Between Us

by Mhairi McFarlane

Can success really change a person, though? she wondered. Maybe it only brings elements that were always there to the fore?

Nearly a decade on, it was as if their love was a neglected, autumn leaf–strewn swimming pool. It technically still existed, yet Joe had drained the water out, inch by inch. If you jumped into it, there was nothing there. You’d break your ankles.

There being no correct and appropriate moment to raise any problem was one of the ways the game felt rigged. Pick an otherwise pressured time? She was thoughtlessly adding to it. During a nice evening out? Ruining it. Try to raise it on a quiet day? Ambush.

She wasn’t going to use her support of him for all those years as a weapon. Love was not meant to be balance transfers. “The fact you’re calling it ‘making a fuss,’ as if I’m a brat, rather than being concerned I’m unhappy, is exactly what I mean.”

“You don’t love me anymore?” “I don’t think I know you anymore, to love you,” Roisin said, holding in tears in the tight wall of her chest.

“I don’t have the bandwidth for this. I had no idea that you were going to wake up this morning and decide we were over,” Joe said. “I think we’ve been over for a while,” Roisin said. “I’m just the one to say it.”

My general point is in the eye of the storm—and this isn’t a storm, believe me—it feels impossible it’ll ever lose its sting. But it will, and faster than you think.”

“I think . . . be clear in your own mind what you want. Or Joe will be clear in his mind what you want.”

Their breaking up, after so long—it was one of those things that happened all the time, but when it happened to you, it was unfeasibly gigantic. Roisin remembered thinking that the words my dad died were far too mundane and ordinary a statement, regarding its seismic impact and otherworldly strangeness. This, after nearly ten years together, had some of the same feel.

That’s life’s mystery, isn’t it? You’re left with best guesses. Oh my God.” Roisin paused. “What?” “That’s what I’ve been doing, with Joe. A man has stopped loving me, and all my focus is on why, and what I did wrong. Solving the mystery. Fuck,”

She got into her driver’s seat with the light-headed feeling of having made history, and not a good chapter. She’d known this day was coming now for a long time, but it was no less weird. Like the shock of a death after a protracted illness. It was slow, but fast at the end. Like Ernest Hemingway said of going bankrupt, in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.

Roisin was her old self. Actually, no, that wasn’t true. She was her present self, this self. She liked this self.