Thinking about you this morning made me feel like I held a creaking wooden ship. The weight of your love shifting inside me, moaning quietly in the sea. It’s thoughts like that which make me wobble. Do you understand? At raw moments I tremble out salt, apologise to whoever I happen to be frightening with tears, I try to sit back upright. Do you understand? It’s just I feel you in the side of my flesh, digging in there, some screw working itself round and round, or a blood bloom in my chest I have to nurse with cupped hands, holding onto the wound. I don’t know if you’d like to see me like that. I liked you curled up small on the floor or howling to the ceiling.

            I think there is a problem in continually lending sound to “I miss you”, it’s a sliding arpeggio that ends in an open mouth, splayed fingers. For a while now I’ve felt my hands poised over the keys, not able to feel my way around a note. Not that you paralysed me. Inside I have cellos playing very low tones, desperately low. You put Jacqueline Dupre on, I lay in your room and listened to the strings suffer. I’m sorry I got angry with you for lethargy. I understand that now.

            Your laughter was ringing out round the flat for days after you’d left, bouncing round its laminate sheen. But the little twists of toilet roll you used to leave everywhere, laced all over the toilet floor were gone, the strange tubes in the bathroom. You fixed the shower, screwed it back into its holding in the wall, but the fucker fell off again after you left. That hideous bus journey to the airport, full of saggy luggage, battered travellers.

It would be helpful if you could appear very suddenly when I most wanted. But there is something about your presence which renders things impossible. It might be how you negate, how you say Don’t, it might be your lids touching each other, quite eagerly pressed together. I think of writing you a letter but the words stop before the page. If I could send you one thing it would be tulips, white, pressed down so they weren’t beautiful anymore. I would come to you with them between my teeth, with bunches of them in my hand, grasped at the belly. At the womb.

            At the airport you said we would see each other soon, I was terrified that was true, terrified it wasn’t. Your reasons are always very simple, mine fold in on each other, like the calzone you ordered in the restaurant, raking through it for canned mushrooms. You only want things fresh from the soil, cut up small between my fingers while I argue horrifically, fighting with the onions in the pan. I hope you’ll try my recipe yourself and realise it’s not as good when you do it. Then you’ll want for me, the particular way of blending in the cream to the herb. You’ll sit at the table and see the wood taking form around my shape. You said you wanted that: the same bed, the same table. But you were letting it go like coloured ribbons curling down from your fingers. The shame is we can’t untie them or bundle any tight fist of material into the palm. So it just hangs there, a loose vein, an odd tail.

            I thought I could hear a big dog padding around your floorboards, then I realised it was just me imagining your future, a barn house with a Labrador. Green wax jackets. Thick soup. I described a nightmare, you said it was a dream, and told me I’d live by a choppy sea, there would always be a storm, and that I needed the Winter as much as Summer. I feel myself on the sand, reconciling with grey sky. Wishing the artist was you.

I don’t know why but I always imagine us meeting again on public transport. There needs to be an audience to these incredulous faces, this entwining of hands. We exclaim names but quietly, rarely surprised. I am remembered to your eyebrows, that patch of dry skin between them.

The phone was shattering its glass just now but I couldn’t be bothered to move for disappointment, a rising and lowing of voices. I’m not moving for anything less than your humming at my side. Your deep trickle of sound.

This city is a map of your body, your cheekbones are the harbour, your eyes lapping at them. Do you remember the night we went to the fake beach, will you forget that? They must have dug away at the old earth and filled it in with synthetic sand so the rich German children could drink cocktails under an umbrella and pretend there was a sea. I said I had lived by the sea all my life, I wasn’t impressed. Maybe that’s why you see me with those grey waves in the future. I feel all that fake sand driving in a crescent round my hip bones, up through the tract.

If you would just say one word, send me a token to say you recognise, to say that you haven’t stopped extending the feelers, the antennae still work, still transmit signals in the air. But I’m not receiving anything, any feeling. I feel you are adrift, I think there’s probably someone else. All those offers, you couldn’t stop taking them. I didn’t expect that. I did.

            I refuse to be debris, I refuse to be dead wood floating around the edges of your life, the past. I’m going to remain neatly buttoned up, holed into memory. I can’t keep appearing in the inbox, battling for company. This is it now, you realise. You realise?

Everything Mother said about me was true. She said I’d never pin anyone down, well it’s never too long before my fingers go looking for another wrist, it’s true, she said I was a pervert, my head would always turn to keep me from walking in a straight line, my feet have gone dumb and want to follow yours but I don’t know where you-

Mother said I could never hold anything down, well it’s true I was always passive, but I suppose that didn’t include decision making, I decided on you. It’s true. She said no one will ever want me to look after their kids. When did I mention looking after anyone’s kids? She said no one would employ me. They did, but my boss tried to sleep with me. Mother said I’d never get married, true, they made it legal, but I wouldn’t get these dumb feet down the aisle, not unless the Vicar was hot. Sorry, my eyes slipped away, sorry, I was looking for you, don’t let me find you or everything Mother said about me will be true.

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