A strange year of both monumental and no movement. There is ‘that’ change in the air, when you give up on summer and see what a new age brings. New commissions, old novels, so much stasis I’ve wanted to scream. But. Change as well, and that inevitable forward motion.

The other day, I was sat on a bench reading before the sea and this woman leaned in and said, Louise. Louise? I guess I wondered about a story where you did just go along with someone’s misrecognition, even for a while. Would that experience still be valid, if ephemeral.

A Walk With Louise

Cuentame.

Tell me a story.

Here, a story about love.

I will see you in my other love. Just to one side. You will lean in as I do, to kiss, a shadow beside me when we make love. Your scent lingers.

‘Love?’

I breathe it to the dark when I’m alone to blank reply, the same blankness of sky we looked up at when it was still just us and it had become pointless to name the stars.

The last time we made love, I didn’t love you, and yet I did and do and don’t and will.

I read a book on the train to a place that is supposed to take my mind off things. A Renaissance woman spills skin on the cover and inside, men talk about love.

I think about our closeness and distance, how we would make love in nights and days and afternoons and evenings and nights and days and always. Twisting together, like Chinese burns, wringing out truth. How I was just a mirror of someone else, that bit fainter, that bit less.

These things you hate about me.

Cuentame.

Talk to me.

Say it again, love.

In the book I’m reading, the men say: Love is creativity, love is assuaging insecurity, love is teaching, love is learning, love is balance, love is happiness, love is not that first flush of love, because that is not even love but, surprise, it is the love that comes after what we think of as love that is love.

Okay.

Across the aisle, a woman drinks red wine with a screw-top and talks in a bored voice about someone she is excited about going for a meal with and my irritation beats at her busy chatter. She leans her head on the train window, white breath infecting glass. Loud.

These things you hate about me.

Behind her, a couple put in earphones like a secret and listen to something on the man’s phone. No gap between their bodies.

It has been suggested I sit on the right and look at the coast.

I am on the left but there, the coast. The sea draws a wash of old blue over a beach like your watered inks.

Surf butts my knees, your arms brace the shock of water. I see how you look at me when you kiss and I see how I look at you when I kiss and I still can’t understand how we did this.

A year of fallow heart, to clean you out.

And yet. In my hometown, a pier. Pretend and too-short, something Orwell has famously written of. If we are shaped by landscape, perhaps this is the reason for my pier, my precipice. Or is it because I know one day I will go to climb the shoulders of my family and teeter. One day one, one day none. The knowledge keeps me brittle, reddens my red stomach, already red with hunger.

These things I hate about me.

I remember you told me, in a certain village neither of us recall, they don’t have a word for “but”. I tried never again to create a sentence containing “but” in the hopes I could become a better person.

The man the woman is going for a meal with has spent ages asking her out. And she means, ages.

Cuentame.

Speak.

The last time we made love you told me you were mine. In the spaces between sentences, my inward time, I think of how beautifully you filled me. How much. Mind, body, skin. No room inside myself for me. In the end we couldn’t even catch our breath, could we, love?

There is a picture I took before you left where your hair has grown foreign, thick and wild from the sprawl of this Sunday-world. It is native foliage, the kale your mother makes the caldo Gallego with. And I have never seen anyone so happy in my life.

Don’t start a sentence with And.

And once, by the river, we had a messy house and study, the habit of coffee and meals and walks and thought. Once a child. Do you remember him? I don’t think you ever quite met. Once a reed you cut for me to draw with which, of course, I have given back.

These things we hate about me.

Tell me a story.

When you talked to me after, I saw the gaps. Gaps fill. When you talked to me after, I saw how your speaking to me was a betrayal to another.

But don’t tell me about that, love.

Cuentame.

I can’t really know what it means, if this is not my language.

Love, the men say, is answering a need in the other.

I have forgotten what I needed. Rest, forgiveness, breath?

‘Louise?’ the man says.

The train slows, bottles clash and laughter clatters. My chest is tight, returned to the clean air and changeable skies of your home, the green you could never describe to me and on seeing, neither could I. I had never felt so free or so engorged with empty dread. It took so much to love you, love. I would do it again.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ The man says.

While I look up and play my role, you’re at my side where you will stay a while. When I blink, we kiss in another time, my face embarrassed with love. How did we get here, from there?

‘It’s Mike. Remember? God I haven’t seen you since uni. How many bloody decades is that then?’

I could just say he’s got the wrong person.

I see myself  things in the basket in the supermarket.

Don’t throw things like that.

Carefully careful, wrong wrong, waking in nighttimes my pulse fast twitching in my throat. The strain of restraint, of editing myself to a point where I split. I tried to tell you, I try to speak, I tried to say, I can’t breathe, love.

‘Oh wow. Oh yeah. Mike. God, too many than I care to remember. Right?’

‘Right? So what’re you doing up here?’

‘Sick of seeing my own four walls.’

‘All know that feeling.’

‘You?’

‘Work. Have time though, just if you fancy catching up? Go for a walk or something, all that tourist stuff. There’s that castle people are always harping on about, dunno why. God, what was your last name again? Sorry, it’s the age -’

Or maybe love is like your scent, or maybe a constantly changing state, moveable and unmeasurable absolutes we wish we could name.

‘Louise?’

What could my name be?

The woman who is finally meeting the man for the meal walks by, sees me looking and I wonder if my face betrays a dislike, if she sleeps on her side with a pillow and drinks to fill her red stomach. I smile; she looks away.

But maybe the woman with my name is still waiting for you on a stool in that cafe which no longer exists, the unsteadiness in her evening out when you walk by the window, with that neat navy coat, your worried face and those fingers that will know her geography, smoothing – or soothing – her into someone else.