I came here not so much heartbroken as heartbeaten but heart still beating, I was okay. I was the victim of a brutal succession of intense love affairs; long conversations way into the night and sex and skin tingling and staring into each others eyes, lots of that for a few weeks but then nothing, then fade to black. No wrench in the works, no tears, no tempests. No ultimatums or ultra-dramatics and no fond farewells. How does the saying go? We ended with a whimper - but not even that, no sound of longing left our lips, we didn’t try, or care, or. And it’s not like I stumbled from one sordid, single encounter to the next, no, we took our time, we talked because it started out the way I know it’s supposed to- with butterflies in my stomach. We had things in common, I had things in common with all of them but that doesn’t mean it didn’t end easily, doesn’t mean we didn’t slip quietly out of each others lives; a little curious maybe, about how it might have gone, had we made the effort, but ultimately unattached. It happened over and over again. A series of staccato relationships.

I mean, once, maybe. I could maybe say it wasn’t that way on this one occasion, because it felt more loving or more important or something. The only difference between then and all those other times was being really afraid. Looking hard at her face, us both looking and looking like we were about to break down and sob our guts out, holding each other like we’d die if we didn’t. That’s not much. Nothing really.

So I didn’t come here to start again, that implies a messed up before, a scrawled on sheet of paper but as old as mine is it’s blank - a few light markings, pencil scratchings, whispers. Unless, and I think this way sometimes, not falling in love can break your heart just as much as actually doing the thing. Loving someone is, I’m told, a wound, a knife in the chest. Painful and it stands to reason that not doing that would be the opposite, the absence of pain but that might be wrong. Some things don’t have an opposite, they’re the whole three hundred and sixty degrees and going without them is like living in a vacuum. No one stabbed me in the heart, but maybe rot set in.