Epilogue On An Affair

Home-Counties Gothic

He was the wrong man at the right time. And perhaps you loved him once, or you said you did, in that early kodak bloom of white nineties polyester and hard marzipan. Your parents approved, in their foreign, distant way, in answer phone messages and polite handshakes. A good family, a good career ahead. A good match. You were young, reckless days on train tracks long spent with cheap rolled cigarettes and your constant lovers. You were slim, and he was reliable. A minimalist, few words, glasses slid up the nose with a hard forefinger, and an abrupt cough in long silences. Spartan, both of you, you in your crazed desire for tight limbs and thin muscle, and him, in that gluttonous insatiable pursuit of power. A legacy. That was you, and that was him. Origami people, flat and folded away with sharp edges. It’s just what came next, after a few years of dating, marriage, that’s what you did in those days, that’s what was done. A shrug. Raw honesty spoken in breaths to the other woman.

I listen to you both, separately, voyeuristic in the dark.

He loved you, deeply, I felt it. My palms revealed what words could never coax in the heaving of his chest and the gasp of his lungs. He spoke of you in short, fractured verse, glimpses of what had been, and what grazed him in the gloom at four am. But did you love him? Yes, perhaps, long…