no such thing at once


BEFORE

They came in their droves to the towns and cities littered with broken mills and empty warehouses. Cranes towered in the soon-to-be cultural quarters, lifting and dropping blocks like giant toddlers. These weren’t ruins. Everything smacked of construction. This was somewhere that they could build their lives, where their lives were already well underway to being completed. Now was the time that they could begin to invest in themselves. Somewhere, in the distance, the sound of a ribbon being cut.


THEN

Our first semester at university coincided with some of the biggest tremors of the Global Financial Crisis. Two weeks before the Humanities induction lecture, Lehman Brothers announced bankruptcy. As we prepared for Christmas, Greeks were taking to the streets and choking on smoke. Everything happens at once, you know. But at the time, so much feels like an arc, high up above. The more significant events were our burgeoning friendships and fuckships, gently swimming in the bay of the wider context. Yeah, we did drugs, but it rarely felt scary. We were exploring and reinventing and achingly suburban. We kept on meeting each other and each other’s each others, to the point where if you didn’t know someone, it wouldn’t be long before you did. We were together and it was so safe, this together we had made. So much sprang from one place but wasn’t limited to the confines of the city. It came with us wherever we went, radiating, so we never said that we were alone. We felt this community like warmth on our skin, an unwritten constitution of devotion. We all shared the same choice, reaping dividends from the faith we had had in our curiosity. The future felt bright.

But I think that was just because it was blank.


NOW

When our mutual friend told me that you’d decided to leave, that whatever had overpowered you had told you that you must leave, I put my hands to my mouth and gasped. I haven’t had a purer reflex since a doctor hit my developing knee with a soft hammer. You weren’t the type, even though I know there’s no such thing as a type. I was still taken aback, back to where we’d shared a slice of space and time. You were embedded there deeply for me, the other side of the orbit, such a shining, immovable part of it. I wonder if I was the same for you and I won’t ever know.

The same mutual friend told me about the loss of someone else, not to the darkness beyond but something all too present. I couldn’t believe that the person I’d danced with, confided in, had moved to get closer to the earth and had resurfaced spewing the worst kind of division. No such thing as a type. No such thing.


AFTER

It all looks so different from here. It always will. And they say that you can’t change the past.