Illustration by Linde Vergeylen

 

There have only been a few times in my life that I have missed being in love. Generally, I’m self-sufficient. But then things kind of fell apart. I had to move back home. I lost my job — though I will say it was a redundancy, not a screaming and shouting expulsion — and suddenly I felt lonely. I have never really been much into dating. I’m not a chaser. Sometimes I got a bit drunk when I was younger and made doe-eyes at some f*ck-nut, but I was just pretending. All the other girls were doing it, but my heart wasn’t in it. I have never needed anything or anyone beyond myself. Being alone didn’t scare me, which is why it was a surprise when suddenly it did, and I longed for things like holding hands, burying noses into those smooth dips between shoulder and neck, staring into eyes — though I’d never been very good at it — and when I found myself missing one particular pair of green eyes I had thrown away because I had believed myself to be too wild and free to ever be tied down by love. It took a sprawling virus to tie me down, and, without all my distractions, I realised that being alone wasn’t all that interesting. These moments broke over me like waves of heartbreak only somehow a little worse, or maybe just a little more pathetic, because they had no one, no object, to latch their little spumy hands onto. No ex-lovers or future suitors. I hadn’t ever given them the chance. These moments, rare as they seemed to be, were gaining in frequency which was alarming considering I was still only in my twenties.

I was hit, sucker-punch to the heart, listening to ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,’ sitting alone in the passenger seat of my mother’s car at a standstill in the driveway in the middle of October. The door was open, and an unseasonably warm breeze was doing its best to break up and diffuse the sickly dog-breath, heat-stroke humidity that had been trapped inside the car as it sat festering beneath the open sun.

It was one of those moments where everything seems so still, time seems so slow-moving and viscous that it’s as though you can see yourself from the outside. As if this still of your life is a picture hanging up in some gallery and you thought you were sitting in your mother’s car in the afternoon waiting for her to find her keys, and her wallet and her sunglasses and oh, wait, where are the tissues and — but you’re actually standing in a cool, open space, air-conditioning chilling the sweat that’s beginning to break out in thready lines across your forehead and your eyes (your deadened, porridge eyes) are looking at this scene and relaying sparks of abject, deject horror back to you.

That is you. That is your leg with the shitty tattoo on the calf swinging out of that tiny blue car. That’s you. That’s your hair. You didn’t bother brushing it this morning. When was your last haircut? That is the driveway of your parents’ home. Where is your home? Where is your car? Where is your professional occupation capable of paying for your outrageous insurance?

I didn’t even have my licence. What was the point of having a licence to drive when I didn’t have a car or a driveway or a house to drive it to? I didn’t have to be anywhere. I didn’t have the husband to make the dinner for. I didn’t have the blinding love-lust that negated the necessity of everything else. Even practical things like driving. I had no excuse.

The ‘not-having’ was the freedom — or, lack of — I guess. Yes, women got the vote, but at what cost? I lost my right to be wed before I hit this blank wall of nothingness. There, at that moment in the car, I thought maybe being bitter and married at twenty-four with a bab on my hip and seething in my semi-detached might have been better than this freedom, this ‘have-nothing’ on the driveway, because at least then, however negative, I’d be feeling something?

Although… it would be a lie to say I felt nothing. I felt things. Sure. I felt sad. I felt lonely. I felt bleak. It was a pandemic, not sure if I said, so the likelihood of meeting someone felt pretty slim. But all these uneasy misgivings were hazy, diluted into a less potent miasma of discontent rather than the passionate, bared-teeth fury that piqued in those suffrage-pioneering, baby-wielding, dinner-cooking women. They had to be forced into action. I was just being nudged by my own unchecked to-do lists into a prostrate position on the living-room floor or the grass in the garden, if the weather was nice.

When you’re only allowed to leave the house once a day and only operate within a strict few kilometres, the scenery starts to wear at the elbows. We all know this. I was just bored, maybe. My mind was running out of colours. The pencils were breaking, the crayons had rubbed down to stubs. It was all lacking. The idea of not working, bank rolling on government funded checks, strolling around the supermarkets thinking of fancy Italian things I could do with the seasonal veg seemed tantalising in the beginning, but now the months were oozing on, and I didn’t feel like going to the supermarket anymore. Not with Mam again. Not her asking me again if it was aubergines or courgettes I used in that nice thing with the herbs. I just wanted to be left alone, but not really. Like, when you’re p*ssed off and you say to someone you want them to leave you alone but really you mean crawl up beside you and hold you and bring you through the fugue but don’t dare f*cking speak—

I just wanted to stay in bed, but the thought of my bed made me sick. When had I last changed the sheets? Days seemed to disappear so quickly and when I lay on my bed, head propped up by a cushion, I could see out the window and track the sun as it moved seamlessly through the sky to its setting point, beyond the field, down to the right-hand corner, disappearing over the tiles of the Hartnett’s house. And then it was night-time, and I couldn’t sleep again, but it didn’t matter because I had nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no one to look presentable for. The moon would come up behind me and track its way in the mournful footsteps of its sunny counterpart. Always trailing after him, looking like sh*t, feeling low, just wanting to get back into bed. Just wanting the sun to go to the supermarket with her and tell her she could get her driver’s license if she wanted, she could do anything. She could do anything if the sun just crawled into bed beside her. Just for a bit. But there were no eclipses throughout the pandemic, as far as I know. There was no opportunity for anyone to cross paths. 

But anyway, with all that free time all I managed to do was feel forlorn, and daydream about love and write bad poetry. And I guess that’s better than nothing.