silly goose


How to set this scene. Why now. There’s a compulsion to explain, to justify, when I can’t really explain it to myself beyond, we fell in love, which is another way of saying, we each had something the other wanted, not that those things were the same, far from it. Despite the age difference, our approaches to life matched. So of course we crossed paths. I believed everything that he said. I know what lies taste like. There wasn’t a power dynamic, just puppies getting overexcited as they played.

It wasn’t that the age difference mattered, it absolutely did, but it felt like a plus. I fucking hate the internet sometimes. What it’s done to my language - it me, big mood. Come to think of it, Orwell could have been talking about memes. Someone who read real, actual papers and didn’t know how social media worked. He wasn’t an escape but a relief, bringing me closer to an actual world that still hummed beneath the screens.

This didn’t last long but it did have an impact. I could have let it be, let it have a bittersweet finish, but I pushed because I still operated on two faulty beliefs. One, that I could have anything I wanted if I just worked for it. Two, that working for it meant spilling my guts and hanging myself way out the line out to dry. I betrayed my naiveté, thinking that my youth could win over history. We crossed paths once more but that’s a different layer of my heart to peel and I can’t multitask.

So then I was left very alone. Not just by him, but by books and films, and everything I usually turned to when my heart was broken. Music helped a bit, if I squinted. I wanted to see us somewhere. I’ve not known a desire like it - other than perhaps when we first sat alone together, shoulders inching closer.

It figures, then, that I’d find it in a film made when he would have been in his twenties. Unexpectedly so - I mean, Christ, look at the title. A romance developing without sleaze or cruelty, but not quite appropriate. A tender first kiss. Some reflex made me inhale sharply, like you do when you’ve reached the top of a long hike and you’re about to take in the view.

That sound the audience made - or the portion of the audience made up of women around my age - collapsed my organs. A mix of disgust and incredulity, all wrapped up in a bitchy laugh. I sunk into my seat, wanting to drown in the balding red velvet. I recalled this to one of my longest-serving (read: suffering) friends a couple of weeks later, over the phone.

“They weren’t disgusted,” she said, softly. “They could just tell that someone was about to make,” I heard her take a slight breath, in which I felt gently handled, “not a great move.”

I loved her for saying it. It genuinely hadn’t occurred to me that they could be recoiling from the consequence of a decision, not the decision itself. I loved her for saying it.

Though it obviously wasn’t true.