Best days of the worst year

You lean your head out of the upstairs window one Thursday in September, man Rapunzel, and somehow I end up inviting you down for a drink. I am fuzzy and warm, just back from an art show, and open to the night. Then we are kissing on my kitchen counter. A dizzying dopamine rush after a long hiatus. My legs give way.

We carve our initials the next day on an outdoor table over Vinho Verde (S&M not M&S) and embark on a not so secret neighbourly tryst for three months of long lunches, endless conversation and electric kisses. All the life we've been missing. We figure it is technically one household, just different rooms...

I still remember how it felt the day I moved out of our building. A wrench of separation like the moment when I have to leave my parents behind at the airport in Perth, for God knows how long. Thanks Covid.

I come back the next day to collect the things I couldn't fit in the moving van - and the cat - to find the cat has vanished. In the downstairs bathroom, deep in the basement, I fall to my knees and wail, bereft and covered in cleaning products. This wail was mostly for the lost cat, but you weren't to know that. It turns out sound is echoed and radically amplified in an empty flat, so from two floors up you text, "are you OK?" The cat rematerialises 3 minutes later.

My plan to move out was sealed before I met you. It seemed smart at the time - a massive house, with outdoor space, shared with a work friend. Much better on paper than my tiny damp basement flat. I was locked into a course of action that should have made everything OK. But I cry the first night, and maybe also the second. I am numb for a month.

In November, I creep back to the old building and write "thank you for the best days of the worst year" in chalk on the wall below your window. Then, overnight, it rains. You don't see it in time. I try a second time on a clear night, heart beating fast at the transgression, triple chalking the letters, really hoping this is actually not creepy, and when you finally see it you grab my face with both hands and kiss me hard.

Then you test positive. So I schlep my way through Hackney clutching hot pots of chicken soup and ginger tea taped shut with masking tape that spill on my chest en route - you are pale and wan and you don't look like yourself, but you eat the soup. On your birthday, as I'd kept a secret key, I break into my empty flat and climb on a stool in my old back garden so I can hand things to you through the upstairs window. I fall off spectacularly, bringing down the clothesline, and you look as though you might jump out of the window to save me.

December. My new landlord informs us that he's sold the big glamorous house. My housemate wants to get another big glamorous house together, but I decide that I need to be back in the crumbly building where I feel so safe. By some miracle, I manage to secure the flat next to my old tiny basement flat - with an actual garden-sized terrace, rather than a tiny strip of cement with a sky light in the middle, and a bedroom of my own, rather than a sofa bed next to the fridge. This was not just to be close to you - I do actually need a place of my own, and I do actually need outdoor space, and I do quite like having my own bedroom. But yes, you were a factor.

In January, the move in date comes, and you tell me that you may not be available "for a little while". I know you have a traumatic job exit going on and it is winter lockdown which isn't great for anyone, so of course I am fine with this. I even put up a massive garden umbrella so we can maintain separate spaces without me feeling like I am intruding.

But then you stop answering my texts. I can hear you peeing above my kitchen ceiling - with such abandon, such life force - you are a visceral ghost, omnipresent even in your absence. I learn that when you make coffee, you tap the filter three times sharply to eject yesterday's coffee. I can hear when you've had guests, girls giggling into the night, you admitting that you hate drinking alone, and your long shadow passes over my umbrella in the evenings like an actual ghost.

We bump into each other in our common doorway, at Sainsbury's, occasionally in the street, weirdly sometimes several times a day, sometimes weeks go by. Once I scream when you open the door at the same time as me and you are on the other side, so close. Often I wince and look down. Manage to mumble hello. Cross the street if I see you in the distance. In the meantime, late in the night, when I have had too much wine, I text you knowing you won't reply, but I am stubbornly not ready to give up on our friendship or whatever it is that connects us. You really should learn to turn those read receipts off :)

My friends tell me to delete your number. Instead, I rename you "DO NOT TEXT". And I try - I really did try - to abide by this.

In March, a storm blows the garden umbrella off the table and nearly into the neighbour's yard. I am up at 3am wrestling with it in the wind and the rain when I decide to stop fighting. I hoist it into a corner, and decide that it has served its purpose.

In April, my kid gets an internship. I am so proud and excited that I text you to tell you and you actually reply. Then, on her first day, when she is a ball of tears and nerves, you don't wave back at her out of the front window and I flip. I text you that I am all out of kindness and that you are not kind and that ghosting is brutal and traumatic. You reply, "I didn't think it counted as ghosting if you let people know first."

The next day, and the day after, and the day after that, you wave. My kid smiles. The world shifts. Two weeks later, on a Friday, you ask if I want to go for a walk.

So, we walk. We end up back where we started with the Vinho Verde, only this time it's beer from the off license as nothing is open yet. We talk. We smoke a joint. I'm annoyed I'm high during this conversation. I want to remember this. I missed you so much. I tell you if we are going to be friends we can never have sex again. I regret this immediately. The last 4 months sucked. You're sorry, you didn't realise, time passed so much faster than you thought. You've tell me that you've not even seen your BFF - I reply, but you weren't sticking your dick in your BFF. Then I am mortified when you tell me that I was a nightmare of barely functional lockdown alcoholism at Christmas and suddenly I understand why you needed to take a step back. Damage control.

May. We finally have the roller disco date you first scheduled for November, when things shut down again. I feel like we are flying round the rink, but in reality it's actually a few years since I have skated, and also I had wine for courage, so at some point looking back at you over my shoulder, I fall backwards, slow motion laughing, and break my arm so badly no one can look at it without recoiling. I can't feel a thing with the adrenaline, but I am still mildly pissed off when the skating attendant, who is filling out the First Aid form, looks at my date of birth, looks back at me, and then shouts my date of birth to the entire skating rink, "you don't look like you were born in _ _ _ _!" My mother finds this story particularly hilarious, especially when I tell her when you were born.

We get an Uber to the hospital. Paid for by the skating rink. I love that you stay with me. Though you'd have been a monster not to. At one point, after the adrenaline, when I am drowning in the pain, you rest your forehead on mine quietly like a giant Labrador. It works. 

Now they want to reset my arm so they offer me either a general anaesthetic or something called the Green Whistle. The surgeon honestly seems so super excited at the prospect of the Green Whistle that we choose that. It smells like marker pens and all the things we were warned not to sniff in high school. And it works. Brutal realignment with zero pain. We escape from A&E (with the green whistle in my handbag) and stop at 2am on the way home at the 24 hour Bagel shop for the most delicious bagel ever and a cake I never ate. We seem to have the unique ability to turn disaster into adventure. This is rare.

You are rare.