Somehow we found ourselves free swimming the day we met – you in your underwear and me in a turquoise sequin bathing suit – mermaid-like. The sun was hot enough for it for once.
We stood in the water, you holding me up as though your roots were so firmly planted in the ground that you were immovable.
I looked at you from above my pink sunglasses and I tried to decode you.
Just hours after we first met I kissed you.
Wading through the mud to reach the water like birds at low tide.
I kissed you.
I kissed you because we were in a love story and this was our cue.
You held my hand so I didn’t slip in the thick slimy moss that coated the underside of the rocks.
We splashed in the sun. Me, mostly hoping I didn’t flash anyone by mistake – the bathing suit hung loosely, exhaustion had stripped me back to my bones – and you, smiling.
You told me that you’d hit your head on the side of the pool as a child. You still waded into the water with me. Held me as the cold current pushed against us. Your fears on pause for this memory.
I wondered if this was the beginning of something and the end of everything.
Later, my hair still damp around my shoulders, we had a glass of white wine in thick bottomed glasses in a pub beer garden where tendrils of ivy climbed up the walls. Dawn set around the afternoon with a certain heaviness. You draped a red Ralph Lauren jumper around my shoulders and I knew it was forever, you know?
I think I fell in love with you that day.
Our lives were linked now.
The next day we lay in the grass of the local park and I talked about the shapes I saw in the clouds. Bridges mostly, with my frame jumping from them. You held my hand and said there would be a different way out. An exit door I hadn’t seen yet.
I had already lost my mind when we met.
You kissed me until I forgot everything.
You are braver than I am – I’m not sure I could stand by someone’s side as they fell the way you stood by mine. A stranger.
Your hand the only thing grounding me.
You were not shocked or deterred two days into our love story when I ended up in hospital because my mind had started to crack.
Or two weeks later when I lost the job that had so defined me.
Or a month later when my house rented and I had to pack up my belongings and scatter them in the friend’s homes who would store them for me.
In fact, it was you that helped me pack up my house into your car. It was you that kissed me in my empty home and pushed my hair away from my face as I said goodbye. It was you who checked the door as I locked it one last time.
We met that day by the parking machine at the train station.
We had drinks in a beer garden that catches the dappled sun like a prism. We ate roast potatoes and talked about life. I was hungover, I think, that day. I was often hungover if I’m honest.
The whole thing was so intangible and difficult to get hold of even then – like a dream. The memories twist out of reach like smoke.
We crossed the train tracks and swam in our underwear in the water. We kissed for the first time in a lake on the hottest day of the year.
And we fell in love that day, I think.
You would call that crazy, but I would call it true.
I think this love story has bound us together inextricably. We could go weeks or even years without talking and I would still, immovably love you.
For being the only piece of light in the dark – a single glowworm in a mason jar in the darkest time.
If I shake the jar will you shine brighter in the dark?
We had known each other just a handful of months when it was your turn to pack up your life. This time it was you who would be sofa surfing – you still are.
There’s no room for me now in your life. We are like a Venn diagram that no longer
intersects – perhaps the circles will move closer again one day. On your dream to
becoming a clockmaker. Something I loved about you when we first met. So out of synch with modern times. But you did a horology degree after all.
You are building yourself a better life – and you don’t have the energy to hold me up as you lay the mortar down. You have no hand free to hold mine. I don’t resent you for that, I am still grateful for you being there when I so desperately needed someone.
I think about you now, as I sit across the table from strangers I have nothing in common with.
I think of our first kiss as the wine swirls around the glass.
As they tell me about their lives, I think of us.
I think of the thousands of moments in-between – our lips pressing together at New Year. Our hands intertwined in the cinema. Me drawing you in a restaurant. Us by the river near my parent’s house. Us sipping beers and eating pizza in the cold. I think of you coming home and me greeting you, getting up from my space on the wooden panels, curled around my laptop like a cat. I think of you pushing my tears from my face. And me touching your face as you cried. Licking your face gently and wondering if I would live forever now.
When I get home from these dates with strangers, I think of you – gone as quickly as you appeared.
A stranger once again.
And I cry.
