Panenka

by Ronan Hession

‘Even though it’s true, it doesn’t mean you have to say it out loud. It has to be helpful and the other person has to be ready to hear it.’

He saw that commitment meant it was possible to have distance without discord. To him love was no union between two otherwise incomplete halves, but more like the gravity that locked two bodies into the same orbit, each doing their own thing but by reference to and in concert with the other.

Habituated loneliness was bearable, but the heart was not built to endure glimpses of what it could never truly have.

Words always took too long to find, and in the meantime the silence conspired against him and separated everything.

It struck him how unreliable age was as a measure of anything. All it did was count the distance from the start, when what truly mattered was the time remaining.

I’m happy to let time do the work. And time with you feels different to any other type of time.’

After all, a few crumbs of love could be made to last a long time if they are all you have.

He said he wanted to clear the weeds in his past to make a path for our future, and I’m sure someday I’ll find the bad poem he stole those words from.

Relationships never truly ended, and even when people faded from you their effect was preserved somewhere in the particle physics of experience where everything is a compound made up of traces of everything else.

‘Do you know the way, between two people, there’s wanting to but can’t, wanting to but won’t and then not wanting to?’ she said. ‘I do now.’

‘Why can’t a woman have a deep affinity with a man, though? Perhaps even love him, and he can love her, but it doesn’t have to become romantic. Then it’s okay if you love the person. You don’t have to pretend you don’t, or hide any subterfuge about being more than friends.

Shouldn’t we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement.

‘I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘Sometimes when you love someone that’s what you do. You wait for them.’