Prologue
There is a moment every writer knows; long before they ever put pen to paper, there is a point of inception, inspiration, imagination – call it what you will – a magic hour of the mind made beautiful, like most things are, by its transience. It won’t last. You can’t keep it. No more than you could keep the spark that lights a flame. But you remember it with every ending; that moment, before it all began, before your perfect creation was made imperfect by logistics and limitations. That moment is what I love most about creating something new: the idea, the spark, the beginning, when what might have been was still what might be.
Muscle Memory
‘Cup of tea?’
I’ve asked him this a hundred times before. I ask it now, casually, as though nothing has changed. As though this time is the same as all the others. But before the words have even left my mouth I think, That’s the last time you’ll ever ask him that question.
I know it’s true, too. Because all this ‘let’s be friends’ stuff is bullshit. Theo has no intention of being my friend; that’s just something he’s been saying to make it easier – not for me, of course, but for him.
He asked if we could have a break but what he meant was a breakup. He moved most of his stuff out of our apartment while I was home in Dublin, crying on my mother’s sofa. He stopped loving me a long time ago but wasn’t brave enough to tell me. And so our relationship kept trundling forward like a wagon down a dirt road, with me tied to the back like a rag doll. I imagine myself bouncing about in the dust, with a stitched-on smile and vacant eyes, just happy the rope is holding. The image is so morbidly funny that I have to conceal a grin.
‘Sure. Thanks,’ says Theo.
Go fuck yourself, I think, in response to his perfectly reasonable answer to my question. This is going to be interesting.
As I fill the kettle I can sense him start to notice his surroundings.
‘The place looks great,’ he says. He’s not being facetious. It does. I redecorated.
In the two months since he left, I’ve found it increasingly easy to accept that this is no longer our apartment, it is my apartment; the things that once served as comforting reminders of him have now grown alien and unwanted, which is why I want it all gone.
The first thing I did was dismantle the photo wall – dozens of pictures of us hung from rows of twine with miniature wooden pegs – my first and only attempt at being the kind of woman who is crafty around the house. As I took the pictures down and placed them in a shoebox (I wasn’t quite ready to throw them away), I noted how smug we seemed in each one: big, stupid smiles, cheeks pressed together, arms around waists. Here we were on a bridge in Rome. Here at a music festival in the countryside. In one photo we were lying half-naked on a beach with the Pacific Ocean stretching out behind us. I remember how Theo splashed me with the icy water, bringing my skin out in goose pimples and making me shriek with laughter.
None of the photos were recent; most were taken early on in our relationship, when Theo would capture me in random, mundane moments – snuggled up on the sofa or laughing with friends. I used to love how he would take my picture unprompted, and not just on special occasions, like the one of me standing on the Ha’penny Bridge in the snow, looking back over my shoulder at him.
The last photo I took down was a Polaroid Theo took of me just a few days into what would become our four years together. In it, I’m lying in his bed half asleep, my body tangled in his bed sheets, back exposed, one leg jutting out, and a mass of auburn hair spilling out across the pillow like warm honey.
He kept those sheets, the ones with the big green, red and black circles on. They came with us from home to home over the years, and on the night Theo left, as he stuffed some clothes into black plastic bags, he held them in his hands and wondered whether to take those sheets or a different set.
He was going to stay with a friend, he said, Steve, he said. Who the fuck is Steve? I asked, but that was neither here nor there. He would just stay with Steve for a couple of weeks, he said, get his head straight, he said, take a little break and then maybe we could go on a holiday and re-evaluate, he said.
‘But Steve only has a blow-up mattress, so I’ll need to bring sheets.’
It struck me as odd how, in the midst of what was a seemingly out-of-the-blue breakup, Theo already knew where he was going and what the situation regarding bed sheets would be when he arrived. And as he stood there, like a child asking his mother which towel to bring to swimming practice, it dawned on me what was happening.
I say that like the information came to me and stayed with me. It didn’t. It was more like a gap in the clouds than a dawning, really. Just a glimmer of clarity that would soon pass, returning at odd intervals and increasing in length until eventually the clouds cleared completely and my brain fully accepted that it was over. The clouds wouldn’t clear for some time, but in that moment, in that gap, I said, ‘You’re leaving me, Theo, take both fucking sets of sheets.’ He said nothing. He packed them both.
After I’d placed the last photo in the shoebox, I stood, hands on hips, and stared for a while at the blank space I’d created on the wall. The little wooden pegs hung there, gripping onto nothing, but they didn’t stay that way for long; the next day I filled that empty space with pictures of friends and family, covering it in memories independent of Theo, ones that existed in a different part of my mind, a part that didn’t hurt to access.
When the wall was full, I looked at the remaining stacks of photos I had printed out, and decided to keep going. I stuck them all over the fridge, but still there were more. So I stuck them to the kitchen cabinets too. I had to run to the shop to get more Blu Tack and by the end of the evening my entire kitchen was covered in photos. When I finished, I chuckled to myself at the sheer number of pictures, then realised how much like a psychopath I would seem to the casual observer and erupted into a proper belly laugh at my own expense. My laughter sounded odd in the empty apartment.
I had a cleansing of sorts, boxing up Theo’s things and removing everything that reminded me of him. I bought new bed sheets; crisp white with orange embroidery across the bottom. I sold the leather sofa I’d always hated and got a comfy, secondhand one instead, scattering yellow cushions on it and adding a knitted throw and a brightly coloured rug. I hung new artwork on the walls. I even lit scented candles every night, so that the smell would be different. Everyone who comes to visit now remarks at how much cosier the place feels, and I wonder why I didn’t do this before.
I’ve welcomed the onset of winter and the increasingly long evenings, which provide the perfect excuse to settle into my snug new space and read all the books I’d been meaning to get to. I curl up on the sofa with Norah Ephron or Joan Didion or some other former heartbreakee who’s been there and done that and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes I stop to contemplate a particularly moving passage. I stare out at the bare treetops, their dark, branches quivering in the breeze, like skinny fingers blindly searching for something just out of reach.
I relish the silence, and the ability to think my thoughts and feel my feelings in peace. And when I get cold, I put the heating on, choosing to ignore Theo’s voice in my head telling me to turn it off and put more clothes on instead. If anything, the place is a bit too warm.