I couldn’t remember

See, if I told you we loved one another, I’d be lying. We get all thick together in ways I don’t do when I’m sober, thick in her neck and teeth. Thick in her mind too, kneading it as spilled prophecies instead of soundbites. Our common affinity to the boozer up down by Cassie’s friend’s cousin’s pad and along the canal a bit where there’s dust on my lips and down my boxers and in the air. Those pints and fucking up, it’s the rope we share with our clipped wings, and we never fall in love outside of it, and that’s why, okay?

Like what she told me the week we met first, through a dingy end-pub all smoked up and dangerous, like when the music goes off. All the stragglers listen to her shout, You don’t love me, like? After all this. She’s swinging wild, her pint spilling. It’s our seventh or eighth, and I feel strong all those moments until she calls at me to love her. I squirm into myself, like a man, cornered and weak with pale hands and a seedy neck, and fucking it all up.

All their heads twist when I yell, Can we talk when I’m back? Then the rattling chairs as she follows me into the disabled toilets before the door closes and she’s topless and on her knees, and all the men cheer and bang on the door before I can tell her I love her.

Then there’s that Monday evening after work with all the parks lit up in dirt, and we grab two bottles of wine and swig from them as she leans her head on my shoulder and rubs her hand through my hair as I talk about the first time I came to this park and didn’t really get it. When I feel her unzip my fly, and her hand navigating my dirty jeans, then on my testicles as her tongue dances from standstill, I tell her I get it now. After, I don’t know if I mean it still.

She didn’t tell me how much she loved my dick the next week we met, but she kissed me on the lips before we said anything. It wasn’t romantic, but a peck the way couples do after work. She asked, Where to?

Marching around a park in circles, on grass, muddy grass, then miles more of it, repeating, with somebody I don’t know. Counting blades and daisies or thinking up something to say, or listening to her trying to until we walk in silence. Oh hey, there is an aeroplane up there in the sky.

What do you think about aeroplanes?

So I say, Let’s go park.

She says, Don’t freeze up like that, I’m kidding. Take me to your favourite pub.

Now, wrapped around my favourite pub, I still don’t love her. I hate her. I challenge her. I ask her if she remembers my name, and she says, Of course I do, Blair. I ask her my job, and she says, You do shifts at a marketing company, but you also build up websites on the side for your grandmother’s friends.

Fine, I say, What do I want to be when I grow up? And she says, Happy.

We’re only one pint in, and I say, We’ve never fucked, right? And she says, One of my favourite moments in my life, that you can’t ever repeat, is discovering weather for the first time.

Uh, what do you mean?

I mean, do you remember your first time looking out the window and seeing the grass all frosted up, as if the world had changed but you had no idea why? I wanted to run all the way down the stairs of the flat and live in it.

I remember hot days too. Same grass and my lying on my belly, plucking daisies one by one, thinking about boys at eight years old, and they’d hand me petals or cartoons they drew on chewing gum paper. Do you remember your first storm? People hate storms, but I got all tucked up and cosy in a duvet and we opened the curtains wide so we could watch the patterns the rain made on the window. God, it was so loud.

Cassie’s not taking her top off tonight, she’s not unzipping my jeans. She’s hunched forward on the pub booth, with froth on her lip and mascara on her cheek.

I say, I remember the first time I moved to the city. God, it wasn’t easy because my mother cried hard. I had this big green backpack that people use to go hiking with, in the mountains, but it’s all I had that was big enough for all my clothes. I stepped on to the train, and she held my sleeve for a second longer than she’s ever held it. Never saw her cry before either, so much it made me want to do it too, on the train where she couldn’t see me.

Do you love me? Cassie says.

I say, I was all alone, and nobody in the world knew who I was. I didn’t need to wear what I needed to wear, or speak like I needed to speak, or worry about the things I always needed to worry about back at home. I could put on these boots and discover something new every day. But later I knew everything, and everybody knew me, and all I ever want is that feeling again. I guess the next time I got it was with you, but it scares me to say it because everything moves around my head like comets or stars, or cosmic stuff and I want to mean it, but maybe I guess I love you too.

I think, right before our next order, there’s an extraordinary warmth at the table. Our bodies carry us up, up and up into the world until the tips of our wings burn in the sun.