So it's been an...interesting time in life. There's been loss & trying to come to terms with grief within my own personal sphere. And you know that 'they' say - you've always got to write a bit of what you know, so there's now incentive for Milly's decision to study for her MA in Bangor & also more accountability for her decision to have an affair with her lecturer. Who wants a victim when you could have a bit of a villain? No more Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Let's have more Promising Young Women. Throw in some first person, too, just for good measure.
Hey, ma, I’m trying to feel festive but the weight of this grief hangs upon me like a scarf, wrapping me in its’ blue embrace until I cannot breathe. It’s as if someone has taken the colour out of the Christmas lights, lining the streets of Bangor’s high street. Or, perhaps, the whole world is devoid of colour - a mere grayscale version, the trees naked, gnarled elders reaching into the abyss. Maybe I’m just being melodramatic.
There’s an absolute emptiness that seems to come with losing your best friend. I came to Bangor to be with her & then they find that tumour & it all happens quick as lightning. One minute you’re joking about the questionable choices she made in her first year modules (and the fashion - oh, the scarves), the next you’re choosing songs for her funeral.
It’s become to the point where I can’t concentrate in my lectures. Wanting to just *feel* anything, I stupidly seduced my lecturer, only later to find out that he’s married with a baby on the way. Sally, you were the lighthouse in my sea of shite - now I’m sailing blind, hitting into every rock in my path to finishing this fucking MA, all the while trying not to meet with my supervisor-cum-ex fuck buddy.
Every time I’m going through the ringer, I drop her a line on instagram. I ask her questions, stupidly, and then imagine her replies. I can hear her voice in my head still. See her in my dreams - she walked into the uni flat with bags overflowing with shopping from the local veg market - ‘I got a good deal on these carrots! They’re wonky!’ - and I exclaimed, ‘You’re okay!’, and you looked at me like I was insane. ‘Of course I’m okay, I just got twenty carrots for 2 quid!’ - we laughed & I helped you unpack all of your insane items, cramming the fridge full, and I remembered that the potatoes live under your bed, because they ‘love being in the dark, tucked up under there’, and it’s all these mundane things that I miss the most. I didn’t want to wake up, I just wanted ten more minutes with you in the kitchen, shaking our bums to Bruce Springsteen.
Do we have to rewatch the downfall? Do we have to see the transgressions? If I had known he was married, although I had suspected, then I would have never become as involved as I had. But I needed the confidence boost - someone to re-read my work to me, naked, as our shadows danced on the wall during twilight & you kissing my neck, telling me you’re wonderful, you need to write more, I will stroke your ego until you cum.
She deteriorated quickly. Would you view that as a blessing? In a way, yes; less suffering for her, but also such a shock. One day, she’s lying asleep and we know there might be no hope of waking up. Stubborn and bright and just so beautiful - you can see it in someone’s eyes, beautiful until the end, with so many questions yet to be answered and longing for adventure, lusting for life, all of the other bullshit phrases that we use when someone is taken far too young. If we’re being blunt, someone who just died. Hardly any warning. No recovery.
And so I ran to Bangor, the plan of ours clasped tight in my sticky palms, and decided if we couldn’t do it together then I would make the biggest hash of it all.
A bit meta, innit. Writing about being a writer & wanting the praise of someone old enough to be your father.
Her fingers ran over the carved initials of past students in the headboard. Lovers with their initials entwined, fights that caused them to be scratched out, the experiences and lives of all who came before, all who slept in this room, with their mark on these walls, feet bare on this carpet, their clothes half hung, half thrown into that wardrobe. Lives that have been lived echoed around the halls, with stories unremarkable to others, simply living and breeding and dying until we all became dust. And Milly would become simply another forgotten story. Just like Sally.
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