We tried to get married after uni. Mostly because it was funny, mostly because Robert thought it would be a ‘stand against the crisis’ to spend too much money on a frivolous celebration of us. What I lacked in money I made up for in friends who would do free things for drinks and photos of them doing it; and anything he said, I usually went for.
   It was going to happen in his parents’ house, where, secretly, I’d always wanted it to happen. We bought the bridesmaids’ dresses off the sale rack at Debenhams. I was to have a man-of-honour and he a best maid. We wanted it gaudy and beautiful like Coming to America, so my ex painted a mural of naked figures dancing under a wedding arbour. She’d given everyone a bush, our hairy likenesses wriggling on a mock-up of stained (smeared maybe?) glass on the walls of their conservatory. 
   It was in his parents’ conservatory that I’d learnt the word for conservatory. I knew a lot of words and hoped words would be my job one day, but had missed out on certain ones that were fancy, exclusively ‘English’ English, or both. Nobody was either in my family, and I’d moved late. Sometimes I’d missed out on stupid ones, too. Instead, I learnt ‘bollard’ at 14 trying to describe the beginning of Do The Right Thing where the kids play around in the fire hydrant water, after I went on a tangent about ‘dry hydrants’ and had to look it up. Then ‘stand mixer’ in Robert’s kitchen at 18, when I’d first met his family and dumbly raised a you-actually-own-this pointer at the contraption I’d only ever come across on Bake Off. ‘Conservatory’ occurred a few minutes after that, because I’d called the room a ‘greenhouse’, after which his mum had said that there was a better word for it. “I’ve got an even better one than that,” said Robert. “What about ‘solarium’?”
   There were lots of words and lots of ideas about the wedding. By the end of it we’d tired of both, and each other, and getting to throw a big party didn’t seem like much of a stand.

He flew to Spain to join a seminary. He’d just turned twenty-four. For a while I thought this was his way of prying out the final residues of my Catholic childhood, sending spite over the ocean. Once the initial frenzy had passed, I’d decided that it must’ve been because he thought there was something cool about Sebastian Flyte. And maybe something cool about leaving. 
   Sometimes I thought about him touching himself in his cell at the seminary. I assumed he had one. It’d be cowardly, I thought, if he didn’t go all the way, and he was the type to. Maybe they were the kind with nice armchairs and yellow walls — though I would’ve bullied him about it. I liked to think that the ghost of my opinions still held some weight.
   Everything — everything in the dream — hinged on how his fingers unhooked the belt loop, how they approached that kinship with his trousers, then his boxers, allowing himself an indulgence. It didn’t quite matter if the room wasn’t so bare, or if he was alone — though I hoped so, I hoped he was one of those solitaries — as long as he was allowing himself that onanistic pleasure, because everything about how I was living felt onanistic, and I couldn’t quite believe, didn’t want to, that he was committing himself to a larger thing so young.
   I prayed for him to be bad at his new life.
He remained a holy spirit in my bed, tumbling over and through well-meaning champagne socialists; French Friedrich Bhaers; guilty cheats; shapeless embodiments of evil. I was experiencing the economy of sex through meeting people who participated in the economy and sometimes having sex with them, or hearing about other people participating in the economy having sex with them. With shallow men there was a clear sense of intellectual desire. Something was extra predatory, like they were swallowing your brain. We would fuck and I would talk about my priest to keep the thing pure.
Fleabag made sure it wasn’t a sexy story anymore — just a millennial one better read in a posh voice, so after a while I stopped telling people and started honing in on the thinking part. 
   I welcomed the danger of creating my own sacral place, originating from the sacral upheld person. Somewhere to pin gentleness square, believe it a lucky rarity. When worse things happened I thought back to him, the beach-stone on the mantelpiece:
like/as/the
God

His presence brought an easiness to thoughts and values and how I placed them over each other. To naked morals and babyspeak. A few months after he left, I left, only to encounter a Bad Thing, a Drug Situation in an otherwise Good Place. As I began to log it, I thought: worse has happened. After all there were no overarching metaphors to it, nothing to drag out. It all happened rather loudly on a flat plane. I thought there was nothing more embarrassing than trying to identify a narrative in a coincidental crisis.
   After some eggings-on, I softened towards the idea. Maybe there was a way to write about weakness, maybe that would go down well in one of those magazines, maybe that would go down well in one of those magazines frustrated men namedrop, one of those magazines where it’s sexy for a woman to ‘consciously’ child herself. Maybe there was something of a force there, a mild hook, simulating the pain of being denied your desires.
   I decided to miss my flight back — back from a village on a pilgrimage path — and instead work on a story. There were lots of expats in lonely bars. One was a writer who had experienced the same Bad Thing. The piece he wrote had been published by a small press and displayed on coffee shop tables. The main thing for him, he said, was not the act itself, but the irony of being beautiful — which he was — and of writing about beautiful things — which he did — and still being subject to turpitude. Being fucked by the ugly darkness. The thought was deplorable enough, cohesive enough, fitting all the aims of the Bad Thing genre, to make me think I didn’t need to exploit it any more.