CHAPTER TWO

      I’d heard about this kind of thing happening which is why I wasn’t making a great dramatic deal about it. I generally don’t become overexcited about things anyway, I’m just not one of those people. I’m not easily surprised by things either. I think it’s because I expect that anything can happen. That makes me sound like a believer and I’m not necessarily that either. I’ll phrase it better: I just accept things that happen. All things. So my life writing to me, though unusual, wasn’t surprising; it was more of an inconvenience. I knew that it would demand much of my attention for the foreseeable future and if that was an easy thing for me then I wouldn’t have received the letters in the first place.

      I beat the ice from the fridge-freezer with a knife and retrieved a cottage pie with my blue hand. While I waited for the microwave to ping I ate a slice of toast. Then a yoghurt. It still wasn’t ready so I licked the lid. I decided that the arrival of the letter gave me permission to open a bottle of €3.99 Pinot Grigio. I stabbed the remainder of the ice from the fridge-freezer while Mr Pan ran to hide in a pink heart-decorated wellington boot still covered in dried muck from a summer music festival three years ago. I removed a wine bottle I’d forgotten to take from the freezer which was now a frozen solid block of alcohol and I replaced it with the new bottle. I wouldn’t forget this one. I mustn’t. It was the last bottle left in the wine-cellar-stroke-corner-cupboard-under-the-cookie-jar. Which reminded me of cookies. I also ate a double chocolate chip cookie while I waited. Then the microwave pinged. I emptied the pie onto the plate, a big unappetising messy pile of mush, still cold in the middle but I hadn’t the patience to put it back in and wait thirty seconds more. I stood at the counter to eat and poked at the warm parts around the edges.

      I used to cook. I used to cook almost every night. The nights I didn’t, my then boyfriend cooked. We enjoyed it. We owned a large apartment in a converted bread factory with floor-to-ceiling steel grid windows and original exposed brickwork on most walls. We had an open-plan kitchen-cum-dining-room and almost every weekend we had friends around for dinner. Blake loved cooking, he loved entertaining, he loved the idea of all of our friends, even family, joining us. He loved the sound of ten to fifteen people laughing, talking, eating, debating. He loved the smells, the steam, the oohs and aahs of delight. He’d stand at the kitchen island and tell a word-perfect story while dicing an onion, splashing the red wine into a beef bourguignon, or flambéing a baked alaska. He never measured anything, he always got the balance just right. He got the balance of everything just right. He was a food and travel writer, he loved going everywhere and tasting everything. He was adventurous. At weekends we never sat still, we climbed this mountain and that mountain, during summers we’d go to countries I’d never heard of. We jumped out of an airplane twice, we’d both bungee jumped three times. He was perfect.

      And, he died.

      Just joking, he’s perfectly fine. Alive and well. Cruel joke I know but I laughed. No, he’s not dead. He’s still alive. Still perfect.

      But I left him.

      He has a television show now. He’d signed the deal when we were still together. It’s on a travel channel we both used to watch all the time, and now and then I switch over and watch him walking the Great Wall of China or sitting in a boat in Thailand eating pad thai; and always, after his word-perfect review, in his perfect clothes – even after a week of climbing mountains, shitting in woods and not showering – he looks into the camera with his perfect face and he’ll say, ‘Wish you were here.’ That’s the name of the show. He told me in the weeks and months that followed our traumatic break-up, while he was crying down the phone, that he’d named it for me, that every time he said it he was talking to me and only me and never ever to anybody else. He wanted me back. He called me every day. Then every two days. Eventually it was once a week and I knew he’d been grappling with the phone for days trying to wait for that one moment to speak to me. Eventually he stopped calling and he’d send me emails. Long detailed emails about where he’d been, about how he felt without me, so depressing and so lonely I couldn’t read them any more. I stopped replying to him. Then his emails got shorter. Less emotional, less detailed, always asking me to meet him though, always asking for us to get back together. I was tempted, don’t get me wrong, he was a perfect man, and having a perfect, handsome man want you is sometimes enough to make you want him back, but that was in the weak moments of my own loneliness. I didn’t want him. It wasn’t that I’d met anybody else either, I told him that time and time again though perhaps it would have been easier if I’d pretended I had because then he could have moved on. I didn’t want anybody else. I didn’t really want anyone. I wanted to just stop for a while. I wanted to stop doing things and stop moving. I just wanted to be on my own.

      I left my job, got a new one at an appliance company for half the salary. We sold the apartment. I rented this studio apartment, a quarter of the size of any other home I’d owned. I found a cat. Some would say I stole it but nevertheless, he/she is mine now. I visit my family when held at gunpoint, I go out with the same friends on nights that he’s not there – my ex-boyfriend, not the cat – which is more often now that he’s travelling so much. I don’t miss him and when I do miss him, I switch on the TV and I get enough dosage of him to feel content again.