This Time Next Year

by Sophie Cousens

Yet visiting old haunts and a long-forgotten road was like stretching the concertina out again—the memories leap out, fresh as the day you folded them away.

How could her parents spend so much of their lives fixing things and fail to see what was broken right in front of them?

No one watched her go and the sea of the kitchen closed around her, like water filling the space where a small fish used to swim.

“He was talking about how, if the universe was a day, then our planet’s only been around for a blink of an eye, and if that blink of an eye was another day, humans have only been around for a blink in that blink. Then I got to thinking, if humans have only been around for a blink, then my lifetime is probably only a blink of that blink.” Minnie was listening attentively, but she was already lost. She moved her eyes from side to side, trying to keep up. “Right,” she said slowly. “And if my life is just a blink in a blink in a blink, then what’s the point in any of it? Nothing I do, nothing I say is ever going to matter

“I don’t want to think like this,” Bev said mournfully, unpacking more packets of flour and lining them up on the counter. “But now I’ve thought it, I can’t turn it off. Like, I was in the shower the other day and I was looking at this shampoo bottle my daughter bought me. It was made of real nice-feeling matte plastic, like someone had taken a lot of time over it. This bottle that was only made to hold shampoo for a month or two and it will probably be around on this planet longer than me. I’ll be dead in thirty years, and my kids might remember me, maybe even my grandkids, but then what? There will be no record I was ever here. But this shampoo bottle will still be existing somewhere, with its list of ingredients and its lovely matte finish.”

“Such a classic Pisces.” Fleur nodded. “All this anxiety about helping everyone.”

Minnie stood up, hugged Greg, hugged Clive, and then left. It had stopped raining outside. On the doorstep she paused, confused by what had just happened. She hadn’t gone there tonight to break up with Greg, but she’d felt this shift inside her. It was as though Ian’s speech had awoken her inner romantic, a voice she’d been silencing for years. She wanted to be with someone who spoke about her the way Ian spoke about Leila, and she definitely didn’t want to be anyone’s seventy percent.

The jostle of thoughts now began again in earnest and she knew she would have no peace until she plucked them out one by one and confined them to a list. She typed a note on her phone.

Since their argument three months ago, she and Leila had patched up a practical peace. They’d had to communicate to wind down the business, but it was a Band-Aid on something that ran much deeper and they both felt it.

They still communicated, sent texts, occasionally exchanged news over the phone. But something had changed between them since their argument. Leila worked days, Minnie worked evenings. They’d met up for Saturday morning coffee a few times, but a polite distance had settled between them. Minnie felt she was catching up with an old acquaintance, exchanging information. She found herself commenting on the coffee, which was never a good sign. Patching together pieces of their friendship in a semblance of repair had not healed the underlying wound.

Years of being so close, rubbing against each other’s hard edges,

finally

Leila used to say that you got the relationship you thought you were worth. If you thought you were only worth part of someone’s attention, perhaps that was all you looked for.

“Maybe they’re both lost souls,” said Quinn thoughtfully. “They see themselves reflected in the other.”

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,’” he said.

“Keats. ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ Written here, I think. I can’t remember any more of it.”

Quinn came to think of therapy as akin to fixing bomb damage with wallpaper—it was something to take your mind off the fact that the walls of your house had been blown to bits.

An orange carpet of leaves covered the footpaths and a crisp, low light shone through the tangle of tree boughs above her head. She picked up a perfect red leaf from the ground, examining the intricate pattern of vessels mapping its thin surface. So beautiful, yet only created to last such a short time before its role on this planet was over, and it would decay into mulch. An unremarkable existence, and yet to look at it—how remarkable. “Minnie?”

“Life is change—if nothing’s changing, you aren’t living.”