I wake up with a small startle at sudden consciousness, and lie still in the dark, my brain scrabbling to reassemble reality. It wasn’t a nightmare – and I’ve had plenty of those – it was just another world, exactly like this one, but with a dramatic difference. Your presence. Your presence, which I took for granted.
In this place, we were cheerfully organising a skiing trip, sitting at a school desk, while next to a busy motorway. The cars thundering past made the table shake but neither of us were bothered. How about Switzerland? you said. We had plans.
I imagine our messaging, me telling you about it later this morning, entertaining you on your commute. You always replied within minutes.
Hah you’d never go skiing, Eve. ‘Why would I willingly travel to a very cold place and do any sort of sport and call it a holiday? Who looks at a very steep icy slope and thinks, I know, I’ll put things on my feet that will make me fall down it faster?’ And so on.
IKR! Obviously my subconscious is trolling me. Also: why are our dreams so interesting to the dreamer and so boring to everyone else? Is it because we’re so impressed we created a story, but for them, the plot has no stakes?
Yes and double dull points for the people who think it’s amazing if it’s a surreal one, as if your dreams are going to be logical. ‘I was staring at the goat but oh my God, then I realised, the goat was ALSO ME.’
That sounds pretty cool, tbf. Goat transmogrification beats skiing any day
Argh, why didn’t I walk 2 mins further to Caffé Nero, I am such a lazy sod, even the Starbucks flat white is a filthy sweet kids milkshake. Pint after work?
Pint after work! x
I miss you.
I hate inventing you, scripting your lines, instead of having the original. I’m what my mum calls, acidly – because I could do a good impression of her second husband – a natural mimic.
But the ease with which I can conjure you up, it feels like a curse. A parlour trick, but it’s ghoulish, a parody. It’s like waltzing with a mannequin.
I push down under the warmth of the covers, listening to the rain pelt the roof outside. I’m enough of a Goth to relish a downpour when I’m not required to be in it, and it’s a good one: really heavy, splashily wet, earth-soaking, you can hear it pinging off the leaves. Only insomniacs, milkmen, the dregs of club nights and early-shifters will know it happened. It’s a secret we’re sharing while the rest of the city snores.
My heart skips a beat as the curtains move. Roger slithers in the window and mews indignantly. Someone threw cold water at him from the sky, when he was busy staking out rats, having fun.
By the light of the side lamp you bought me – ceramic, in the shape of a toadstool, a Disney toadstool with white stalk and red spotted cap (‘As it is a poisonous mushroom, so will twee home accessories be deadly to your hopes of getting a boyfriend.’), I see Roger settle at the end of the bed, his fur in damp peaks.
Someone once said to me birth was the most ordinary and extraordinary thing you’ll ever experience, simultaneously, and death is the same. The fact of yours sits there, implacably, being so banal and so mind-blowingly strange at the same time.
It will always be like this, I have come to realise. The ache is permanent, it must be accommodated. It’s part of my body now.
I keep waiting to get past it. To ‘move on’, to absorb it, to set it aside, to make sense of it, to process it. For it to be, somehow, ‘behind’ me. What next? I keep thinking, with a pain in my stomach like it’s been slit open. And – there is no next, stupid. That’s the point. Someone has gone, forever, and you have to stop waiting for them to come back. Without realising it, you are stuck on pause, as if their not being here might change.
This is what I never knew about loss – it’s also about what you gain. You carry a weight that you never had before. It’s never behind you. It’s alongside you.
‘Forever’: people say it in wedding vows all the time like they understand what it means, but actual forever is fucking huge.