“You need to duck-dive a few waves, mate. Come surfing with me. It’ll help, I promise. You’ll feel like a new person. If I ever have a problem, the sea sorts it out.”
Right now, I don’t want Warren to be my mate, or to feel like a newperson. I want to travel back to the night of my dream and consume caffeine at quantities that would cut short a coma.
“Come to Cornwall, stay for a bit. I’ll teach you to surf, help you move on.”
“I’m not ready to move on.”
Warren brushes salt from his fingers. “This is no good. Look at you—you’re making yourself ill. You need to get out more, see people...”
“There’s a decent hotel by the river. It’s not too expensive. I’ll give them a ring.”
Warren sighs heavily. “Okay. I’ll check myself in tomorrow, if you insist.”
“I do.”
“But tonight I can kip here.” He pats the sofa cushion. “I’ll be no bother.”
Perhaps the rumpled duvet should have given him a clue. “Actually, that’s kind of my bed at the moment.”
He looks at me pityingly. “Come on, Joel.”
“Look, no offense, Warren, but you don’t get to tell me how to live.”
“You did the right thing, you know. Letting her go.”
I think about my mum. The decision Warren made that enabled her to live her life.
Still. “Right doesn’t make it easy.”
“I know. But I’m sure Callie wouldn’t want you to—”
That does it. “Maybe you should just go.”
He eyeballs me helplessly. “That’s really what you want?”
Just... trust people to love you, Joel.
“I can’t do this right now” is all I say.
•••
After he leaves I sit on the sofa, the air congealing with chip-shop fat. I try to imagine what Callie’s doing now, wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling this way. I think about her until my heart is alight and my mind ablaze, and then I finally fan the flames with a double shot of Scotland’s finest.
75.
Callie—six months after
The months have leapfrogged into May, yet I’ve never felt more damp, more gray, more lonely.
Friday nights are the worst. That once-golden time of the week, a sensation of supreme release—like slipping into a warm bath, letting out a held breath. But now just the act of arriving home at the end of the week is enough to trigger a landslide of memories from those glorious months before Joel’s dream, when life—and our love—truly felt infinite.
Back then, Friday nights meant Joel, a crackling fire, the enticing sight of chilled white wine. A weekend waiting for us like a cork to be popped, long lazy kisses that ushered in evenings lost to lovemaking, our skin pink and slick, heartbeats thundering. Slow showers together before nights out in town, candlelit dinners, drinks with friends.
My mind filters out the messier stuff, like when Joel couldn’t sleep, or got snagged on the meaning of a dream. Because none of the hiccups mattered, not really. I loved him fully, for the whole person he was.
Six months on, I still do.
•••
