Friends and Dark Shapes: A Novel

by Kavita Bedford

I can’t tell if I am beginning to fall in love with her a little bit, or if I want to be her; maybe they are always the same thing.

So many of us are floating or saving up for some day when it will get better. I think it would be better to spend all the money I make doing things I actually love instead of saving it all for some other day. Just a lot of the time, I think I don’t want to live as long as we do these days. I don’t want to become a divorced, sick, still-working, grumpy husk of a man like my dad and still have so long to go in life. And I don’t mean suicide or nothing. I’d just rather live now, and live brightly.

He brushed my forehead, and said that sometimes people want to find someone to blame because the insides of their bodies feel like prisons. Is that why you go away and write to catch your thoughts, I asked, so they don’t drag you away? Yes, sort of, he said. You know how sometimes you get so many worries about things changing, or you have thoughts that feel a bit crazy that no one will understand? I nodded. It’s important to find somewhere to put all of the upset, he said, so you don’t become like that poor woman and take it out on the wrong people. It was strange to realise sometimes things got too much for him too.

I wonder now if I will ever again speak with another in that distant language of giggles and chants and dark magic. I wonder if, after you lose a parent and lose your base, it is ever possible for the same city to again feel like that cross-my-heart-hope-to-die teenage secret.

The truth about getting older, she says, is you just spend more time watching the same streets and missing people that used to be in them with you.

It turns out we want roots, we want a home, we want the small, everyday happiness.

The rain met the ocean, and it was hard to tell which way was up, and which way was down, because everywhere was water and water and water, and it felt like there would never be land again.

Is that true: is a feeling about a city also a feeling about oneself? And if so, how does one ever separate their city from themselves? Are we all superimposing ourselves onto our backdrop, forcing the geography to come alive with our own loss and love?

We don’t always get to choose the places that become everything to us.