Ghosts

by Dolly Alderton

then haunted me with a sinister sense that there were important things I couldn’t remember and never would. Hundreds of black holes in who I was, as bottomless as a night spent drinking tequila.

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

I jerked my head away and looked out at the passing city. Lola squeezed my hand. I smiled at her and squeezed it back. I’d never felt more grateful for her friendship than since Max’s disappearance.

“I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” he said within the first two minutes of me asking him about his job. I wouldn’t be surprised if right-leaning thirty-somethings received a script in the post to prepare them for social situations. “I’m not sure if I believe that really exists,” I replied. “I know what you’re trying to say. But ‘I love the gays but don’t care about the poor’ can’t be described as liberal in any sense.”

A diagnosis of chronic mentionitis—that another human has bought a permanent property on a road that goes right through the middle of your soul—means that you are truly, irreversibly, horrifically in love.

She was so desperate to love someone. It seemed like such a simple, singular thing to ask from this life.

Each of them would give these men something—a story, a weekend away, their attention, their advice, their time, a sexual adventure, an actual adventure—then they’d be forced to pass him along to the next relationship. These men would emerge at some point, full of all the love and care and confidence that had been bestowed upon them over the years, and they might commit to someone. Then, most certainly, another one. Then another one when that one got boring. Their greed would not be satisfied by one woman, by one life. They’d get to lead a great many lives. Life after life after life after life.