Talking at Night

by Claire Daverley

Don’t miss out on something good, simply because it’s different.

He listens to her breathing and thinks of her awake and looping, obsessive and hurting and trying to cope, and the love he feels is bigger than anything he’s felt before, bigger than his anger and his pain, his desire and his fury, and this, to him, is entirely new, and the right thing, he knows, is to keep it to himself.

He tells her he loves her, too, because it turns out it only takes practice, and meaning it—and feeling it—has nothing to do with anything.

He knows this thing between them will always hold some temptation, some kind of magnetic pull that neither of them can quite break. An addiction, he thinks, as he descends, passes another lone hiker who nods to him, says morning. And like any addiction, you have to learn to manage it. It’s a moment of weakness, when he sees something and wants to share it with her, an urge that crops up out of nowhere, even though he is calm, and managing, and getting out every day, as if he can walk off the bad feelings,

and thinks how all the old songs are true, how love is so often just pain, still four letters, the flip side of the same feeling.

I wish I’d done everything on earth with you, she says.

You’re okay, she says, and it is as if the word has lost all meaning, and yet still Rosie holds on to it, like a life buoy, a truth they can speak into being.

the peace he’s made with the things he did and the people who left and the way the sun keeps rising, regardless.

There are things that mean something, friends and laughter and nourishment, and things that just happen, because that is living without tragedy, routine-led, more deliberate.

But they are themselves. Full of spaces that don’t need to be filled, imprints in the mattress and the carpets of the houses they no longer live in, getting on in ways they had wanted.

I don’t want to shoot for things that bleed me dry, anymore; I want things that fill me up, and I don’t care what they are, as long as you’re there, and I’m there with you. I want to make you breakfast, Will. Meet you at home, every day, and share car keys and toothpaste and surprise you with birthday candles.

There is only what happens, he tells her. What is and what isn’t.