Learning To Be
I was not always like this; once, there was more of me; imagine this skeleton re-clothed, blackbird glossy, fleshy-plump.
She, as I always think of my younger self, was dissatisfaction incarnate, and look where she’s got me.
We were meant for each other, Murry and me, yet despite our best efforts, we remained separate.
Was he the one? –I expect so, yes; the love of one’s life (and there must always somehow be one.)
Was she not his love? People say so, but they do not look deeply enough.
We were not what we seemed, as many are not – tugging and clawing, this way and that, sometimes miles apart, sometimes inches, tantalisingly close, on the cusp of…what?
Were you not jealous of us? Did you imagine perfection, or did you see through our smokescreen, that bubbling pot of penury, misunderstanding, lust?
Was he not, in the end, what he had planned all along to be, the great man of letters, living fat off my money with three more wives?
Was he not in the end, of the two of us, the more beautiful?
Were you not surprised? That it is my face, not his, which swims up from the dark.
We were not the only ones who failed to learn the language of another: words stay on the page: people slide, slip and change.
Was she surprised at her fall from grace? She left on our wedding day, when he turned and, on his handkerchief, wiped our kiss off his lips.
Was he aware of what he did?
We were married at last, but there were no guests at our wedding breakfast, no photographs.
She went then and I came back, my mother and my father, too, and Chummie and dear Granny, as they had come on the Quai aux Fleurs, the river grey below Carco’s window.
I was, after all, the long-searched-for cure.
Emma Timpany‘s most recent stories have appeared in The Frogmore Papers and on Auditor, a GPS-triggered app designed for walkers on Bodmin Moor.
Note: This story was inspired by the last paragraph of a biography of Katherine Mansfield (The Storyteller, by Kathleen Jones, EUP 2010)