The Rachel Incident

by Caroline O'Donoghue

I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.

I was paranoid the way only people of my generation are paranoid, that I was about to be publicly derided by an unseen, online mass for ideological crimes committed as a teenager.

I had given up on becoming enlightened and was just getting drunk all the time.

April is a dangerous time to get obsessed with a man who is harder to pin down than egg whites.

I was in love for the first time properly, and he didn’t want me, and it was eating my organs.

“We’ve all had our hearts broken, and we’ve all had someone cut us some slack because of it.”

“I just think it’s mental that we’re drinking Côtes du Rhône and eating fish fingers.”

“Sometimes I feel like I was in a coma or something, before we met.”

His skin looked lunar that night, like something the sky had given birth to. “I love you,” I said, my thumbs on the famous stomach. “I love you like I’ve never loved anyone.”

What they were trying to do was send an adult signal to someone who didn’t yet have the language to translate it.

But we would get through it the way Irish people traditionally get through things. By getting shit-faced.

It was an important life lesson to learn, and I’ve used it a lot since: if you’re looking to distract a couple, just ask them how they met.

His attempts at adult life had played out like Peter Pan trying to trap his shadow. In that one unfinished sentence, he was coming to the realisation that some people create their own adulthood, and some people have it thrust upon them. He, it turned out, would be the latter kind of person.

When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.

That was over ten years ago, which makes it a genuine memory, and not the pretend one I fantasised about in the cab ride home. The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much.

I’ve never been someone who asks about ex-girlfriends, preferring to presume that men were simply asleep before I met them.

I am good at a few things, but I am great at being married.