By Muna Mir
‘You know I hated you when we first met.’
The confession excites me slightly. We’re walking through an overgrown field by the river. Something touches my leg. It’s grass. Everything around us is grass. Long and overgrown, too early in the season to be cut, but trying so desperately to get there that it reaches up and tickles the tender spot behind my knees. It’s grass but I swat at it anyway. I can’t remember meeting Flora. I’m walking behind her now, watching the brown tips of her hair turn golden in the sunlight.
‘What changed?’ I ask.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replies.
Before we became friends I hadn’t thought that Flora had known of me at all. Tracing the inception of our friendship was one of our favourite pastimes. Neither of us could pin down quite when it had happened, less so why, only that we were happy it did. It seemed to me that one day the sun had risen and we had woken up intimately connected to one another. That was all. Our tentative colloquialisms had turned into knowing glances and we became a pair. I couldn’t imagine how it had ever been otherwise. I wouldn’t survive severance.
But Flora must have known me before. She may not have known my name, or my favourite film, or the two colours of nail polish she now knew I kept under my sink, but she’d known me enough to hate me. A thrill rushes through me. I watch the way her hand trails the high stalks of grass. When the adrenaline ebbs, it is replaced by a warm pool in my stomach, like beer, sloshing gently. ‘I suppose we began actually speaking and then something clicked.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I say. But I can’t remember it happening. It feels like I should be able to remember the exact moment with sound (the signing of a contract, the clicking close of a pen), but I can’t. She stops suddenly and turns around.
‘Sorry. That was kind of a shitty thing to say.’
I shake my head. It was. It doesn’t matter.
‘You know I love you, right?’
I nod. Her eyebrows are furrowed and cast shadows across her eyes.
The warmth in my stomach has grown sickly. I get this sometimes. Always with Flora. It’s greed, I think, the way my body floods with warmth every time she does something she has to apologise for. Symbolic of scales tipping in my favour. Or an indicator that I still have some chance at self-preservation. Or maybe it’s some perverse greed: happiness wrought from the knowledge that I have any ounce of power over her. It’s times like this that I think about ending things. A voice inside of me screeches that it would be impossible, but I know that isn’t true. I could do it. I could stop talking to Flora, and after a while she would fade into memory. I could work until Flora was just a combination of sounds in my head. ‘I love you too,’ I say, and I mean it.
I think she might kiss me then but she turns back around and I’m left to stare at the gold flecks of light in her hair again.
We’re going to a field somewhere. Somewhere pretty, I’ve been told. Flora had found it (a small copse of trees) on her own a few weeks ago. She told me that when she did all she could think of was sitting there with me. I don’t know if I believe this. I think it more likely that she found it with Eoin and doesn’t want to tell me. I don’t really care. Not in any way that matters, anyway.
The last remnants of what could reasonably be considered a path disappeared twenty minutes ago, and if I turn around to search for where we came from the grass stretches on forever. The grass goes on forever. I can’t tell if we’re trespassing—the fields around us are untended and wild, but I can’t imagine any plot this large having the privilege of being in disuse. I don’t know how Flora is keeping track of where we are and I haven’t asked how long the walk is going to take.
Did I want to go on a walk with her? she’d asked me the day before.
We’d been lying on her bed watching a film.
Sure.
I watch now as she pushes aside dry branches and prickly leaves, leaving a small trampled trench for me to walk in. Behind me the grass stitches itself back together so that it seems we were never there. I can’t tell if she really was about to kiss me or if I had just been thinking about it. Too many seconds have passed since it happened and now I can’t think of it in any clarity at all. The more I replay the split-second the more it gets worn and fuzzy, the more I deceive myself into believing what my mind wants to remember.
I think about kissing Flora a lot. It’s happened before. For a while I thought that meant that it would have to happen again. I’m not so sure anymore. Quite often I can’t tell if I want it to or not. I suppose the answer is I do, but I can’t tell what that would mean. I’m not sure what I would want it to. Flora’s stopped to examine something in the grass by her feet. I stare at the way her hair falls over her shoulders as she bends down. A piece of it falls into her eyes and the urge to push it back twists some tender spot in my gut. It’s that realisation. The one I keep having again and again and again.
It first hit me a few weeks ago. We were sitting in a booth at the Two Foxes. It was colder then, it had been raining for weeks. It was still that period of false spring where flowers are drowned instead of raised. We were celebrating something, but I can’t quite remember what. I think Flora had handed in an essay she’d been slaving over. I hadn’t seen her much lately.
I had begun to notice that it was always like that. I’d live inside her skin for a week, then left abandoned for just as long, stuck trying to remember how to stay warm on my own. It was then, lying in my bed in the dark that I’d think about ending things. It couldn’t go on for any longer, I wouldn’t let it. But I always did. Eventually the sun would come out and Flora’s hair would turn golden and that colour would wash onto the rest of my life. Maybe that was how it was always going to be.
But that night we were sitting in the back of the Two Foxes and it was raining out. The windows were frosted with condensation, and the table we were at, all the way at the back of the pub, was sticky. My head had already become heavy and was lolling into my hand.
We had spent the past ten minutes laughing hysterically at something Eoin had said to her the other day. I can’t remember exactly what it was now, and even if I could it wouldn’t be half as funny. I couldn’t tell if she really liked Eoin even though they’d been going out for over two months. I still can’t. He was texting her intermittently the whole evening. It was never about anything important, none of it was particularly witty either, but I think, if anything, that’s what she likes about him. He seems to always need her for no reason at all.
I thought about that while we were sitting there. I thought about Eoin and Flora and how long she would entertain him before she got bored. I thought about me and Flora and how long it would take before the glamour wore off and we no longer knew each other. I thought about forever sometimes, infrequently, and not there in the pub. I thought about how my memories would change if I grew alongside someone instead of away from them.
I suppose my drink was wearing off because suddenly I could sense that I had grown estranged from the whole evening. As if in a flood of cold water, I became wary of the fact that I had begun vying for Flora’s attention. I couldn’t tell when it had happened and it was only in the gap in our conversation that I noticed how the sensation grew. It was silly, and I tried to squash it down. Eoin had just called her. This wasn’t rare. There was always a fifty-fifty chance that she would pick up the phone, or that I’d be spared the interaction. Her eyes would gloss over the caller ID swiftly before she’d turn the phone over and continue talking to me as if nothing was happening. I liked it best when she did that. It thrilled me and warmed me and made me feel special. This time she had picked up. It had been a quick call. A short
parade of words: ‘Yes,’ and ‘Of course,’ and ‘That sounds good,’ before ‘Okay, I’ll see you then. Yeah… okay bye,’ and she’d hung up.
It wasn’t anything important. She’d apologised, made him seem like a nuisance, and apologised again. Still, some scab had been scratched, and I could feel myself unravelling. I hated that I wasn’t mad or irritated. I was bleeding desperation and if I didn’t end things soon this sickness would become visible. Her hair was falling over her face as she looked down at her phone. My stomach ached. I could feel a curtain drawing closed between us. I gulped down the remnants of my drink and mumbled about going to use the bathroom.
I gripped the sink and turned on the faucet. For a moment I stood there and listened to the water run. I closed my eyes and then thought I might fall over and opened them once more. Letting the cold water run over my wrists, I watched my chest move in the mirror as I breathed. I have to end things, something squeaked, I don’t want to do this any longer. In the mirror I looked worn out. I pushed my hair behind my ears. My cheeks were heating up, making me look fragile and feverish.
When I returned to the table I feigned sickness. I needed to go home, I said. We parted outside of the pub and she hugged me tight and told me she’d missed me. Sobering up in the cold, I thought about never speaking to Flora again.
We’ve reached the grove now, a grassy patch between high fields. She sits down and squints up at me. She stretches a hand up to drag me down and I let her. There are plums growing on the trees, some unlucky fruit already scattered around our feet. Sickly sweet for a moment before they begin to rot away. Summer will be the end of it and when everything is done I will be emptied entirely. It was never going to be any different.
She leans her head on my shoulder. In the month before summer, I think of ending things.