So very sly and so very old

I had seen your shadow a thousand times in the hundreds- thousand- days since you disappeared from my life like a bad conjurer. Izzy wizzy, let’s get lost. Whenever I had seen you, it wasn’t you. The man was a little too thin, or not blonde enough; his beard wasn’t as heavy or his eyes were the wrong colour. So when I saw you it was really as though I had seen a specter outside an urban train station at 7.08 in the morning. In the hundreds of days you’d been gone I imagined you in Australia, so far from me as to be in another world, not here, not at the station on a normal morning, fumbling with change for the ticket machine, balancing a copy of The Metro on top of a paper cup of tea.

What shocked me most was how you were essentially unchanged: the same walk, the same nervous hand gesture pulling at your hair as you walked quite usually into the foyer. If you hadn’t had to buy a ticket on that mild September morning then my hesitation would have meant that we hadn’t spoken. I queued behind you and breathed heavily. I could watch you go or I could be brave. I watched you go and then suddenly called your name. You turned and looked as though you were contemplating a running jump over the barrier. Those same hands that had touched me so many times were bunched in fists next to you, the hair that I had stroked while you slept was going grey at the temples.That was the biggest shock to me, that there in the flecks of blonde and mousy brown were hints of grey, tiny, newly cut white hairs. 

“Laura. You’re looking well.” You said, embarrassed, shy, sly and old. So very sly and so very old. Grey at the temples. Older than I’d left you. Older than you’d left me. I showed you the diamond ring on my wedding finger, just like all those years before, the new ring on your finger, the cold metal touching my face as you stroked my eyelids. You aren’t the only one who can get someone to stick a ring on your hand, I thought with contempt. You smiled, exclaimed it was huge and so it was. What a big diamond, like that’s what matters, a dead bit of carbon on a dead bit of metal on a dead womans fucking hand. ‘You can get bogged down with rings,’ I wanted to say earnestly, ‘you can get caught up with what’s a ring and what’s a promise. You can get caught up with bloody rings and engagements and everyone being thrilled that you’ve got into bloody line and decided to do the right thing with a normal boy. You can get caught up with being property of your husband, property of your wife, property of a bad marriage and a bad childhood and a need to belong to something, someone, anything, anyone.’ I did not say those things though, I simply smiled and let you touch my fingers as you admired the expensive piece of jewellery against my skin. 

My eyes filled with tears that I blinked back. ‘I’m not even married yet,’ I should have carried on, should have screamed to the tops of the rafters in that railway station entrance, high and tall and metal and echoing, ‘I’m not even married yet and my marriage is just your marriage ten years ago. I just want things to be okay. I just want to be normal. I just want to be doing the right thing. I just want to belong to anything, to anyone. And you did that. You did that to me.’

I looked into your sly, old eyes and told you I was a teacher too now. Just like you were. Just like she was. I am a teacher because what else can a girl do with an English degree and a need for cash? Because what else can a girl do with no ambition and no lifeblood left? When you left the air got sucked out of my lungs and the scarlet removed from my blood. Washed up, used up, had at 21.

You let go of my diamond-crowned hand and looked at me with what I knew was confusion: you mirrored my own face. Here’s the person I loved most in the world, that look seemed to say, that I have been inside of- in every single sense-that I have hit and broken and laughed with and kissed and told I would marry, sat on Chadwell Heath station at one in the morning . And I don’t even know her. I offered you my right hand, not the hand that you always promised something to, and said baldly,

“Come on. It’s all forgotten.” Relieved and flushed you shook it.

“Thanks.” You replied, you palm plump and warm in my own.

But it was not forgotten, it could never be forgotten. I walked out of that station with your hand print burning a hole in my palm.