Melon
Moon,
Flower
Blue
It is a hug that I struggle with the most; where to put the arms, my arms, both of which are instrumental in the act of hugging. It shames me to say that I do not enjoy hugs, not entirely but there are parts of them I enjoy, in the same way a boy might enjoy a Sunday roast but gag on the vegetables. I do not wish to hug anyone but my lover. To hug a stranger is the sound of drilling, even a family member causes my muscles to tighten with discomfort. No, the only person I would hug with even the smallest soupçon of enthusiasm is my lover: a rush of blood as she approaches, her body opening up to me; a sharp intake of breath, perhaps, and a moment or two as I find the right place for the arms, my arms; hers are already in the correct spot, settling neatly into the terrain of bone and muscles that my own just cannot seem to navigate. Just as I think I have found the correct arrangement for my arms on her back, the hug is over. I say to myself that my next hug will be better; it has to be. It is unfortunate that I cannot practice without her. What if she should find my awkwardness an aversion to her embrace? She says nothing, how polite! She does not break away eagerly. I do not tire of hugging her. My arms will come good.
Arms are such silly things. I was born with two, and some forty years later there are still occasions in which I find myself unsure of what to do with them, where to put them, how to carry them; maybe I will hold an arm in midair suspiciously, as if frozen halfway through a movement with neither ending nor beginning, and so I appear jagged, as a swastika or an action figure abandoned on a child’s bedroom floor. If I am spooning in bed then I am also awkward with my arm, where to put it. Of course one arm is held around the little spoon, and I attempt to be professional, like I have spooned a thousand times. ‘Ah, spooning, of course! I am a natural! You have not been spooned until you have been spooned by me! I taught a class on spooning at the Sorbonne in 2013, attended by people from all over the world!’ However, for all the successes of one arm, the other is a let down. It is squeezed between the bodies, keeping us apart. And I am so frustrated by this interrupting limb that I want to tear it off, hurl it out of my window into the road below. She, too, must be terribly put out by my arm. She turns over, brandishing a saw from the garden shed—‘Either that arm goes, or I do.’ There is rust on the blade, it has not been used in so long.
The arm goes, and I miss it only sometimes. Time itself I miss, too. Time had a habit of running away from me before I met her; I was glad to see time go. In it the colours rush and flow, they blur and become grey. Into time I put my fingers as a passenger puts their hand out the rolled-down car window. A wristwatch is fine but the calendar has to go. I abandon it all, I abandon everything. They have betrayed my trust, the clock set to heartbeats, sunrises, unveiled moons. When last Sunday used to feel a week ago, now it is a month. There is not just Time, but also the Before Time: eleven days of constant communication as I waded through an illness only to decide, on the morning of our first meeting, that I wished to cancel; everything was deleted and we went our separate ways. She messaged me three days later, and, as I had squandered seventy-five hours cursing my hasty rejection, it seemed fateful. The universe held her out to me, a reward for some good deed perhaps. The next evening, in Tuesday’s King Arthur, she put her legs between my knees. I knew where to put my hands.
Most certainly Me Before I Met Her is an important period, like the Triassic or the Renaissance. I do not offer it up to the history books — no, too intimate! — but keep it measured along the length of my existence.
Blood rushes. Down by the side of the road, we watch the cyclists speed by. She recalls her past with a scalpel and a strip of gauze. Every rendezvous is a bit more skin peeled back. There are black drips across the table. Her eyes are a fire into me. Most of all there is laughter. I am comfortable in her company, as though we are two travellers in a foreign land who come upon the other in a beachside cafe, sharing a drink, united by their tongue. We eat dinner late and are the last to leave. The servers regard us with contempt and try to scam. I am too joyful to object or fuss. We plan when we will see each other again. We miss each other immediately. We are disgusting.
The book is held open in front of the kebab shop counter, its title page inscribed; after that first date, separated and sent out to a small fluorescent lot in Hackney. The fourteenth of April, 23:15. Red, green, yellow, red, green peppers cut across, their seedy innards gaping. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea split in two rectangles for the lens. Pale skin and blue nail varnish at the end of tattooed fingers with a burdened keyring hanging from her pinkie. Far enough away to blur is the makings of a halloumi wrap, pinning down a sheet of tinfoil fluttering upwards.
Late at night I walk back from the train station. The barriers are open and everything else is closed. Others are drunker than me. I am sprightly. Even exhausted, sleep does not come close on the journey home, and alighting with spring, I bound along the platform to the tune of romance. The station is still and the homeless are elsewhere. Caught beneath these golden streetlights is the gritty scattering of birdshit in sweeping movements, generous with the season and pestled underfoot. I’ll be back along this path soon, I think to myself, just seven more hours. Neon from the abutted Indian and American restaurants gets spilled across the tarmac. No traffic at the crossing; red, green, amber, red, green switching rhythmically, waiting for something to happen, but for a figure out the shadows from one side to the other. The cat meows at me; I apologise and explain that it is all for a good reason, the best reason. She holds onto her grudge just long enough to piss outside the litter tray then join me in bed, snuggling against my chest, one arm stroking her and one arm holding my phone up to write—