I’ve seen another version of me.
I wonder what I’d be like, people sometimes think, if I hadn’t met that person when I did or missed that party or caught the train earlier or later or not at all. Who would I be if I’d refused that job instead of taken it, if I’d gone on the trip or if I’d stayed at home that day?
I don’t have to wonder this, because I have seen the other me. I have watched her dart between different countries whilst I stayed in the same place, ignore the job that I took, laugh on the day I thought grief would rip me into a thousand pieces.
And now, I am faced with a choice.
I stand at the kitchen window and stare out at the wilderness of our garden. The leathery green leaves twist and thrash against one another. Some of them are already edged with the gold of autumn. The wind is cold even though it’s only September. It screams through the gap between the glass and the battered wooden pane and I sigh and flick on the radio beside me.
The tension is still here in the room, hanging above me like a shimmering heat. The argument, yet another, looped around and around in tiresome knots.
I close my eyes, and feel the other life calling me, promising me answers and a way out. I picture him in Luigi’s, waiting for me. We haven’t been in a long time, but I know where he’ll sit: at the third table on the right, next to the wall with the picture of Charlie Chaplin above him. He’ll face the door. He will sit fiddling with the cutlery, his jaw set with tension. If I don’t arrive, he will put his head in his hands, tufts of his hair escaping through his fingers. He will sigh, and stand, nodding a goodbye to the staff, explaining nothing.
And after that I don’t know what he’ll do or what will happen, because I cannot imagine a life without him, a life where he hasn’t met me yet and hasn’t turned grey with sadness. But maybe that’s the whole problem. Maybe we are together too much and our shared pain has started to weather us both like the sea has weathered our house: splintering us, cracking the beautiful strength that we started out with.