Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

I’d noticed this was a thing that people did when they got into their thirties: they saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgement on their life. If you voted Labour and they voted Lib Dem, they thought you were voting Labour specifically to let them know that their politics were incorrect. If they moved to the suburbs and you didn’t, they thought you were refusing solely to prove a point that your life was more glamorous than theirs. Katherine had defected to long-term monogamy in her mid-twenties when she met her husband, Mark, and, since then, she wanted everyone to come and join her.

returning to the scene of my teenage life for an afternoon felt like a brief holiday back in time.

The most simultaneously reassuring and unsettling discovery I made in those first few intense weeks of compulsive right- and left-clicking on Linx, was just how unimaginative humans are. None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality – it would be too painful to process. I-like-the-outdoors-also-like-the-indoors-I-love-pizza-I’m-looking-for-someone-who-can-make-me-laugh-I-just-want-someone-to-come-home-to-and-feel-wriggling-next-to-me-in-the-middle-of-the-night unoriginality. There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we’d like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.

He said he’d felt untethered in recent years – unsure of the sort of life that would make him happiest. He felt like he had to escape something, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know where to go. I told him I thought that was the sensation commonly known as adulthood.

‘Heterosexual women should be decorated like war heroes just for loving us,’ he said with a sigh, his fingers gently separating the strands of my hair. ‘I don’t know how you all do it.’ ‘I know, bless us,’ I said. ‘We’re really putting our shifts in and it’s such a thankless job.’

I had never known a feeling as unbearable – as sour, wrenching and unshakeably sad – as pity for a parent.

My best and oldest friend, stuck somewhere between her former earth-bound self and a new life, floating up and away from self-awareness and a sense of humour, to a place I couldn’t reach her. You don’t get to be both, I wanted to say to her. Which are you, Katherine? A satirist or an arsehole?

Being a heterosexual woman who loved men meant being a translator for their emotions, a palliative nurse for their pride and a hostage negotiator for their egos.