In a train station in Brussels, he touches his necklace and tells us that it’s a manifestation tool.
“What did you manifest?” you ask.
“My girlfriend,” he smiles.
We both smile back, but as we walk out of the station and through the market, I rant about how if a woman talked about manifesting love, people would say she was desperate.
The week I moved to Brighton I bought a painted wooden box from an antique shop. When I got home, I opened it and found a card inside explaining that it was inspired by a Victorian hope chest. Young women used to store their best linen and other valuable items in there to manifest a husband. I took it to be a good omen for my life in this new city.
It’s a numbers game, you say as we walk to the pub to meet your boyfriend. I say I don’t want to play a game, that you’re more romantically resilient than me. You sat through all the painstaking small talk, looked beautiful for guys who didn’t give a damn, tried a singles’ night where all the men were old and ugly and socially inept. You stayed hopeful. Now, he gives you flowers in our doorway as I duck out of the way. I’m trying to pay attention because you want me to write a poem for your wedding, and it might be with him.
I used to think that I would spend my twenties falling in and out of love, either in love or heartbroken at any given time. I’m a lover girl at heart, but I’ve spent most of these years on my own. When I write about things that happened a long time ago I worry that people will think I’m obsessive or still longing for someone or not ‘over’ it, when in reality, it’s only because love is interesting to me to think and write about. If I’m not writing about us, I’m just writing about me. Memories come up and everything is connected and will be forever.
When Amy Winehouse described herself as “a very romantic person,” she qualified the statement by adding, “I don’t mean romantic in a flowers and chocolate kind of way. It’s more like if it’s raining, I’ll go up to the window and press my nose against the glass and sigh at how beautiful it all looks." I used to think of myself as a romantic with an upper-case R, like the poets. That seemed more substantial, more masculine.
In the introduction to All About Love, bell hooks writes that “whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is “desperate” for a man. No one thinks she is simply passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter.” I am passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter, yet when I write about love I feel like a fraud or like I’m being overly nostalgic because I haven’t been in it for a long time.
We don’t really talk about love much at all. We talk about dating and apps, sex and relationships, but we don’t talk about love. We drink until the night folds in on itself. Our bodies fall through quicksand dance floors. The driver says, “There’s no love on this bus”, but it’s 4am and the city looks almost special.
When I do talk about love it’s to a man who tells me that he doesn’t believe in it. Love is invented by poor people. We’re sitting at the top of the Shard and he jokes about how his front garden is such a mess because only transient women pass through it. Sometimes I still think of all the weeds, the wasteland and the wasted affection of a man who doesn’t believe in love. I imagined myself telling this story at the pub on a Thursday night in 2026. We would laugh about the garden and the neighbours, but the transient women would still make me a little sad.
The second time my housemate and I take the romantic personality test, it tells us we are less romantic than we were two weeks ago. I think it’s because we’ve been talking about love more. Talking about love is never as romantic as pressing your nose against the window when it’s raining. It quickly becomes practical and quotidian. I’ve learnt how to package all my romance up and keep it for myself, but I still spend an embarrassing amount of time contemplating that other kind of love.
We don’t talk about love, but we dream of it. We arrive back in the city feeling like the scraped-out carcass of an empty train carriage. We laugh at awkward sex stories and they say they’re happy they found it before the apps got so bad. We don’t talk about love, we just know all the songs (and all the rest.) The music or the misery? Each night out feels like pressing on a bruise, but we’ll keep going out anyway because it’s summer now, another summer of love never gained, and what else is there to do?
My fav of your writing for a while x