Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love

Eventually this will happen to us. You will drop bits of our friendship here and there and eventually, I will stop picking us back up, picking you back up, putting us back together again. Eventually we might forget where we put it, this friendship of ours, and we will both let it fall through the cracks of a floorboard, forgotten in the memory of old mix tapes and letters boxed in an attic somewhere.

I look back now and I want to shake myself. I want to say, do not think so long about what you cannot plan for. Do not take so long. Do it. Do it anyway.

I accept time has passed and we have changed and there is an emptiness now in which we have nothing left to say because it has all been said already, because there are no words left between us any more.

We'd pass each other on the stairs, me going up, you coming down, and in the space between heartbeats you'd brush my hand or my arm, once or twice even the small of my back as you followed me, and I knew it was intentional because it kept happening. Your touches were tiny, seemingly accidental - sometimes your fingers pressing the tips of mine as you wordlessly passed me a glass or a plate - but they cracked me open, like lightning across the sky.

Every day she felt unnerved by how reasonable her love and her fury, which had become one, seemed. She spent most days feeling stunned, aware only of a sort of rage swirling loose inside her like a rainstorm gathering speed, and it frightened her to think of what might happen if she were to let it implode.

Was she okay? When he told her, always briefly, that he had, and that she was, her heart didn't break quite as much anymore, perhaps because it was already broken, per- haps because it was enough to know that at least Amal was alive, that she was doing just fine without her.

Our star-crossed moments may have lasted only milliseconds, but they filled the whole of my small schoolgirl world and kept it turning, like shafts of dust dancing gold in a splinter of sunlight.

Every day she felt unnerved by how unreasonable her love and her fury, which had become one, seemed. She spent most days feeling stunned, aware only of a sort of rage swirling loose inside her like a rainstorm gathering speed, and it frightened her to think of what might happen if she were to let it implode.

Outside the air was plump, swollen with rain.

But this new summer, this particular summer, was as perfectly formed as a china tea set; an endless run of exquisite clear blue skies and bright sun cooled by a string of steady breezes. In the afternoons, lazy white clouds rolled through the sky like long cats, casting a thin shade before dissolving to let the sun stretch into the evenings again. It would have been the perfect summer, if not for my father's death.

You fizz like lemonade, bittersweet; you do not care what other people think of your clothes or the wild way you dance.

I maybe laugh too but honestly I am not joking for I have always hated this habit of yours, the messy carelessness that means I am forever picking up after you while you are forever losing things. Pieces of jewelry, library books, your mobile phone. Eventually this will happen to us. You will drop bits of our friendship here and there and eventually, I will stop picking us back up, picking you back up, putting us back together again. Eventually we might forget where we put it, this friendship of ours, and we will both let it fall through the cracks of a floorboard, forgotten in the memory of old mix tapes and letters boxed in an attic somewhere.

I had spent my life at university living like that, hiding boyfriends like crumpled love letters, and now I was too old for it.

Every day I looked up at the sky and I longed for the day that I might escape.