‘any love I made you feel is yours to keep’

leaving our world in a resting place

There’s a reason most montages of couples in romance films contain two people spinning in the centre of a vast landscape: to fall in love is a dizzying affair. Camera movements in these scenes are often erratic and shaky as the couple hurtle towards something beyond themselves.

Submarine (2010)

No landscape is neutral when you’re falling in love –– it’s as if everything exists for you, like the white outlines of an April afternoon were carved for this very feeling. Even the narrow light slanting across the train carriage becomes personal. In the early stages of falling, the world speaks back: the budding flowers of early spring ask you to prise their petals apart and sow your secrets into the folds. I walked by a piece of red cloth discarded on the road and noticed how the creases made it resemble a heart. Before long, regular objects started taking on the shape of hearts everywhere I looked. This felt like a conversation.

 On the last train back from Cardiff to Bristol, a man with sallow skin and patchy stubble paused by our seats to tell us that we looked “Very in love… Not like me and my Mrs,” before staggering away. You said afterwards: "Well if that’s a sign, I’ll take it.” I asked you to repeat what you said, not because I didn’t hear you, but because I wanted to hear you say it again. For the rest of the journey we picked at cold egg noodle leftovers; they had been sitting in the small takeaway box for so long that all you could taste was the sweat of the cardboard. By the time you said you weren’t very sentimental I had already put the chopstick wrapper in my pocket to glue into my scrapbook later when I got home.

I remember the first night we biked back to mine after I just moved into my new apartment, the moon perched on the bridge –– the only other witness to prove that it was real. You had one hand on the handlebars, the other outstretched towards me. I almost lost my balance trying to clasp at the air in your direction, but having this moment to call mine felt more important than the scrapes I’d get from falling. We swayed hand-in-hand for only a few seconds before my body began to tilt, but it was long enough for me to realise that I didn’t have to imagine what I wanted my life to look like anymore. 

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“Take things slow.” But that’s what adults do! Not first-time lovers! First-time lovers are immune to slowness. Immune to endings; endings only exist in the hypothetical.

Before starting a new relationship, those on the outside tend to offer the standard aphorisms: “take it slow,” “don’t rush into it.” And this is sage advice –– slowness helps you to maintain a sense of self, it gives you longer to assess the other person’s character, and most importantly, it allows you to sit with all those percolating feelings; seeing what settles in your body both in their presence and absence. However, we talk a lot about slowness as though by consequence it will also slow down any ending, or even prevent one altogether. It doesn’t. A heart beats the same and won’t go any slower on demand. So we lurched forwards without abandon. You came to Paris and I had a shelf at your place. Slowness was no longer necessary because this was finally “it.” I guess we always feel that way in the first stages of falling, especially after a long period of lovelessness.

And so we outstretched our arms, ran towards the seemingly endless open fields. I like to think a small part of us is running there still: running until running turns into falling and we would eventually find out what was on the other side of someone getting hurt, the scraped knees and cleaning of fresh wounds. Maybe we’d find out which one of us would’ve first said the words that are more than the sum of their parts. I could feel them rising in my chest every time you switched the bedside light off, only to be gargled and washed down the sink by morning. But I don’t regret not telling you. I think you know that those words still belong to you, somewhere beyond those open fields. 

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I’m in the frozen aisle of the supermarket but I forgot what I came here for. FROZENFRUITFROZENVEGFROZENFISHHALFPRICEOFFLIMITEDTIMESALE. Sweetcorn? Green beans? I can’t help but think about the unravelling. The park bench. Heads bowed, the trodden grass, not being sure of what to do with our hands. The hesitancy between syllables. The old lady observing us from afar, knowing. The children chasing a ball, unknowing. I asked a question I already knew the answer to. You nodded, and there it was again: the familiar sound of something falling. 

Your first teenage heartbreak hurts because you can’t imagine life without them and your first adult heartbreak hurts precisely because you can, you just didn’t want to.

You always think there’s more time. And when the unmerciful hands of the clock collapse and take with it the lover, the dense quiet before the applause, dew drops on slanted blades of grass, that sigh we make upon the plane landing, you have to learn how to be again. To occupy the swelling reserve of now empty space inside yourself and turn it into guitar chords or paint strokes. To affirm yourself and your existence more than ever: Here I am. I am here. I am becoming and re-becoming. I am I am I am. 

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The first tree you taught me how to recognise was a horse chestnut tree: 5 paddle-shaped leaflets, jagged around the edges. Plucking a leaf from my neighbour’s front garden, I flick through the Tree Guide that you let me keep, even after the solemn handing-over-of-belongings ritual. My hands trace over the leaf’s veins, trying to work out if it’s a Judas or Dove tree. I notice the quiet newness of this feeling, of having to work this one out for myself. 

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In the immediate aftermath, it always feels impossible to believe that love lost is never really gone, that it just takes on a new form. But it will. It always does. Haven’t we all lived to tell the tale at least once? Aren’t we so lucky that we will probably get to tell it for as long as we live? To keep experiencing the circular nature of it all? 

My Dad sends a text: ‘I’ve left a bag of chocolate peanuts in your room.’ I’m learning how love always comes back and looks different each time. 

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The act of remembering implies that something has been forgotten. But we can’t forget -– love is a wholly transformative experience.

I walk along the overgrown meadow of wildflowers and a slit forms in the clouds, creating a small opening for the sun to exhale. Something about the way the breeze sweeps past reminds me of that July afternoon by the lake when you lifted me up so I could see the flickering silhouette of a big orange fish that I forget the name of because, truthfully, I wasn’t really paying much attention –– and it’s not that I didn’t care, but it’s just I was too distracted by the feeling of your arms making a wreath around my ribs and all that lightness in my legs hovering over the ground beneath us, and how much I wanted you to keep telling me about the different species of fish and trees and birds, and then we could make up new names when you’d finish listing them all (even if I’d only forget them seconds later): The Suspicious Coppery One, The One That Looks Like That Teacher You Hated in Primary School –– because in that moment, I would’ve liked to have spent a lifetime making lists with you.

Before the sun retreats back behind the clouds and takes you along with it, the memory makes a sound like a wind chime in the distance and I smile, remembering. Not forgetting. I was here. We were here. I am here.

I am I am I am.

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