Volume 9: On Love
Companionable silence and the contours of life in love
“Aiden can finish your sentences, you know precisely when he needs hand lotion, and your individual laughs have become one laugh, along with all the other ridiculous things that synch when people are in love.”
In Bryan Washington’s short fiction piece, Arrivals, he writes of a gay couple in bed ordering room service in an expensive hotel, eating avocado on toast, “cosplaying like the couple you’re sure you could maybe become.”
I have been that person, performing the imagined routines of what a dream love might look like, but without the comfort, the substance, a hollow feeling that senses something missing.
When Aldous Harding, in my favourite song Horizon, sings let me fill you up with the fingers of love, I know I now live in a constant state of feeling that touch. Less fingers, more of a hand in the palm of which I am continually held.
I fell in love in the unlikeliest of places, for me at least. Against the grey backdrop of the office, my desk strategically positioned directly opposite the water cooler, meant that by the principle of sheer thirst alone, he would encounter me at least a few times a day. Daring glances turn to lingering looks exchanged over computer screens, amplified by the background gossip of our coming together carried on a tide of tongues other than our own.
Now, it has been almost one full turn around the sun since the early autumn walk, where in the marshes around the estuary of the River Blyth, he asked me to be his girlfriend. That question had been so important to me, carrying a sense of recognition and formality that I hadn’t experienced in so long, after years of presumption, casual encounters, heartache.
Still in the nascence of cohabitation, I think of the beautiful words encountered in my inbox from Jasmine Lo’s newsletter inevitably, creased.
“Has it become home, yet. Have you grown into the shape of its shell.”
Earlier that week, we had accidentally shattered the full length mirror only just installed in the bedroom. Typically a foreboding stroke of ill superstition, luck doesn’t come into the equation when living with foundations that feel so reassuringly stable.
In quiet familiarity, here in our shell we spend precious idle hours. The complete comfort of cafetieres consumed under covers on a Sunday morning. Wine-stained evenings spent exploring our bodies with the eagerness of amateur cartographers.
I see our story as the greatest thing I have ever written, already a series of film-like moments. The flight I jump on last minute to France to meet him there for our second date. The fake proposal I receive as a wind up from his former work mates at the pub where we go for our third date - the head waitress’ ring artfully positioned atop a Chantenay carrot on the dessert plate where will you marry me is spelt out in raspberry coulis.
This is a love that feels like a novel, a many-chaptered tome of real weight, compared to the fleeting leaflets of other encounters in the annals of my own history.
I re-read the journals that record our earliest days together, our origin story recorded in excited scribbles. The last entry in one, my birthday, before stocking that notebook on the bookshelf to begin the fresh journal he buys me in a boutique stationers in Edinburgh, I write, “I am seeing in 27 well-read, well-fed, and well-loved.”
That same book contains dark pages of sorrowful admissions, recounting, the “minor catastrophes of your life,” as Washington writes, that remind me why I revel the way I do in what I have found now.
Whilst volumes of words have been exchanged between us, spoken or written, small talk, big talk, it is the companionable level of silence we have reached that means the most. Brief comfortable pauses, when reading side by side - one of my greatest pleasures, or when sharing steaming bowls of pho in the Vietnamese noodle house a stone’s throw from our home.
My second reader in everything I do, his and mine are the four eyes that pass over almost every word I write. But not this, yet.
Earlier this week, his birthday arrives, and in a Spanish restaurant, gorging on calamari drenched in aioli and sinking red wine that costs ten times the price of the supermarket bottles we frequently imbibe, we talk of the future - the daydreams, the names we will share. Next week, despite all that we have done in such short time, we will take our first flight together, two halves of a whole, as new shores beckon.
