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HALF HUMAN HALF CHEESE WHEEL BORN TO LEICESTER COUPLE: Mother Weeps, “I Always Knew We’d Brie Blessed,” claims the Daily Star,
“So take it down about three point sizes, please, Garamond.” Clive was back and sliding the drinks onto the scarred coffee table. “‘Gaz’ is short for ‘Garamond,’ of the Fonty Garamonds,” he explained. “As in, the actual font,” Joss piped up. “His grandfather invented it.” “He’s mad as pants. Won’t even read anything in sans serif,” Gaz said.
“It’s called The Bird,” she tossed at me over her shoulder. “It’s where C. S. Lewis and Tolkien and some other people got together and gave notes on each other’s manuscripts and probably acted totally unbearable.”
“Too right. A woman can’t bloody well pick her signature drink without sampling the whole bar.”
it’s hard to be free and clear for whatever comes along when you’re not making any room for anything to come along.”
I told myself to carry this moment as a talisman of a time in my life when I was both truly content and lucky enough to realize it.
thought of high school English, and that part of the Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” about how the breath right before you kiss your beloved is the sweetest one of all, because you realize you’re about to get exactly what you want.
The turbulent love and lust we gave in to that day felt like completion, like kismet, like the beginning of a story that was always meant to be written. Nick and I had discovered a gravitational pull of our own, and it changed everything.
“You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.” —Wallis Simpson
I remember once waiting for the Tube and thinking, as its oncoming headlights gleamed brighter in the tunnel, I could just jump. Not because I wanted to die, but because sometimes your mind dangles the worst-case behavior in front of you specifically so that you can be aware that you’re choosing to resist it.
I remember understanding what a brutal thing it is to be the bearer of truly bad news—to break off a piece of that misery and hand it to other people, one by one, and then have to comfort them; to put their grief on your shoulders on top of all your own; to be the calm one in the face of their shock and tears. And then learning that relative weight of grief is immaterial. Being smothered a little is no different than being smothered a lot. Either way, you can’t breathe.
I don’t know why it takes something monumentally destructive to remind you what you want to save. This was not the life I would have chosen, but Nick would always be the person.
