HARD TO HANDLE
TRACK 2 | YOUR EMAIL DIDN’T FIND ME WELL
‘Hard to Handle’ initiallysounds like a song I’ve written about having a life that is hard for someone else to handle. It’s years of being a pain in the ass for my friends and family. But actually, it’s about how I find my own life hard to handle. How I want to be able to live a normal life again, but I still want to be successful. How maybe I don’t really know who I am or what I want anymore.
The waiter collects our plates,and Luc pours us another glass of wine. He pours slowly, so that he can make sure each glass is even, filling my glass before his own. He takes the dribble at the end of the bottle and lifts his glass. It clinks against mine, the satisfying ringing staying in the air for a few seconds longer than the glasses.
‘To our relationship,’ he smiles, and it’s not insincere.
‘To our relationship,’ I repeat, but it’s harder for me to respond with that same sincerity.
At no point in the next five monthscan I forget why I broke up with Luc the first time. Even ten years ago, my life was too unmanageable to force someone else into that.
I know everyone only wants what’s best for me, but all I want is more control over my own life. My dating life was the only aspect I could control. The fact that I never let anyone in, never let anyone close, was a choice I made. Everyone leaves eventually anyway, and I don’t want to have to police myself while they’re around to make sure they haven’t got any dirt they can sell when they do leave. NDAs expire eventually.
Jess and I had another friend: Hazel. BetweenSweethearts Inside at NightandParty Pooper, stories kept cropping up about me in the papers: break-ups, where I was going to be at any given time, leaked song titles, new album news, my relationship with Mauve. Stories too close and intimate to have come from anyone outside that inner circle. After months of speculation and me accusing Mauve several times, Jess and I eventually caught Hazel out with a fake story we only told her.
It’s easier to see someone a couple of times, have some fun and then cut them off.
With Luc, it was different.
Jess is the only one who knows the truth. And only because she was sitting on the sofa in my studio while I was at the piano. Tears ran down my cheeks as I played the notes over and over, painstakingly putting words together forUnlikely Silence– the lead single for my fifth album of the same name.
The truth that I didn’t change my mind, no matter how much it looked like that.
It’s the only time I haven’t.
I cross my legs and fiddle with the buckle on my shoe, pulling the strap and running my finger inside it against a rogue hair which seems to have sprouted near my ankle.
‘I guess all that’s left today is to get papped.’ Luc runs his hands through his hair, pushing his glasses up his nose. Hissmile is crooked, rising more on his right than left. The overlap in his front teeth has been corrected, his pearly white smile in near-perfect condition.
Another thing I’ve missed.
He shakes his head, looking at the table. ‘I don’t know how you can live like this.’
My back straightens, my muscles and joints stiffening. There we have the reason I had to let him go, no matter my feelings. My life was not for him. He was always so stationary, while I was always moving, always doing, always working. A timely reminder of why I made the right call a decade ago.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this. My brother says it constantly. That’s why Rory hides from the spotlight, why he tries to keep his life as separate to mine as possible.
‘Now is the time for you to back out if you don’t want to do this.’ I try and fail to swallow a lump in my throat, a slight aching pain settling in my neck. ‘If you don’t want to be involved, we can leave here separately, and everyone will be none the wiser.’
Luc looks into my eyes, his own full of searching. Neither of us breaks eye contact. I gulp down half my final glass of wine, and the room spins slightly as I put it back on the table. I notice a few drops have spilled through the course of the evening, the dark red splotches seeping through the table cloth protecting the oak table. The initial drops are darker, the liquid lightening as it seeps into a star around it. I look at the door, captured by Luc’s eye as my own brush past him.
‘Sie,’ he says softly. ‘If this is something you don’t want to do, you can say. If you don’t want to follow Mimi’s plan, that’s okay. It’s still your decision, your life, at the end of the day.’
‘It doesn’t work like that unfortunately.’ I shake my head. ‘My life stopped being my life as soon as I signed the recording contract.’
Luc frowns.
‘If I don’t do this, if I don’t overhaul what people think about me, we won’t sell enough tickets to the tour to meet the contract for venues we’ve already committed to.’
He dips his chin, glasses slipping down his nose. ‘We’re really doing this then.’
‘Looks like it.’ I drum my fingers on the table, the hardness of the wood against my skin settling me. ‘What are you getting out of this?’
Luc shrugs. ‘I get to help a friend.’
I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. ‘Be serious.’
