Really Good, Actually

by Monica Heisey

Or because we fell in love too young, and how could our actual lives compare to the idea we’d had of what our lives could be when we were barely twenty

I felt different, though: calmer, safer. Buckled in.

My bisexuality until now had been largely theoretical,

Though I’d always felt at least 35% gay, whenever my orientation came up in conversation, I felt inexperienced and sheepish.

‘I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m fundamentally a worse person than I thought I was. How can you tell if something you did was a stupid mistake or a real sign of your character?’

All the upstairs ladies talked about death like this – like it was an appointment they knew was coming up but had forgotten exactly when they’d booked it in for.

eventually I would reveal the part of myself that made him recoil, and he would go, and I’d be despondent, so for now I was just trying to enjoy the view.

at a certain point it becomes running, when most of moving on is just getting out of bed and plodding forward. Call it what you must, but you need to practise walking around and living life and being heartbroken at the same time. Not in an exciting way, where you’re in the thrall of some new person, or buying something outrageous, or terrorising Jiro, but in the way you still have to go to work when you have a toothache.’

that I was queering the straight relationship by being less attractive than he was.

‘We’re not friends. We’re just two people having a hard time.’

‘but I haven’t been alone in a long time, and now I am, and if I don’t stay that way for a bit, I will never understand what it is I actually like or want or even, maybe, feel, so I have to be a careful little nun for a few weeks or months, and then who knows?

As time passed, I knew, little details like this would fade from my memory; I would fixate less often on our relationship and the low-grade horror of its ending. One day I would climb into bed with a sandwich and think, I used to have a name for this, and not know what it was. I snorted at the idea of pulling this off for a day, even a few hours. It was taking so long. It would take so much longer.