A blonde woman in a sports bra, in New York City, on Instagram, tells me to remember that we, more often than not, fall for the potential or promise in a person, rather than the person in front of us. That we fall in love, not through chemical reaction or sensation or fate or divine intervention, but through hope for what they could become with us, or what we (alone or together) could become through them.
It’s raining now and I can hear the water hitting the green and yellowing leaves on the silver birch tree outside of my window.
I remember when my Dad planted these trees. He hoped that they would grow wide enough to buffer the view between our neighbour’s courtyard and our sunroof – but birch trees are notoriously thin and as they sway in the wind I can see my neighbour tie his rose bush to some canes through the branches. He ties them, why? Because he hopes that, through preserving these plants, they will bloom again come springtime. He hopes for beauty come March.
I said goodbye to my fifth boyfriend last weekend – fifth by technicality, but first by prosperity. I mean that insofar as – he made me laugh. We would sit in the living room and watch TV and eat dinner and go for lunch on the weekends and it made sense in its simplicity, and felt like there was hope to be had in the things that would follow. Like we were going somewhere good. And for this reason, he was the best one yet. Above all, a friend. Just bright blue sky and inside jokes. Laughter.
Walking away from someone like that is tough, because it means that you’re going to be laughless for a while.
But because I am older now, I realise that love is like a story we tell ourselves rather than a thing that happens to us – and so instead of surrendering to laughlessness –I’ve decided to evade it. I’ve decided to plod on. I’ve decided to hope.
September has been difficult. I have spent a lot of my time alone, on sofas in a few living rooms, drifting between nausea, exhaustion and sadness. It’s been the longest month of my life.
But I’m lucky, I’ve been depressed only once, and this time has not been that time, I don’t think. It’s odd, though, to be able to feel myself coming out of another cold, dark and lonely time as though I’m walking out of the cave on a beach I’ve been visiting my whole life. It’s like feeling air gather around your skin slowly after a very long time of stillness. Feel it brush across your ankles and skin, and come towards the light. Feel it cover you in a creeping until you’re so out of it, surrounded by colour and air and wind and weather, and you turn to look back, and the cave is just dark. You can’t see the intricacies within it. You can’t see the corners of it, the details and the callouses of it. All you can do is know that there’s more than darkness lying in there – you just can’t see it. Can’t remember how it feels. You just know that the cave’s there. That you can go back, or not. It’s not a choice though, it’s just there. You may find yourself there again. Also, you know that it deceives – it goes deeper and further back than it suggests at first glance.
I took him to that beach when he came to Wales for the first time. He stood on the concrete as I ran down to the sea. I hadn’t felt the sand in months. I was wearing our favourite dress of mine, and the wind blew it about me in a way that made me feel like I was a ship with filling sails. I stood at the water, and turned to the right, and saw that cave. All I could see of it was darkness then. I walked back to the car and we drove away, and he put on Sara by Bob Dylan, and I started to cry a bit because I was reminded of bleakness momentarily, and felt relieved to feel so far from it in that moment. I had been reminded of this grey, forgotten corner of myself. Sadness was only a memory.
This week, I’ve thought about him often. I’ve thought about him in that living room. The same living room that I would lie, on the sofa, unwell and alone. I think about hope, and hope that he’s alright. And then I think about hope, and I know he’s alright. Then, I think about hope, and hope that he’ll make me laugh and I’ll make him laugh one day again, just as two people who knew each other through a really tough time.
This week, too, I went to that same beach, with the same cave – and this time, it wasn’t just a mass of darkness, indiscernible and shaded. This time, I could see the corners of it. The streams running through it. The cracked edges and calloused ends. The jagged, jutting stone and hiding places. It felt closer. Familiar – but I didn’t go inside. I evade the laughlessness.
I hope.
Now, today, coming in from a walk in the rain, I look at myself, wet hair, skin tired from this month and all it has thrown at me, and I fall for the person in front of me. I fall in love through chemical reaction and sensation and fate and divine intervention. I fall in love with the disaster of now. I fall in love with the mess.