I hope you're doing well
Genuinely. Not the polite version. I hope it worked out, I hope she's kind to you, I hope you stopped doing the thing with your hands when you're nervous. I hope you never think about me at all.
drag anywhere
Genuinely. Not the polite version. I hope it worked out, I hope she's kind to you, I hope you stopped doing the thing with your hands when you're nervous. I hope you never think about me at all.
Whoever you are, reading this. I don't know you and I never will and I mean it completely.
You sat next to me for the whole hour and did not once ask what was wrong. I have never been so grateful for a question that didn't come.
At the hospital, when you were already past hearing it. Thirty-one years of not managing it and then I said it to a room.
You would tell the same three stories and I would wait for them to end. I have spent the last four years trying to remember the details of stories I refused to listen to.
It has said March for two and a half years. Nobody in this house has mentioned it and nobody is going to turn the page.
It had been three months and I thought it was time. I got as far as the doorway.
It went to somebody else about a year ago. I know because a stranger replied once, very kindly, saying they thought I might have the wrong person. I apologised. I still text it.
Everyone assumed it was someone else and I let them. It was the right thing to do and I would do it again and I have still never admitted it, which I think means it cost me something after all.
In the third person, in my head, as though somebody were reading it. I think it's so that at least somebody is watching.
In the car, before you came in and made dinner and asked about my day. You were so good at it that for years I thought I had imagined the car.
I'm fine until about seven. Then the day has nothing left to give me and the flat is very quiet and there are five hours to get through before it's reasonable to sleep.
Which stung, honestly. But it also meant it was mine. I did it in a room on my own over about eighteen months and it belongs to me.
Nothing happened in it. That's the point. No crisis, no decision, no consequence. Just about eleven weeks of nothing being wrong, which I did not recognise as remarkable at the time.
That's a strange thing to find out about yourself at thirty-eight. Somebody's hand on my back would do more than any conversation.
I had five minutes and she was running late and it seemed rude to take up more room than that. So I said mild, and she wrote mild, and I went back to work.
I make jokes instead. I send the article instead. I ask about the car instead. I am so proud of you it embarrasses me, and I have decided that this is where I'll say it.
I answer the presenters. Out loud. I noticed myself doing it last Tuesday and had to sit down.
So that coming back to the flat feels marginally less like coming back to an empty flat. It costs almost nothing and it works slightly.
The speech I would give if I ever saw you again. It's about four minutes long. It's very good. It's the most polished thing I own and it will never be used.
I told them it was capacity. It was you. You were unbearable to be near and I could not say why without saying everything, so I took a worse job in a worse team to get out of the room.
You wrote three lines on an essay when I was sixteen. Three lines. I have made a living off the belief you handed me in a margin, and you almost certainly do not remember my name.
Everybody in my family says it like a compliment. It means I get the phone calls at midnight and nobody has ever rung me at midnight.
Not badly. Not enough to change a plan for it. Everything is fine, everything is pleasant, and I could not tell you a single thing I am looking forward to.
I worked it out once. Four days before anybody would ring. It isn't a threat and I'm not going anywhere — it's just a number I know about my own life.
If somebody offers me advice one more time I will scream. I don't need a plan. I need one person to notice, unprompted, that I have gone quiet.
Because saying yes ends the conversation and saying no invites a second question. Then on the day I say something came up, and everybody is very understanding, and it happens again in three weeks.
There's no crying. Nothing happens. I just move through the week with the sound off, and then it's Friday, and then it's Friday again.
Up at six, gym, in early, first one to reply. Nobody has ever once suspected. The whole structure exists so there is no room left in the day to sit down.
Under a name that means nothing to anyone who might pick up my phone. It has been there for two years and I have never used it and I have never deleted it and I know exactly what that means.
Which is to say completely, badly, and about somebody I had invented. I'm not sorry. It was the first time I understood that I had that much in me.
You were maybe eighty and you said thank you, love, in a way that suggested people had stopped doing that. I had been thinking about giving up on quite a lot that week. It sounds ridiculous. It worked.
Properly asked, I mean. And waited. I would not know what to say if they did — I think I would just be embarrassed. But I would like the chance to be embarrassed.
If you had been careless with me I could have made you into something I was well rid of. Instead you were gentle about it and I have nothing to be angry at.
Twice. There is a folder on my phone that exists purely so I don't have to see it by accident, and I open that folder on purpose about once a month.
Not badly. Not at all. I shook a colleague's hand in March and thought about it for the rest of the week, and I don't know who I would even tell that to.
Every time we say goodbye there is a second where I could. I have had about two hundred of those seconds. I will probably have two hundred more and use none of them.
That's the whole thing, really. Not that you owed me anything. Just that I know exactly what I would have been like, and nobody ever got to find out.
You said it once, gently, and I did not speak to you for a year for saying it. You were right. I have never given you the satisfaction and it is one of my meanest secrets.
Two years of a shift together. She was the reason I liked going to work. When she left, somebody said her full name at her leaving card and I realised I had never known it.
And you meant it, kindly, on the last day. I have opened that thread maybe forty times since. There is nothing under my half of it. There never was.
I stopped about four years ago and I have kept going every week because of what it would do to my mother. I don't know whether that makes me a coward or a good son. Probably both.
You said keep it, so technically it's mine, but we both know you meant it as a way of leaving something behind. Your handwriting is in the margin on page 140. I've never lent it to anyone.
Not out of anger. I just knew you would be perfectly pleasant for ninety seconds and then I would have to carry it for a fortnight.
And I never said anything, because saying it then would have been taking something. So I made tea and answered the phone at strange hours and let her think it was ordinary friendship. She is well now. She married somebody good. I am glad in a way that has stones in it.
That's what I finally understood. You had to try with her. With me you could arrive late and leave early and I would still be pleased to see you.
There are three hundred and forty entries. You have never seen one and never will. It started as something I would eventually give you and turned into somewhere to put it instead.
Not once. Not in school, not at work, not by anybody I loved. I am always the good option once the first one falls through, and I have got so used to it that I plan for it.
I said it so convincingly that I believed it for about a month. I've been paying for that month for six years.
Four seconds. Longer than the others got. I have thought about those four seconds more than I have thought about entire relationships.
For two years the quiet was the worst part. Somewhere this spring it turned into something else. I made coffee this morning and did not brace for anything.
You were fifteen and they were relentless and I laughed along because it was cheaper than being next. I have apologised to you in my head about four hundred times. Never once out loud.
Every April. You have probably assumed it was somebody from her work. It wasn't. She was the only person who ever asked me a second question.
Not because of the money or the sleep. Because I have his temper and I have felt it move in me exactly once, years ago, and I have never forgotten how easy it was.
Every party I hated. Every leaving do for somebody I barely knew. I would stand near the door and drink slowly and go home at eleven feeling like I had done something.
In the shower, in the car, walking home. I had versions for every mood you might be in. Then you moved cities and I helped you carry boxes and said nothing at all.
I told a lot of people that you did, for about a year, and I want it on record somewhere that it wasn't true. You were nineteen and so was I and neither of us knew anything.
You were honest about it, which somehow made it worse. I told myself second was still something. I gave four years to being somebody's fallback and I would probably do it again, which is the part that frightens me.
Eleven years. I don't send anything. I just notice the date and let it pass and get on with the day.
One for me and one for the side of the bed nobody is on. It has been fourteen months. I know how it sounds. I am not ready to turn it off.
You were kind the way you are kind to everybody. I know that now. But I was nineteen and nobody had been, and I spent two years reading meaning into a person who was just being decent.
I was decent about it. I never said a word against him, I never let it show, I was glad on your behalf when things went well. It cost more than anybody knows.
Not to follow you. Just so that some mornings I could be on the same one and read my book and know you were four doors down. I stopped when I realised how it would sound if I ever said it out loud.
Everyone had their phones out. It would have taken more courage than I had to say the true thing in front of forty people, so I said the easy thing and then I lived inside it for six years.
In front of everyone. You said it warmly and you meant it and I have never felt further away from anybody in my life. I gave a good speech. Everyone said so.
So one week I stopped, to see. It has been five months. You have not noticed. I check my phone the way other people check the weather.
Not eight years of pining. Eight years of it going quiet and then something small setting it off again — a song, somebody with your walk, a photo I wasn't looking for. Eight years of thinking it had finally gone.
You sat on the end of my bed at one in the morning and asked whether you should tell her how you felt. I said yes. I helped you word it. I proofread the message. She said yes too. I was the first person you told.
Everybody else wanted me to be impressive. You wanted me to be on time. I have never felt safer than I did being mildly annoying to you on a Tuesday.
Flat white, no sugar, and you always asked for it extra hot because the walk back to the office is long. I have never once made you one. I just know.
I keep planning to move back. I understand now that the thing I'm homesick for isn't a place, and no amount of rent will get me there.
Not I love you. Not anything. I said the car park charges after six and she said she knew, and that was it, that was the last one. I have made my peace with almost everything else.
You never knew because I made sure of it. Turns out you spent the same decade convinced I was the one who had it easy. We could have just said something.
Not obsessively. Once a month, maybe, when something reminds me. Just to see that you are alive and doing well somewhere. That's all I want from it. That's all I've ever wanted from it.
I found the statements when we cleared the flat. I know you went without for years so it never looked like we were going without. You never once made it feel like a debt. I don't know how you did that.
Everyone told me I'd chosen well. They were right, on paper. Some nights I stand in the kitchen at midnight with the fridge open and I am not hungry at all.
Year eight. I had no lunch for the third day and you slid half of yours across the table without looking up, like it was an accident, so I wouldn't have to say anything. I am thirty-one. I still think about that when I want to be a better person.
Nine years of being the calm one. The safe pair of hands. I fake almost all of it and I have never once been caught, which frightens me more than being caught would.
I saw the photos. You looked genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, in a way you never quite managed with me. I wanted to be angry about it. Mostly I was relieved, which was worse.
It wasn't a falling out. There was no moment. I just answered slower and slower until answering felt strange, and then it felt too late, and then it had been four years. I think about you constantly. I still don't text.
At the wedding, when your cousin asked, I said it was ancient history and I laughed. I had rehearsed that laugh in the car.
You sat with me for maybe six minutes at three in the morning and you did not say anything useful and it was the single kindest thing anybody has ever done for me. I never got your name. I have thought about you every year since.
I wanted to be asked. There is an enormous difference and I found it out at thirty-four, in an office with a glass wall, holding a laptop I did not want to open.
She stopped sleeping by the door about a week before you moved out. I thought she was ill. She was just getting ready.
Everyone thinks I'm fine because I answer quickly and I show up and I make the jokes. I am so tired. Not sad exactly. Just running on the last bar for about two years now. Writing that down is the first time it has left my head.
You meant it kindly. You said it was a long shot and that I should have a backup. I have never been so motivated by anything in my life. I got it. I never told you that you were the reason.
You were not a good father for a long time and then you were, and nobody in the family knows how to talk about the part in between. I forgave you somewhere around the time you started calling on Sundays for no reason. I never said it out loud because I thought it would make you cry, and I don't know what I'd do with that.
You wrote four paragraphs. I read them standing in a car park with the engine still running. Then I deleted the thread so I wouldn't be able to answer at two in the morning. I have spent three years trying to remember the third paragraph.
That whole year I told everyone I was staying in the city for work. It wasn't work. It was the chance that I might run into you at the shop on the corner on a Sunday. I did, twice. You said hello like it cost you nothing.
You called to say you'd be late and that the traffic was awful and that you loved me, in that order, like it was nothing. Eleven seconds. I have listened to it more times than I have told anyone about, and I have never told anyone about it. I am afraid of the day the phone dies and takes your voice with it.