How am I? I don't know. Well. Fine, I reckon. I'm lying. Well, not lying about being fine. Lying about "reckon" being a part of my vocabulary. It isn't. Well, it isn't fully. Soon maybe. I've moved to London. I've been there for a year. It's lovely. Not a penthouse overlooking the Eye. Just a flat with character. Oh, but if you go up onto the roof, you can actually spot the Eye. You can spot the whole city really. Once I brought a glass of wine up and sat watching a couple fight through their glass windows for hours. Fascinating. I left when they began to make up. I wasn't creepy, just curious. Or was I just more interested in conflict than love.
I moved after completing my degree. During my mourning period, I had visited London. Mainly because she had told me to go and I was clinging to any last shred I had of her. In the most delusional part of my mind I was convinced I would go and find her sitting, waiting for me at Postman's park. Cigar in her mouth and another in hand for me. And then we would kiss and be married the next day. You see, delusions.
Grieving the loss of one alive, is a unique sort of agony. It's like you can still taste the relief, it tempts with its presence, holding itself at an arm's length. You know if you could just reach it, it could all be over. It requires more strength, I'll say that much, on the grievers part. When you grieve one who's gone completely, there is no hope, there is no relief, and it may sound awful to say, but I found that strangely comforting. You have no choice. You are forced to come to terms with the unchangeable fact that this is the way things are now. And soon, most will settle into that new reality and find an amount of peace there. But one alive, there's always that gnawing awareness that they are only a phone call, a walk, one drunken, poor decision away. And there's hope. Hope that one night one of you will cave and make that poor decision. Hope. Hope can be a devil. The sorrow caused by absence is the same, but the grit required to walk in that sorrow, knowing you could be free of it, well it's torturous. I have never been able to decide which kind of grief I preferred.
In the years she was away, I found God. Not immediately, definitely not. In the first days I prayed to someone in the sky that he'd be gracious and give her back. Then the next couple months I cursed that same someone for taking her away. I had to find someone to blame because I didn't have it in me to blame her. I slipped into a nihilistic way, as is the apparent temptation for so many young people who think too much. I ceased to write because there was no future and I ceased to call home because there was no past and I ceased to cook because I didn't believe in pleasure of any kind. Everything was mindless and meaningless and nothing made sense but nothing was even real, so what did nothing owe us, that it needed to make sense.
But there was a day, I was in Belgium, Antwerp it was, with some friends. I was moping about the city, ruining the trip for everyone else I'm sure, and I saw this girl. She was pretty, blonde hair and blue eyes. She was much younger than me, I could tell by the life in her eyes. I wondered if she was a local, her interest in everything that moved gave her away. It was the scarf she wore that had caught my eye. A bright yellow, that stuck out like stray paint drop on the day's gloomy canvas. I was pulled in by it, almost feeling the need to go near her. Where had she given it? The states? New York? Perchance by a girl with tamed curly hair and a tan pea coat. She had reverted back to her old ways. I was sure of it. She had given away everything she owed that had any amount of color. She had taken a boring man with a boring office job and had borne him one child already. Another was on the way. Is that the woman who gave you this yellow scarf?
The girl had noticed me staring at the scarf before I could notice that I was.
"Hallo..." She said with a weak, unnerved smile.
"Oh, hello. I'm sorry, I was staring."
"It's alright," she said with a think Dutch accent. I had judged her wrong. She probably was a local.
YOU ARE READING
All the People in the World
Romance"But whether she was pretty or ugly, she was definitely something one felt they had never seen before. And, for all my displays of indifference, I had the nauseating feeling each time she prepared to leave, that she was something I would hardly see...
