Page 1 of If We Were Young

Dreams

I think about you when I shouldn’t.

When my eyes blink open in the depth of night and I’m chasing the tail of a dream, you stand there, a ghost of a whisper calling my name.

I see you everywhere I look. In places I know you’ll never be: the turn of a shoulder, a flash of dark hair.

I hear you until it hurts my heart: a shout in the park, a rumbled laugh that makes me turn and stare.

I think about you more than I should. Secrets and regrets. Split moments of indecision. Moments where I wish I’d been someone else: brave, wild, and free.

But that’s not me.

I’m not brave.

Not brave enough for you.

That’s why I live without you and every day is a passing moment until I might see you in my sleep.

There, in the dark places of the night, there is just you and me. We are memories in notebooks worn around the edges, jokes half-remembered but still halfway funny. We are hands that brush in a passing touch, long silent moments full of words never said.

For you, my heart aches over what could have been. Because for us, despite my regret, there is only the time when we were young.

2005

“Oh my gawwwd.” Ange fell through the front door, gasping and clutching her chest. She bent at the waist and I re-opened the door so that if she threw up it would be on the front step and not on Ma’s carpets. Please not on Ma’s carpets.

“It’s okay,” she gasped. She looked like she’d just walked out of a sauna. Her hair stuck in twisted vines across her forehead, her cheeks were a deep blotched red. “I won’t get the carpets.”

“Have you run here?” I peered out of the doorway to check if there was a bunch of wild animals out in the deathly quiet cul-de-sac. I could think of no reason, other than a lion trying to chew off her leg while she clawed on her elbows to get to freedom, for Angela to run. None.

“I have. I think I’m going to faint.” She slid down the wall and her chest rattled.

“You need to stop smoking, Ange.” I kicked her feet over the threshold to the house and shut the door. Outside was blindingly hot. Stupid hot for August, or any month.

“I need a ciggy to recover.”

“You know you can’t smoke in here.” I left her on the floor and walked back to the kitchen where I’d been working my way through a list of jobs entitled “Veronica’s To Do List”. It filled the front and back of a sheet of A4 lined paper. I’d been cherry-picking my preferred chores off of it.

“What have you been doing?” Angela staggered behind me and dragged a chair across my mother’s kitchen tiles.

“Sweeping the stairs.”

“Since I saw you last week?”

I held in a smile. “There are lots of stairs.”

Angela poked her head back into the hallway. “No there aren’t. It’s the same eighteen I slipped down last month after those vodka jelly shots.”

I shot her a glare but bit my tongue from retorting. The vodka jelly had caused the long chore list. It appeared my time hadn’t been utilised efficiently.

“Anyway, why are you here? I thought you were at work?”

“Gaaaaaaah. Don’t you mention that heathen place.”

“The Post Office?”

“Ugh. Do you know how hard it is working every damn day? It hurts me, Ronnie. It hurts me.”