One #4
Not every day held. I won’t pretend it did — the version where it’s all semicolons and clean edits is exactly the lie I left home to stop telling.
There were mornings the mirror handed me back a stranger and I stood in a cold flat over a shut shop and hated the whole slow redraft of myself, wanted to skip to the person I could feel myself becoming and couldn’t yet afford.
But I’d learned one useful thing on that lino in Wales, with a word nobody picked up sitting between the kettle and the cake tin: you don’t get the end without the middle, and the middle is just days.
You keep the appointment with yourself on the days you’d rather not. Especially those.
I tried, those first couple of years, to do the thing you’re meant to do in a new city.
I let Rhi drag me out. I met men. Only men, that part was never the complicated part; I’ve known where I look since before I had a word for the looking.
The complicated part is what my looking lands on.
My type, if you want to be reductive about it, and everyone does, is the big quiet ones, the ones with working hands and a stillness to them, built like they could carry a fridge up the stairs and would rather not talk about it.
And the trouble with that type, out in the actual world, is that it comes in two main varieties: the ones who’d sooner die than be seen leaving a place with someone like me, and the ones with a ring already on and a wife in Sale who thinks he’s at five-a-side.
Homophobes and husbands. That’s the catchment, when your eye points where mine points.
The last one asked me to turn round — that was simply what he wanted, the back of me, the spine, a view that could’ve belonged to anyone, and for three months I called it a preference, because a preference is easier to live with than a diagnosis.
He never once needed my face for anything.
I found out about the wife the way I’d found out everything else about him: not face-on.
His phone lit up on my counter — her name, something about the kids’ bedtime — and I read it upside down without meaning to.
I didn’t shout. I made the tea anyway, because some news you take standing up, politely, the way you sign for a parcel you never ordered.
The rest reached for a label the second drink in, what are you, though, like, do you take or give, as if I were a form with a blank box they couldn’t rest till they’d ticked.
Or they reached for the body instead, hands going exactly where I’d said not to, with the confidence of men who’d decided the rules were foreplay.
One of them, when I moved his hand back the second time, sighed, like I was hard work, like being asked to listen was a tax on his night out.
So I did the sums, the way I do, and came out the far side with a decision that felt at the time like maturity and not like a wound: that I was better on my own.
That a self I’d built this carefully wasn’t for handing to anyone who treated it as a puzzle to crack or a rulebook to haggle down.
I stopped going out to be met. I went out to watch instead, which is safer, and which turns out to be the whole of what I do for a living anyway.
Alone was better. I had the evidence. I believed it right up to the point where a big quiet man on a bar stool started failing to do a single one of the things the evidence had promised me he would.
The bar’s two streets over. Rhi got me through its door the first time, and I kept going through it long after she’d moved out and across the city, because watching a room turned out to be the one hunger I’d decided I was still allowed.
There’s a man who comes in every other weekend or so, on his own, and orders the same drink and takes the same stool at the counter, angled so the room stays where he can feel it, out of habit rather than fear.
He doesn’t talk much. When he does, it’s short, considered, like every sentence has gone through a costing exercise before it’s allowed out of his mouth.
I clock him the way you clock weather: something worth noting, not yet something you plan your day around.
His name stays unknown for months. I learn his face first, the particular economy of it.
I’ve got his face memorised before I’ve got a single word of who he is, and there’s something in that I recognise, some version of my own arrival: you learn the shape of a thing long before you learn what to call it.
I go home some nights and write. Not about him, not yet, not directly, but there’s a character starting to take up room in a notebook that used to belong to someone else entirely.
I don’t know yet that I’m going to spend the best part of two years inside that.
I only know it won’t leave me alone, the way the bar won’t, the way this city that took me in without asking a single question won’t, and I let it stay, the way I’ve learned to let things stay: quietly, without announcing it, the shelf filling one book at a time until one day you look up and it’s a library.