I could have loved you

This is about flirting with a man at a BBQ during the World Cup.

It was a three-second look. Three seconds.

We’d talked and joked and laughed all evening through the smog of our mutual friends. Making him laugh feels like how Messi must feel when he does whatever it is Messi does. I don’t know.

We were meant to be watching the football. That was the purpose of the party, after all. But it, like everything else in the vicinity of me and him, had disintegrated into tiny little pieces and soaked into the beer-sodden earth below.

Making him laugh feels like when the goalie— oh, I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.

When the lines around his mouth go Creation of Adam all the way up to his crow’s feet, I want to fall to my knees and sob into the suede of his Birkenstocks.

If handsome was all he was, that’s all I’d tell you about. But I’m going to tell you, instead, about how I think we probably knew each other in another life. Not in some voodoo way or anything like that. Just in the way that, this, the first time we’ve ever met, feels like coming home from school. Like ripping your uniform off in one grand swoop to the lounge floor on a hot July afternoon. I’m home!

Our kids would be fair with dark hair and high cheekbones. We’d have some in-joke about grapefruits, for some reason, which we’d carry on for years despite forgetting the origin. We’d honeymoon in Argentina because of this, the night we met.

“I’m off now.” I can’t stay any longer. If I don’t go, I’ll have to watch him leave, and that’s the only thing worse than leaving now. To be near him is to stand in the glow of a vending machine with no coins.

“So soon?.” He knows that’s as far as the protest can go. Any more and the unsayable would verge on said.

“Yeah, I should”, I smile.

I breathe in deeply, stealing one last gasp of air from the moment that was already becoming memory. I never used to understand those people who collect sand from different beaches. Or air from different cities. But as I attempt to snow-globe what’s left of the space between us inside the cavity of my chest, I’m closer to an eBay bid on Tokyo Smog 2019 than ever before.

Rip the plaster off, Harriet.
Smash the glass.

I collect my bag from beneath the buffet table. I fish my coat from the pile. I say hello and goodbye to those I’d neglected all evening. And here we go. A hug, a second too long.

“Bye.”

“Yeah— bye.”

Down the side entry to the garden, I look back, and there it is. Three seconds. And here they are:

1

I know you.

2

I know how it ends.

3

In another life.

In another life.

This didn’t really happen at a football match party. Well, not only. And not just with him.

It happened with Breakfast Guy, a couple of months ago, too, when he walked me home for the last time. At the crossing, we waited, and I looked, and there it was; the same three seconds. A thought shared instead of the few years it would have taken to act it out.

It happened with the boy on the station platform, as the train was pulling out of Manchester Piccadilly when I was fourteen. I think about him sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth.

It happened with the man I loved. Once the last moving box was loaded. I mounted the passenger seat of the goodbye-mobile. Three seconds. 1. Well, that’s it. 2. We nearly made it, didn’t we? 3. In another life.

It wouldn’t be perfect, had it lived.

It was only perfect because it was preserved in time. A dandelion cast inside a paperweight. A two-headed calf. A family home, once sold, should only be revisited by picture, never person.

Have you ever tried to reheat McDonald’s chips? To bask in the glory of the night before whilst hovering oven-side, in an attempt to resuscitate the cold, limp remains of a feeling you’ll never feel again? Some things cannot survive being woken up next to. They were perfect because they never had the chance to prove otherwise.

I’m almost certain that, upon my deathbed, it won’t be my life flashing before my eyes, but the lives I didn’t live with the men I couldn’t hold. It’s not sad. I don’t think it is, anyway.

After all, a life doesn’t have to be yours to have happened.
A love doesn’t have to last to have lived.
A goal doesn’t have to have been scored to— oh, I don’t care.