16/07/05 - Maybe
When you find a new lover, your mind races. The vessel of your heart sails away from the failures of your past and brims with the promise of something new, the shapes of a million maybes. You're blooming with a rose-tinted enthusiasm that renders you able to see only good things. Well, no one ever fantasises about a future full of rubbish, do they?
Maybe you won't be alone for ever. Maybe this seed of affection will take root and grow into a love. Maybe you'll marry. Maybe you'll have children. Maybe you'll move to a house down a country lane. Maybe you'll have a little dog that will chase yellow butterflies.
And while you're gorging on sugar-coated maybes, maybe you'll forget for a moment that life is actually a bit shit. Maybe not everything will turn out good. Maybe you'll find a lump, get ill and never recover. Maybe your son won't be good at playing the trombone like you'd hoped. Maybe he'll get hooked on smack instead. Maybe you'll lose your best friend because an idiot was driving the wrong way round the M25. Maybe the well of your marital good intentions will run dry. Maybe one day he'll run off with someone a bit more normal, who'll be for ever free to read and drive.
Maybe you'll realise that mulling over the maybes, instead of the moment, is a bit of a waste of time, because maybe tomorrow you'll get run over by a bus.
23/07/05 - I lied
While in the first throes of love, it's not alluring to draw attention to your faults, failures, weaknesses and woes. Maybe you're a lazy git, prone to gluttony or midnight rages, always crying, like to moan about your lot in life but never do anything about it, can't be bothered to wash up, or have a chin that scuffs along the ground with the gravity of your own misery.
No one's 'would-like-to-meet' criteria ever states their desire for someone possessing any of the above qualities, so if you've got them, lock them away in the kernel of your stomach and don't let them out for at least six months. By then, maybe your lover will love you too much to care. But until that time, you must appear alive and carefree - so buoyant that your chin juts high enough for you to prick the moon with your tongue every time you speak.
In an attempt to sit on the bad and show the good, I told my lover a lie. I said I was happy when really I was sad. We'd been together two months. It was too soon to drown him in the resurgent grief that sweeps me away for a couple of weeks at this time each year. I'd been to a doctor - an annual occurrence pointlessly to plot the slow rot of my retinas. There are only two outcomes: the same or worse. Never better.
When I got home, tat man called to ask if it was all OK. 'Yes,' I replied. 'Fine. Routine. Happy.' I smiled down the receiver and swallowed the words, 'Shit. Scared. Sad.'
30/07/05 - gay date
For years a sense of shame and a fear of rejection made me hide my fate from even some of my closest friends. I couldn't find the words to deal with the ensuing surprise/pity/silence. My closet groaned under the weight of my future. People saw the hair and heels, but never the moth-eaten truth that nestled in the bottom drawer.
But the years ticked by and, eventually, I couldn't uphold my self-inflicted show of normality. Blaming my calamities on just being a clumsy git became less and less convincing. The stress of hiding overtook the stress of not seeing. It was time to kick open the closet doors. So I told everyone I knew.
But one area still troubled me. At what point do you inform a prospective lover that the eyes into which they are longingly staring are on the wane, that underneath the bowl cut is someone who is going blind, and already halfway there?
Last year I went out with a bloke who didn't know. I worried about whether to lay it on the line. No one likes a date who flops out their dirty laundry over the first round. I shouldn't have bothered. He had a secret that was a greater obstacle than mine: he was gay.
We were drinking. It got late and he started to confide. He said he'd never fancied a woman and started disclosing nights of passion with his best friend. I asked if he was perchance gay. He said, 'No', because his mother 'wouldn't like it'.
06/07/05 - techno
My last serious boyfriend liked technology. He had two mobiles, eight computers, four monitors and several other unidentifiable objects squished into our oppressively small rented flat. They bred in the night as he snuck in antiquated machines from the skip outside his work. The stained emerald green shagpile rippled as it lay awkwardly over the tangled mass of cables that ran from room to room, connecting these whirring electronic life forms. His opposing passion caused arguments and saw me acquire habits that I didn't like to call my own.
He'd said we must have cable telly. I found myself exchanging pointless sleep hours to watch blokes flogging cut glass for 12-monthly 'no hassle' payments. And the lure of sniffing the dirty laundry of chatshow guests while eating my cornflakes made me persistently late for work.
He said I needed to modernise and get a mobile. So I bought one and started shouting 'I'm on the bus' annoyingly during rush hour, like all the other modern people. 'We must have broadband as well,' he said. 'You'll be able to go on the internet all the time!' he added as bait. I ended up bidding drunkenly in the middle of the night for things I didn't want. I bought boots that were three sizes too small and a lot of 20 left-foot only Barbie shoes. eBay told me I had 'won' these auctions. Really, I was a loser.
Then one day he left and, fortunately for me, took his techno geekery with him.
13/07/05 - discovery
The infant months of a relationship are imbued with discovery. You're Christopher Columbus and your lover is a map of the world. Each time you meet, you notice new islands of moles among the waves of blue and green ink as you snuggle into the folds of their tattooed skin. Each time they speak, things you've never heard before emanate from their mouth; and each time they laugh, the muscles in their face move to form new shapes and expressions under their skin.
You lie awake together at night, learning new things: how they ran away from home in 1982 and didn't return until 1987, and how they once galloped through a field in the dark with their pockets stuffed with squealing baby guinea pigs, liberated in the name of animal rights.
At the end of your three-month voyage of discovery, you either don't like what you've found and set off for more bountiful shores; or, like me, you find they've colonised your heart, but you can't spit out the three sticky little words that you want to say through fear that it's just too early to share them.
But then one sunny morning in July, I was in a building when a bus blew up outside. The fragility of human life lay before me on the road. That night I went to tat man's high rise, sailed up in the lift and let the suppressed 'I love you' escape from my mouth. Life suddenly felt too short not to.