Only You

'The Three Ages of Humans' ~ Dosso Dossi (Giovanni de Lutero)

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Although I appear to drive aimlessly, I think my unconscious seeks out personal landmarks, as if performing some morbid memory-lane exposure therapy. I’ve realised there is nowhere I can go where I can escape to that isn’t haunted by the ghosts of some version we once were.

Unless it’s a Wetherspoons.

We never went there.

I haven’t forgiven them for the time I hungrily ordered a hangover fry-up and was served a single mushroom. When I questioned the waitress, she patiently brought a menu and pointed to the word mushroom in the description.

I turn into the small car park and feel instantly irritated that I am not alone. I pull into the space furthest away and turn off the ignition. I pretend I haven’t immediately noticed the bench is still there. Or that it seems pensive, as if approaching it would encroach on a private moment, looking out over the vast and barren moors.

I wait for as long as I think is respectful, then get out of the car, pulling up the collar of my coat and fumbling with the zip. I berate myself for having relied on him to always do it for me, like a child who never realised that one day they would have to leave home.

We used to sit here as if it were our back garden, other people intruders in the small world we’d created. We even had the audacity to express our displeasure at yet another arrival of a tourist with a loud tut. That was me. He never tutted at anything. His was more a loud For fuck’s sake that could reverberate around the hills for miles.

It was here that I asked him a question I had never given any thought to before I knew him.

Before I loved him.

It seems so naïve now.

I couldn’t have known what I was asking.

That one day it would become the final test of our Squid Game love.

But everything in me had to ask.

To know.

I’d spent a long time thinking about it, so I already had the advantage of a decision made. I regret the offence I expressed when he quite rightly took time to think. At the time, I think I only wanted to know — to be sure — that he loved me as much as I loved him. But, as with other times that now torment my memory, I let that insecurity express itself as displeasure at him.

He should have taken time.

Just as I had.

It felt bigger than a marriage proposal.

"If I died, would you be with someone else?"

I laugh now at the absurdity of the word if.

He said no, eventually.

After thinking.

Which, in retrospect, was the correct response to a question that was arguably none of my business.

Except it felt like it would forever be my business.

No matter what.

I hate that the memory of the moment he affirmed that he loved me as much as I loved him is tainted by the row that followed only minutes later. I don’t even remember what it was about. But we ate our favourite meals — mine macaroni cheese, his steak pie and mash — at our favourite pub in silence.

As I sit now, alone, on the wet bench that we once treated like the sofa in our living room, scattered with personal debris, I reach a hand across to pat where he should have been and stare out over the moors, watching sheep graze in the field.

I think about that argument and I realise what it was really about.

Except, actually, I don't.

When the rain starts to fall, I stay a few more moments before meandering back to the empty car park, muttering under my breath about the damn zip.