Still in the game

A girl I was friends with at school drowns in the summer I am 25. I didn’t know her in adulthood, but I creep into the back of the crematorium before the ceremony starts, and watch, black-faced as they talk about the woman who was the girl I copied Maths homework off of. I was compelled to come and see this, to remember her, to remember being a child. I liked her, she was kind and funny and we never fell out, we just fell out of touch. I thought of her sometimes, I assumed that she would be at a school reunion in forty years’ time and it strikes me with an unbidden clarity there in the crematorium that this is what death really is, absence. I feel lucky not to be dead today, I think, on a loop. Lucky not to be dead, lucky not be dead. What a basic human instinct: to stay alive. That is all anyone can think in here today; you can see it on people’s faces. Here but for the grace of God go I, we all think. I could be dead. I could be in that coffin. I could be her. I am still alive. I am winning the game. I am still in the game.

After the ceremony I sneak back out, beyond the mourners and walk the maze of tiny lanes, like roads from a model village, stilettos on gravel. I walk steps up a hill and then steps down the other side, into a stone basin lined with plaques and flowers. It is a beautiful day to still be in the game. I sit on a bench next to some roses and watch a butterfly on a shrub, and a plane leave a trail in the sky. I think about the girl who died who was 45 days younger than me, and I think of my grandfather, who was 55 years older than me, and think that there doesn’t seem to be much sense to who lives and who dies. A song comes into my head and I realise that it is playing on a car stereo, somewhere nearby. My thoughts are still inside my head, but the song is outside of it. The June air is alive with a song from your youth and I long for you now, not to touch or to kiss, not to have or to hold, but to speak to, to know. I have so much to tell you, so much has happened. I count the summers that I have not known you on my hand and know that it is something different now, the way I miss you. It is not the desperation of those years straight after, of being with the wrong man and knowing it was because of you. It is not the wish to hear your voice, the dialling of a disconnected telephone number. It is harder to explain now, it is not a sonnet.

I wish you had been my friend. I wish I could have really known you. I wish the words that you spoke to me had been solid, something that I could have stored in a shoebox underneath my bed, not the breathy smoke of lovers nonsense. When the sex was taken away we still had something; but the sex always did get in the way, it was sticky and poisonous, seeping out of me in the end. When you held me I felt temporary and mortal, like I might die any second in your arms. My limbs could have snapped, my heart could have stopped. All that was keeping me alive was your whimsy; your ideas were what flowed in my veins. Here, even in this garden, dying seems impossible. The sky is too deep over my head, the ground too real for me to ever leave it. You made me feel close to death; sometimes exhilaratingly, brilliantly close and sometimes close in a Victorian, terrifying way. How often did I scream at you that I would throw myself underneath a bus, how many times did you threaten to drink yourself to death? The language of our love was funeral, black and grisly. Always on the edge.