Four months before Catherine
I’m not very well, I think.
I’m spending too much time in my head, lost in my dream world, and it’s beginning to get harder to tell dreams and reality apart.
If I’m not dreaming and fantasising then I’m remembering and reinventing, always trying to get the perfect ending.
To make everything right, you have to turn the clock back, the hands spinning through the years fifteen times until we are young again, nineteen and twenty, everything ahead.
Our beginning is just right, no changes needed.
There you are standing next to your pale blue car, stubbled, unshowered, with hair that stands on end: the boy who is about to take a stick to my world and spin it round and round until it veers right off its axis.
There’s a beautiful drawing that appears like magic on my desk while I’m working.
There’s lunch in an old wooden hut with peeling blue paint, and if I try hard enough I can hear the manic cry of the gulls, I can taste salt in the air.
Now there’s a long gilt-edged mirror and a girl standing in front of it, watching, watching as you stand behind her, slowly unbuttoning her shirt, one button, then the next, with hands that do not shake.
Your confidence is my undoing, your solemn eyes holding mine in the glass as my shirt falls away, your palms circling my breasts, your almost-smile as you watch me beginning to writhe and squirm, pressing my nakedness back into fully clothed you.
Soon you’ll carry me over to your bed, you’ll run your tongue all the way down my body, starting at my neck, you’ll stroke and touch every part of me, you’ll somehow take off all of your own clothes without me even knowing how you’re doing it, and then you’ll be inside me, finally, and it will hurt but I will want you to carry on, and so you do, slowly, so slowly, and now it’s the opposite of pain and we’re grabbing at each other and perhaps I’m laughing, because all I know is that I want this feeling, this incredible, intense, pleasurable feeling to carry on.
There will be dark nights, months and months of them, when we lie wound around each other flesh against flesh, my hand in yours, palm against palm, lifeline, heart line.
You will tell me you love me and I’ll say it right back, I’ll whisper the words into your ear.
There will be light-filled days, there will be coffee and tiny little cakes and an old woman who calls me by the wrong name.
There will be Paris, a painting of a dark-eyed woman at the theatre, slim white candles burning at an altar.
There will be a drawing of a girl kneeling up on a bed dressed in nothing but a loose white shirt that ends just above her knees.
How long did it take you to do the drawing – ten minutes, maybe fifteen?
Yet you managed to capture perfectly the sweep of my hair, almost reaching my waist, the longest it has ever been.
My neck was perhaps a little more swan-like than it really is, a Photoshopped neck though we didn’t have the words for that back then.
But it is the eyes you notice, my look of euphoria as I gaze off the page.
You know looking at my eyes that I am buoyed by the delirium of new love.
I am happy, I am confident, I am invincible.
Let’s stop the clock right here.