Wine and blood and memories and laughter and crying and food and hope and loss and

I’m sat watching the waiter pour her a glass of red, knowing full well that in forty-five minutes I will be picking shards of the same wine glass out of my forehead, as the same waiter will phone the police, and his supervisor will limply place a damp tea-towel on my head to staunch the bleeding. As she asks me how my day was, I struggle with the burden that I am the only person in the world who knows this as an inevitability.

As the night flows like blood through a slowly cauterising wound, the details that I embroidered into my memory with delicate threads begin to unravel, the stitches she embedded into my flesh begin to loosen. Her laugh is overpowered by the thunderous cackle of the woman three tables down. Her sickly-sweet scent that would remain on my pillow for hours after she left that always reminded me of lilies in a summer wind, suddenly becomes the hanging perfume drifting lightly from the supervisor’s neck. The slightly chipped label of the house merlot as the waiter brings it for our inspection and approval, even though her favourite is a Mendoza Malbec. Or perhaps it was a Spanish Rioja she loved. For a love to form, the pieces must be aligned in just such a way, that the whole outweighs the weakness of a singular pawn, but here, on the table before us, the pieces are scattered. I sit and watch her take a sip of the Merlot and pretend to enjoy it, listening to her words as you might listen to a neighbour’s music through the walls.

Desecrated words and the shrill ring of glass and knives on plates collide in a cacophony. It roars around me in a distorted kind of resonance you might only feel watching a hurricane from afar, and yet, here I am, staring into the unblinking eye from a hundred miles away. Her questions batter me like a single tree, along in a storm. All I want is to scream that I cannot ask her any question I do not yet know the answer to, and that I cannot tell her any lie she has not already heard.

Except she hasn’t.

Not yet.

She hasn’t yet heard me laugh in dismay at her crappy puns. She does not yet know our first kiss will be under our favourite oak tree. She does not know she will trip over the curb on her way home and break her phone. She does not know that the first time we sleep together, her Dad will knock on her door in a surprise visit, and it will be one of the most awkward moments of my life. She doesn’t know he will pass away a year and seven months later, before I can ask his permission to marry her.

She is free within the prison of linearity, the unpredictably and exhilaration of time that marches forward, but I am not fitted with such a blessing. I am cursed with knowledge that all wish for, but none other than the greatest of sinners are affixed with. Out of all in the world, I know what it’s like to watch my eldest son die, and the other to be lost between a marriage that should not exist, to grow up never knowing the difference between the sweet feeling of cognitive dissonance and the bitter taste of love. I know this better than anyone, for I have watched the destruction of beautiful things not yet grown. I know what it is like to look upon my death, for she is my suicide.

Her love will destroy me, yet I understand the beauty in fireworks lies in their brevity. We watch them light up the darkness in the world for the briefest of moments, before they fade into memory.

In less than forty minutes, I’ll confess that we shouldn’t see each other, ever again. She will be surprised, and she will arch her eyebrow in that way she does when she is irritated, but she won’t be shocked, for I have hardly spoken a word. Instead, I will stare and I will think, and I’ll give her the ghost of a smile, but not for her, and not for her words, it’ll be a ghost among a mausoleum of missed and forgotten chances.

She will politely offer to split the check, then she’ll go to leave, but I will have a change of heart. I’ll grab her hand and I’ll tell her everything. I will tell her we are destined to fall further than anyone else has, first to love, then to other places. I’ll tell her I know what happened to her when she was just eight years old. I’ll tell her that in eight months I’ll take her on a romantic holiday to Santorini. I’ll tell her I know how she got that scar on her naval. How I cried when she read her vows. How the sound of our son’s dwindling heartrate reverberates in the memory of an echo. How I couldn’t even taste my Chicken Alfredo tonight, because the taste of bourbon and thirty-six sleeping pills still pollutes my tongue. I’ll send a flurry of a madman’s words at her as she tries to pull away from my ever-tightening grip. She will scream in panic and call me a psycho, and the smashing of glass and horrified shouts of onlookers will sear into my brain with burning precision, and I’ll feel the damp, cool and strange smelling towel on my forehead again.

Yet, the hairs on my arms will stand tall, as the smell fades, and so too does the perfume of the supervisor. Pinpricks with scar the outer layers of my skin as I detect the faint smell of lilies again.

In four days’ time I will get a text message asking how I could possibly know what happened to her as a child, and I will tell her the truth. A month later, we will be sitting under our oak tree, sharing a bottle of Malbec, and the only memory I can hear will sound exactly like her laugh.