Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

I found this unsaid pact to be both sad and cheering in equal measure.

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.

I’d never known why they were important, but they were—they felt like proof of life lived,

Pretend Boyfriend Man used his profile to push an agenda of a dreamy, committed reliability. His photo selection always included an image of him holding a friend’s baby or, worse, stripping wallpaper or sanding a floor with his top off. His profile included supposedly throwaway phrases such as “on the lookout for a wife” or “My dream evening? Snuggling on the sofa while watching a Sofia Coppola film.”

He knew exactly what he was doing and I wasn’t having any of it.

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.

Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can’t be bothered to take up an instrument.

I knew it would be a subject we returned to at some point when we were drunker and more comfortable with each other and we’d steer the conversational tone until we sounded like Oprah doing a tell-all televised interview, in which we’d take turns to be the guest.

asked me if I’d like another drink, I said yes and he said: “Single or double?” I smiled and he winked. We were in this together now, two comrades on a mission.

The sexiest, most exciting, romantic, explosive feeling in the world is a matter of a few centimetres of skin being stroked for the first time in a public place. The first confirmation of desire. The first indication of intimacy. You only get that feeling with a person once.

We established that we both suffered from condiment anxiety—a fear that the sauce will run out on the walk home.

“Never been. Where is it?” “Look it up,” he said, before closing the door.

Her illogical optimism about the exact trajectory of her life never failed to make me glow with fondness for her.

It’s so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you’ve borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own.

(all tall people are smug, whether they know it or not).

I took out my notebook to write meaningless words on that I’d never return to, as a gesture of enthusiasm.

“Perhaps you are. I always rather liked sleeping around. It was all a lot of harmless fun as far as I can remember, apart from the odd bit of disease, but that was no bother really.”

Men always have to keep a low flame burning for every ex. It will be flickering in there for him, even if he doesn’t know it is. Whereas women always have to extinguish it.”

“I know,” he said, giving me a clumsy hug. “I’m sorry.” “What’s the excuse, come on, say it quickly before you can make one up.”

think something happens in your thirties where you slightly let go of this idea of the perfect career.

“We weren’t wrong,” he said. “We were growing up.”

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

“He seemed great.” “Yeah, well, they always do.”

I’m going to have to become that woman in the office who befriends all the graduates.”

“Ideally, I’m looking for a Cancer, but they can be a bit too home-orientated and weirdly I’ve noticed often have psoriasis, which isn’t a problem of course.”

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

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.

No shame in it.” “I didn’t say there was any shame in it.”

“You will feel a bit silly. But it’s a bit of discomfort for you that will make such a huge difference to him.”

Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is “pain from an old wound.”

I was doing everything I could to keep him alive with me—I had started reading our early messages like they were the pages of a play. I preferred to live with a half-alive version of him than admit he was gone for good.

The contents of supermarket baskets are surely evidence that none of us are coping with adulthood all that well.

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind”

And single women at a thirty-something party carried the same calibre of entertainment as a covers band.

“No one remotely fuckable is going to be on a train to Godalming, trust me,”

“How do you know he’s online until two a.m. every night?” “Because I basically just sit there with our chat window open on my phone not talking to him but watching him be online. I cancelled dinner with a friend last night to do it.”

A definitive 1970s manual on marriage that may have been on our mothers’ shelves in earnest but had since been claimed by us in satire.

Everyone cheered at this meaningless innuendo. Prudes love innuendo.

“He probably didn’t know what he wanted until he was told it was what he wanted.”

“And are you both putting yourself out there?” Lola topped up her wine glass. “Yes. It’s all I’ve been doing. I hate that phrase, like I’m a worm on a hook.”

“Do you really want that from these men? Their attention?” “No,” she said. “What do you want?” “Their love.”

I couldn’t be bothered to ask for the translation of this.

“You never know someone’s true politics until you go to their wedding.” How right and wise he was.

I realized I was sitting in a noise that was harder to ignore than anything I had heard all night. Silence.

You always told us that literature belongs to everyone and that we should never feel intimidated by it.

What was it about mothers that lowered a woman’s irritation threshold by a metre just from speaking?

No one can stay young for ever, even when youth seems such an integral part of who they are. It’s such a simple rule of being human, and yet one I regularly found impossible to grasp. Everyone gets old.

“This is exactly how it was meant to turn out.” “It was,” he said, placing his lips to my cheek and holding them there for a few seconds before giving it a parting kiss. “And I wouldn’t change any of it.”

“Lola, what’s your love language?” Franny asked, her chin coyly resting in the palm of her hand. Lola shrugged. “I don’t know. Anal, probably.”

“You’re lucky,” I said. “Why?” “To feel unemotional about politics.”