all away?
I wail into Casey’s armpit in the taxi as she strokes my hair. Part of me thinks at least Casey’s finally got what she wants, a bawling best friend she can look after.
‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ she says, still stroking my hair, ‘but maybe what just happened is for the best. I mean, now you can finally move on and accept that it really is over between you, can’t you, eh?’
I nod but what I’m actually thinking is I would have preferred to live in ignorant bliss, hoping he was in the same state I am, desperately missing me as much as I miss him.
9.11 a.m.
I press pause on the DVD and push a visibly miffed Harry off my lap, suddenly overcome by the guilt of how much I have to do. What the hell am I doing being distracted by a film? It’s just like when I was a kid and Mum used to militantly make me clear up my room every Saturday morning, and I’d wind up secretly watching Going Live .
I brush the cat hair off my leggings and walk into the kitchen, put my mug in the sink and grab the marker pen I left on the island unit last night. I need to label some of the newly packed boxes from last night with my clear and simple system: Charity Shop, Ship or Storage.
It’s the smell that does it. I close my eyes and inhale the pungent petrol-like smell as I take the lid off the pen. Ryan would often spend evenings sprawled across our lounge floor, drawing up various player formations on big sheets of white paper for upcoming school football matches while I read my photography books.
This scent is, in a way, stronger and more memory-inducing than his Hugo Boss aftershave and for a long time after he left, when I smelt that particular scent I’d find myself turning and following the wearer in case it was Ryan before realizing what I was doing and hastily retreating.
But unlike that, this smell brings pleasure as well as pain because it doesn’t just make me think of Ryan. It takes me back to my school days; Casey and I giggling during lessons and then scribbling notes to each other in our exercise books about boys we fancied. And of course, it reminds me of home. My parents. The smell of Sharpies infiltrated our house as they laboured tirelessly over homework books with their red pens.
I look in an unmarked box on the kitchen counter, full of random kitchen gadgets and scrawl ‘Charity Shop’ on the side. It may seem like I’m wiping a lifetime of memories out, just like on a whiteboard, but it’s in order to make way for new ones.
The Worst First Kiss
There are certain givens when it comes to falling in love. Take the first kiss. No one ever wrote about the path of true love starting with a terrible kiss, did they? Would Juliet have been quite so infatuated with Romeo if he’d just stuck his tongue down her throat instead of doing all that balcony stuff? Or if Jack had drunkenly snogged Rose at that below-decks party instead of tenderly kissing her whilst making her fly on the bow of the ship? Would it still have been the biggest grossing film of all time? Maybe Shakespeare and all his romantic writing contemporaries (and James Cameron) thought a bad first kiss was just too obvious a sign that the relationship was doomed from the start. At times, I’ve wondered the same thing.
<
‘Oh GOD, not him,’ I mutter darkly, spotting the familiar figure of Ryan Cooper approaching as I try desperately to hide behind my mum. It’s a cold, bleak Saturday morning and Mum’s dragged me out on a Christmas shopping trip to Southend in a bid to ‘bond’ with me. I’m hating it because generally I do everything to avoid being seen in public with my parents because they’re so embarrassing and so miserable.
They haven’t always been this unhappy but things have recently hit an all-time low and it’s really pissing me off that neither one of them has the guts to just put me out of my misery and leave. But Dad’s the head teacher at Westcliff, where I go, and Mum’s head of
I wail into Casey’s armpit in the taxi as she strokes my hair. Part of me thinks at least Casey’s finally got what she wants, a bawling best friend she can look after.
‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ she says, still stroking my hair, ‘but maybe what just happened is for the best. I mean, now you can finally move on and accept that it really is over between you, can’t you, eh?’
I nod but what I’m actually thinking is I would have preferred to live in ignorant bliss, hoping he was in the same state I am, desperately missing me as much as I miss him.
9.11 a.m.
I press pause on the DVD and push a visibly miffed Harry off my lap, suddenly overcome by the guilt of how much I have to do. What the hell am I doing being distracted by a film? It’s just like when I was a kid and Mum used to militantly make me clear up my room every Saturday morning, and I’d wind up secretly watching Going Live .
I brush the cat hair off my leggings and walk into the kitchen, put my mug in the sink and grab the marker pen I left on the island unit last night. I need to label some of the newly packed boxes from last night with my clear and simple system: Charity Shop, Ship or Storage.
It’s the smell that does it. I close my eyes and inhale the pungent petrol-like smell as I take the lid off the pen. Ryan would often spend evenings sprawled across our lounge floor, drawing up various player formations on big sheets of white paper for upcoming school football matches while I read my photography books.
This scent is, in a way, stronger and more memory-inducing than his Hugo Boss aftershave and for a long time after he left, when I smelt that particular scent I’d find myself turning and following the wearer in case it was Ryan before realizing what I was doing and hastily retreating.
But unlike that, this smell brings pleasure as well as pain because it doesn’t just make me think of Ryan. It takes me back to my school days; Casey and I giggling during lessons and then scribbling notes to each other in our exercise books about boys we fancied. And of course, it reminds me of home. My parents. The smell of Sharpies infiltrated our house as they laboured tirelessly over homework books with their red pens.
I look in an unmarked box on the kitchen counter, full of random kitchen gadgets and scrawl ‘Charity Shop’ on the side. It may seem like I’m wiping a lifetime of memories out, just like on a whiteboard, but it’s in order to make way for new ones.
The Worst First Kiss
There are certain givens when it comes to falling in love. Take the first kiss. No one ever wrote about the path of true love starting with a terrible kiss, did they? Would Juliet have been quite so infatuated with Romeo if he’d just stuck his tongue down her throat instead of doing all that balcony stuff? Or if Jack had drunkenly snogged Rose at that below-decks party instead of tenderly kissing her whilst making her fly on the bow of the ship? Would it still have been the biggest grossing film of all time? Maybe Shakespeare and all his romantic writing contemporaries (and James Cameron) thought a bad first kiss was just too obvious a sign that the relationship was doomed from the start. At times, I’ve wondered the same thing.
<
‘Oh GOD, not him,’ I mutter darkly, spotting the familiar figure of Ryan Cooper approaching as I try desperately to hide behind my mum. It’s a cold, bleak Saturday morning and Mum’s dragged me out on a Christmas shopping trip to Southend in a bid to ‘bond’ with me. I’m hating it because generally I do everything to avoid being seen in public with my parents because they’re so embarrassing and so miserable.
They haven’t always been this unhappy but things have recently hit an all-time low and it’s really pissing me off that neither one of them has the guts to just put me out of my misery and leave. But Dad’s the head teacher at Westcliff, where I go, and Mum’s head of
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