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.

On that August evening, in the first hours of the second day of my thirty-third year, it felt like every random component of my life had been designed long ago to fit together at that very moment.

My thirty-second birthday was the simplest birthday I ever had. Which was a perfectly lovely way to begin the strangest year of my life.

“It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”

When I was in Pinner, I could be seventeen again, just for a day. I could pretend that my world was myopic and my choices meaningless and the possibilities that were ahead of me were wide open and boundless.

I too had shoeboxes of cinema tickets from first dates with Joe and utility bills from flats I no longer lived in. I’d never known why they were important, but they were—they felt like proof of life lived,

only famous people get assassinated. Normal people just get shot in the open.

There were graphic designers—Jesus, there were so many graphic designers. Why had I only ever met a handful of graphic designers in real life and yet I had seen at least 350 of them on this dating app?

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.

He loved to travel. Recently, he’d become restless. He hated the daily slog of his job and dreamt of a simpler life—teaching surfing, working on a farm, living in remoteness—but he was realistic about the fact he’d probably miss his salary. He couldn’t work out which gave him greater freedom: earning enough money so he could disappear whenever he wanted, or earning no money and choosing a life of semi-permanent disappearance. 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.

“But those are the best things about a person—the contradictions,”

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.

“I’ve had a lovely night, Nina,” he said, and held my face in his hands as if it were as unexpected as a pearl in an oyster. “And I’m certain I’m going to marry you.”

“Imagine if happiness was as easy in adulthood,” I said, sitting back up on the sofa. “Imagine if that level of divine contentment were that accessible to us.”

The truth was, I very rarely knew what Lola meant when she said “you know what I mean?,” but I found her so entertaining, I never wanted to signal at a platform where her train of thought could stop.

she never got angry about anything—which wasn’t just down to her benevolence, she was mainly too busy either daydreaming about herself or worrying about everyone liking her. She was both the most tragically insecure and beguilingly confident person I had ever met.

“It’s already started happening. People don’t understand what it’s like to be us. No one wants to do anything any more, everyone just wants me round for dinner. Which is nice and everything, but I don’t want to spend my Saturday nights on a happy couple’s sofa. How am I ever going to meet anyone like that? I’ve never heard of anyone meeting the love of their life because they wandered through their friends’ living room in Bromley.”

Loads of people aren’t happy until they’re in a relationship. Happiness, for them, is being in a partnership. I am sadly one of those people.”

“It must be so sad, watching yourself become someone who is wound up and stressed out all the time. I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding it.”

It must be terrible to have a child and then realize it’s not the right decision for you. Particularly as you can’t say it out loud, so it’s a secret she’s had to keep for all my life.”

“Heterosexual women should be decorated like war heroes just for loving us,”

“So that’s why I like you so much. Accidentally hot people. They’re the best.”

As I felt the warmth of Max travel up into me through our hands, I felt like I was uncontactable. Reality could try as hard as it liked—it could text, email and call me—when I was with Max, it wouldn’t be able to get in touch.

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 think something happens in your thirties where you slightly let go of this idea of the perfect career. I have so much fun outside of work, maybe it’s enough that it’s just fine.

“I thought you didn’t like tall people.” “What an insane thing to say, why would I have ever said that?”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an engagement ring I could remember.

“All these things we thought about each other,” I said. “Doesn’t like tall people, wouldn’t join dating apps, never wanted to get married. Funny how wrong we were.” “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.

I marvelled at how a marriage ironically seemed to provide men of my generation with even more of an excuse to not grow up.

I never know if what I remember as an hour when I was a child was actually ten minutes in reality.”

“Of course I wasn’t! He told me he wanted to marry me on our first date. Can you imagine what would have happened if a woman had said that on a first date? He would have alerted the authorities. Why does he get to say that?

“How is this still the reality of our lives?” I said, gulping the rest of my wine in one. “Waiting for men to call us and reading our own hair like it’s a book. I feel so grim to be a woman. That’s not how I’m meant to feel.”

The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is “pain from an old wound.”

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

But finding proof of his existence meant I had to ask myself a harder question: if he was real, but he was gone, had I dreamt our relationship? Had I invented what we were to each other? The magic that I had felt when he’d picked me up and kissed me on the dance floor the first night we met, “The Edge of Heaven” our soundtrack, was that one-sided? Did Max make everyone feel like that? Was he an illusionist? Was this a show-stopping, spangled deception he could perform on anyone? The love I’d felt, the details of him I’d studied like an academic, the future I’d tentatively begun to think about—were they sleight of hand and tricks of the mind? Had I fallen for it?

Had I trusted him too quickly and fallen too deeply, because I’d projected my own version of his personality into the holes of my knowledge of him?

“No,” I said. “I’m not having any of this. Women shouldn’t have to trick men into keeping their attention.”

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

Everyone gets old. 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.

Getting older was an increasingly perplexing thing, but these moments—understanding that potential future memories were being taken from you year on year, like road closures—were the very worst of it.

Performative, public baby-holding had become a competitive sport for childless women at events over the last five years.

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

So much of the love you feel for a person is dependent on the vast archive of shared memories you can access just by seeing their face or hearing their voice.

“Love is homesickness,”

I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.

I was an adult woman with a mortgage, a career and a life full of responsibilities. I was a little girl with a dying dad. And I didn’t know where I wanted to go. “I miss home.” I miss home. I miss home.

“Being in love isn’t a notion. It’s not a theory. It’s a connection you have to someone. If you were in love with me, you wouldn’t have been able to be apart from me.

I don’t think you actually care about me. I think you care that an experience that might be good for you has ended.”