-warm in my mouth, pepper and rich black currants.

“I wanted to kiss you back there in the pub, Laurie, and I want to kiss you even more right now. You’re one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met in my whole life.” He looks away, down the length of the deserted street and then back at me again. “You’re beautiful and kind, and you make me laugh, and when you look at me like that with your summer hedgerow eyes…only a fucking saint wouldn’t kiss you.”

kissed her because she looked fucking ethereal under the streetlamp with snowflakes clinging to her hair.

There’s something about living in a different place that allows you to be whoever you want to be.

Yes, we’ve become one of those loved-up couples who call each other ridiculous names like ickle-pickle and dinky-toes.

was behind him in the queue in Pret in Covent Garden.

I told him that there comes a point where you have to make the choice to be happy, because being sad for too long is exhausting. And that one day, you’ll look back, and you’ll not be able to remember exactly what it was you loved about that person.”

“But I also said that sometimes, rarely, people can come back into your life. And if that happens, you should keep those people close to you forever.”

That when someone says “the man you’ve always dreamed of,” I think of Jack O’Mara.

You tread lightly through life, but you leave deep footprints that are hard for other people to fill.”

Sarah. Just writing her name fills me with shame and desolation. I need to find a way to make her believe that I’m sorry.

My dad died yesterday. Here one minute, and then gone, with no one at his side to hold his hand or kiss him goodbye.

I can’t help smiling, because his laugh has been missing from my life for so long. It’s late and the lights are low, and his green-gold eyes are the same green-gold eyes I looked into one December night from the top deck of a bus on Camden High Street. It seems like a lifetime ago. For that girl, I can’t say no.

And then he looks down at me, and his eyes say all the things he cannot. His gaze holds mine as we dance slowly, and I silently tell him that I’ll always carry him in my heart, and he silently tells me that in another place, another time, we’d have been pretty damn close to perfect.

The truth is that I’ve walked around the edge of being in love with Jack for too many years. It’s made me realize something inevitable, something that’s been a long time coming: he and I would be better off without each other. I need to unwind the roots of Jack O’Mara from my life. He’s too much a part of who I am, and me a part of him. The problem with uprooting things is that sometimes it kills them altogether, but that’s a risk I have to take. For the sake of my marriage; for the sake of all of us.

Above us the skies are flooded green and azure and purple, rolling swaths of glorious color.

“Sometimes you just meet the right person at the wrong time,” I say softly. “Yeah,” he says. “And then you spend every day afterward wishing that time could be rearranged.”

“I’d wait a lifetime for you,” I say. “I love you, Jack O’Mara.”