olivia-sudjic

Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.

A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it__ didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.

She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved__ word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted.

Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained.

The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.

Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?'I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.

The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.

That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet__he feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against.

Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.

It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.

It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.

Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.

We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton.

Yeah!' I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul.

To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.

She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.