Blue is the colour of longing for the distances you never arrive in.

a diptych; or two types of love.

some things cannot be moved or owned 

It began, as doomed love stories often do, in the middle. We found each other somewhere between the tangle of my half-decade long relationship, which unspooled a year too late, and the fresh air of spring term at university, before words like career path and grad scheme had seeped into our daily lexicon. All birdsong and laughter in the gauzy April sunlight.

By December I was adrift. We had moved to London, ostensibly alone but entwined from the moment I left my toothbrush in his bathroom. Now, though, he was in Canada for the holidays and things were coming undone. Our relationship balanced on a gossamer thread three and a half thousand miles long. 

The days were endless. Turning over my phone took on the rhythm of a tick, each time finding it infuriatingly devoid of messages. I watched it arc across the room with detachment. As time began to blur, the texture of my longing became less melancholic, more jagged and spiteful. 

I took a trip to the bustling Southbank looking for a Scrooge-esque transformation. Darkness gathered early but I was kept hopeful by the twinkling Christmas lights glittering across the Thames. I hovered at the edges of market stalls, determined to make exactly the right decisions. Gifts that would shout she’s perfect for you, you idiot as he shucked off the paper. Containers for our inside jokes. Objects to fill the negative space, do the heavy lifting for everything we missed by jumping in halfway through the story. 

I wrapped his presents and wrote something sweet enough to hurt your teeth in the card, doing my best to erase the endless blank space. Finally, he returned. And it was so obvious then - - that place on the horizon I had been pining for, it wasn’t him. He was simply a boy who handed me an airport-branded plastic bag and watched me pull out a toblerone and a pair of socks, the receipt clinging to their heels. 

We limped on, making it to a year, but the deep blue longing had turned to dust that fell like snow over those gifts I had so carefully chosen.

Our break up was a tear stained bad dream I woke up in every morning for a month, although I can’t be sure now exactly what I was mourning. On that last day, he told me he was certain his mum would reach out to see how I was holding up - that’s what she had done for his last girlfriend, he said, the one she had loved so dearly. 

I never did hear from her. 

and, for a moment, the light held still 

It’s impossible to remember who started it or why, but somewhere between fifteen and sixteen one of us clenched a pen between our teeth and scrawled our name on the back of the other’s birthday card. A quirk of adolescence. We always were trying to be different. 

For ten years we took separate paths. Different countries, different continents. Other people’s beds. But on the back of every card I’d find his name and he would find mine. 

This December, I sat down to write his card and the quiet ritual was muscle memory. I suppose nearly twenty years of repetition will do that. It struck me, though, that I hadn’t thought to check my own birthday card, the one he watched me open a few days earlier. Because eventually our paths did meet. There are two children now. And two cats. A multitude of tiny things that make up our lives, too vital to disappear under a blanket of dust. 

I climbed the stairs to find what I was looking for: his name, where it had always been, since the very beginning.

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A couple of notes:

The title quote comes from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost as does the title of the first part of the diptych.

The second title comes from the poem Winter Stars by Larry Levis.

And if you’re wondering what I’m talking about when I describe our birthday cards, it’s this (he really outdid me this year):