Where do I begin?

If I knew how to do it, I would write a book about all of this. I would fiction this baby right up: call me Rita and you George and just get right down to it, make my millions. Pete suggested it once: just write everything down, how the whole thing happened, and change the names. 

The thing is, for this to be a story that I could just sit down and write, there would need to be a beginning and a middle and an end- and I don't even know myself what they are. Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be?

I might start in 1985 in Romford and end in 2015 in the same commuter town on the rougher outskirts of London. Begin on the day that I was born and end six weeks before Christmas thirty years later. That would be then and now. But what about you, born on the south coast thirteen years before my story began and not dead yet? Between us we have a collective 73 years of story and it only crossed- the brief Venn Diagram of gin and sex and arguments- for a lousy eight of those. And what about the stories of those who made us and kept us, the stories of the ones on the official documents? My husband, your wife, our parents and grandparents? Add those, even if I exclude those who excluded themselves like your feckless father and my philandering grandfather, suddenly there is 400 years worth of mundane tale to tell and this isn't a biography of those boring bastards. Those people are good people, but not characters you can write in a book. No one would read it. 

If I did write a novel it would be supernatural and I would find you in a time slip and murder you with my bare hands in the back of my Hyundai. Fuck it, if I'm writing the book I would have a better car and I would run you over with it. The fictional version of our story would have me happen upon you shot in the leg on the outskirts of a wood and I would bury you alive in a shallow grave. If this were fiction I would hunt you out now and make myself a sprite who had the power to make you invisible and silent for the rest of your life. You would hate that, you always wanted to be the centre of attention. If I was writing the book of me and you there would have been a happy ending, or some fucking ending at all. You would not just have upped and left one day, told me that I was surplus to requirements and changed your phone number. Ha. There you have it, the ending that no one would believe: Belle and The Beast and Belle gets left on her own, chain smoking menthol cigarettes in the dark while The Beast goes back to his wife. It's a bestseller.