The No-Show

by Beth O'Leary

She’s probably forgiven him already, really, in anticipation of his excellent excuse. But for a moment, it’s quite nice to imagine she’s the sort of woman who wouldn’t. The sort of woman who’d say, I don’t take this shit. If you stand me up, that’s it. You’re done.

Should i be this kind of woman ?

Part of the trick of not letting people into your heart is not to care when they lie to you; the trick is not to care what they say at all.

“Don’t worry, though. I make a lot of mistakes, but I try not to make the same one twice.”

This should be my motto

“But why? Why are we so hostile to that? What if we called that compassion, and thought, wow, isn’t it great that strangers can look at me and think, Poor her, I hope she’s okay? Because actually, that’s what I think if I see a woman who looks like she’s been stood up. I don’t think, God, how pathetic, what a loser, nobody loves her. Do you?” Collective headshaking. Though there’s probably the odd dickhead in there who thinks exactly that. Siobhan does truly believe her message—that people are ultimately good, and kind, and worth loving—but she also thinks that quite a lot of them are hiding it well. “So why are we letting our embarrassment tell us to think the worst of the people around us? And—hang on—how has that emotion managed to get in there and tell us, This is on you? When, I mean, whose fault is it that I was sitting alone in that café? Was it mine? Or was it his?” “His!” they yell, and Siobhan smiles out at them all. “Let me tell you what I did as soon as I left that café. I blocked that guy’s number and I cleared all our messages and I ghosted him, because I damn well wasn’t going to wait for him to ghost me first. Am I right? You know what I’m going to say. Love yourself first. Don’t wait for him to do it for you.”

Siobhan has this constant sense of sand slipping beneath her feet as she runs, as if the ground is just waiting to trip her up.

Great imagery

She’s collapsed inward like this once before, and it’s even worse now for knowing just how awful it’s about to get.

Its the knowing how bad that it will be...

Something awful is happening to her. She’s breaking.

He’s bright eyed and energized today—he’s just played football, and his hair is still wet from showering. He beamed at her when she arrived at the café, and he said, Jane, you look lovely today, and she had thought, Marry me marry me marry me, then, Stop that, Jane, just stop it.

LOL

Why is it not possible to snatch words in midair and take them back?

Beautiful imagery. Why indeed

“That’s the difference between a friend and a lover, Jane. A friend doesn’t need the whole of you. If you don’t want to tell me about your life before we met, I don’t give a toss—I’m in it for the Jane that’s here and now, aren’t I? I take you as you come. But if I loved you, I’d want everything. Wouldn’t I? Don’t you want all of him? All his secrets? All the versions of Joseph that exist out there, all the people he is when he’s at work and with his mother and with the lads at the pub?”

as she catches sight of herself in a shop window she has a little flutter of that feeling that she now knows is called disassociation, that sense that she is observing herself from a distance, that she can’t tell if she’s real.

He shakes his head. “Nobody would want me if they knew how broken I am.” His words are slurring. “That’s nonsense. One day a woman will love every inch of the real, proper you—maybe she’ll be a woman who’s had struggles of her own, and she’ll be glad that you understand what that feels like.”