Just Last Night

by Mhairi McFarlane

This is what I never knew about loss—it’s also about what you gain. You carry a weight that you never had before. It’s never behind you. It’s alongside you.

“Forever”: people say it in wedding vows all the time like they understand what it means, but actual forever is fucking huge.

But don’t we all, in a sense, crop out our nuclear power stations?”

We can feel ourselves, if not having already made irreversible mistakes, right on the verge of making them.

I notice, once again, that company that’s not the right fit for you is so much lonelier than being happily alone.

As an introvert, i feel this greatly.

I ponder how many mistakes in life are born of a simple fear of being rude.

The things we do to avoid difficult things are often worse than the difficult thing.

God laughs when we tell Him our plans, and He also has a good old chortle when He overhears us saying we know things for sure, like who we know we’re never going to feel feelings for.

Seeing someone you know well in a totally different context is always disorientating and vaguely impressive. You realize you have them on loan from the other lives they lead.

Separation makes you value something more and I was acutely aware of how fond I was of Ed, and how badly I’d miss him.

There’ve been times it’s hurt less and times it’s hurt more, but it’s always there and it’s always hurt.

the act of choosing toppings feels so frivolous. It’s like a statement that life goes on. You’re not ready for that statement. You can’t find the moment, or the words, without it seeming tasteless. How

can they be dead, and you’re still preferring pepperoni to ham.”

It’s very hard to absorb that I will be thinking and “what-if-ing” about last night’s events for the rest of my life. It has an instant permanence, like looking at a fresh wound and knowing the scar it leaves will always be a part of your body.

Why are things, abandoned things, so hard to bear? They didn’t have that quality before. And compared to the living thing you’ve lost, they’re without value.

This lack of warning is another aspect of it that I can’t accept. Susie didn’t know her last day was her last day. She got no ceremony, no sense of occasion. Life life life . . . and in an instant, dead. Like a brutal edit in a film, a jump cut. Over. Finished.

Our environment is so extraordinarily perilous. That’s what I can’t unknow, sitting in rooms abuzz with ignorant noise. Nothing is for granted, and everything you know can be taken away in an instant.

You don’t realize the flippancy of your generation’s attitudes and language until you grasp for the terminology that conveys the impact, and it’s not there. It’s been shopworn by silly jokes and ironic hyperbole.

Everyone’s a fool for somebody,

No one said evil couldn’t be attractive. It’s how evil gets a lot of its workload done, in fact.

Beauty isn’t an arrangement of features, even features as perfect as Finlay Hart’s, it’s a feeling. This is how it feels in the split second you suddenly become aware that you’re falling in love with someone. The click of a jigsaw’s last piece, the rainfall of coins in a jackpot slot machine, the right song striking up and your being swept away by its opening bars. That conviction of making complete sense of the universe, in one moment. Of course. You’re where I should be. You’re here.