I text Josh, a guy from back home that I worked in a pub with. Joe didn’t want me to be friends with him because he knew there was something between us. It makes me feel giddy, as though what I’m doing is against the rules. I’m allowed to do whatever I want now. Josh responds with a voice note:

‘Now then, Annie Lord, tell me you’re out tonight?’

There’s something so hot about someone referring to you by your full name. It reminds me of being told off by a teacher. I listen to it again. I like how his thick Yorkshire accent curls over the Ts until they disappear, smooth as a beach pebble. Josh sends a photo from where he sits in the pub, gums shining pink through his smile, beer froth bubbles popping on his top lip. I message other nearly-sort-of-but-not-quite men and try to build some kind of scaffolding of attention that will prevent me from ever hitting the ground.

‘What’s he said?’ asks Moll, but Josh has stopped replying.

‘No,’ I laugh. ‘You look much better.’ When I hug her she feels like a wilting flower, one that keeps going even though there’s no sun. I want to be strong like Granny, but I’m not sure I’m made of the same matter as her. She’s iron and I’m something like dust.

In ‘The Glass Essay’, Anne Carson goes back to her mother’s house on a moor in the North to try to repair her broken heart. In the poem, Carson remembers a conversation she has with her mum in the kitchen:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

I don’t want to put it down either. I want to hold onto it until my hand burns. Until the skin peels away in flakes.

‘I guess you can tell how I feel about you at this point.’

Somehow it was you that said this and not me. It was a strange feeling, realising I was inside the moment I had been waiting for forever. Nothing could be as perfect as the way I scripted it in my mind, but it took on a more beautiful form in the harsh grip of reality. We were kissing and it was clumsy, our teeth bumping, our tongues pressing at the wrong times. It was too wet. But we carried on until blood swelled to the surface of our lips, until redness blurred outside lip lines, until your stubble scratched my chin pink, until jaws stiffened, until we were back at mine and there was lilac light seeping through the blinds, and it was morning, and nothing could get me out of my bed because you were in it.

We go to a bar and at first I don’t know how I’m supposed to be. I’ve never really dated before. There were just bathrooms at house parties and then there was Joe. I tell him I’ve just come out of a five-year relationship and his lips tighten shut and he says, ‘Must have been a real captivating guy,’ and I realise that’s not something you say on a first date. So then I change the subject to a fall-out I had with my friend a few weeks ago over not responding to her WhatsApp messages and he says, ‘Does that happen a lot?’ and I realise you shouldn’t say stuff that’s so personal. But I get better at being who he wants me to be. When I say ‘path’ he makes me repeat it back to him because he says I sound Northern, so I tell him other things about where I’m from that make it sound more exotic. That people from home say ‘me sen’, meaning myself. When I can’t light my cigarette he takes it out of my hand and says, ‘Let me do it,’ with so much conviction that I let him do other things I can do because he must like doing them. Like Google Map us to a bar I know the way to or explain how mortgages work. When he says he plans to learn choreography for the first dance when he gets married, like you see on all those viral Facebook clips, I lie and say it’s cute. Avoid saying ‘that’s weird’ when he mentions that Ronaldo’s his favourite football player. Parts of me slip away. I don’t mind watching them leave.

I get the ick – that sudden, slightly sick feeling where you find someone you previously thought attractive all at once extremely unattractive and everything they do is infuriating. Not because this guy got something wrong, but because he looked so pathetic when he realised.

He’s not the only one who gives me the ick. I get it because one guy waits for me to say ‘table for two’ even though he’s standing in front of me, because one guy says he ‘felt like superman’ when he snorted coke for the first time, because one guy begins a sentence with ‘the thing with girls, right …’, because one guy holds his cutlery between his fist and bites down on the fork when taking things off it, because one guy meets me holding an umbrella, because one guy’s legs are dangling off a bar stool, because one guy presses the traffic-light button and actually waits for the green man and I’ve already crossed over and am standing waiting at the other side of the road, because one guy has all this white stuff between his teeth, because one guy’s shoulders hunch upwards when he gets cold, because I accidentally imagined one guy wearing a dressing gown, because I accidentally imagined another standing naked in the bathroom waiting for the shower to heat up.

At the door to the house, I think again about how I could just say, ‘I’m not feeling this, sorry,’ but the more I rehearse the phrase the harder it becomes to squeeze it out. It’s like I have hot mashed potato in my mouth. In bed, he swipes past my clit like he’s scanning items on the Sainsbury’s self-checkout machine. Then, almost without warning, he’s inside me, moving in me with this aggressive circle motion. My brain rehearses the words I might use to correct him, how his face might break apart like a smashed plate if I did, how he might leave my room walking smaller. So I swallow those words back down, try to find other ways, moaning when he moves more in the way of something I would like, shuffling to different angles. But every time I just end up on my back again counting all the cracks in the ceiling as he draws those same circles into my cervix. It feels like someone’s rooting around in me for something they need to remove. After a while I give up and lie there, thinking of England.

I think for a moment about these mistakes. How quickly I made them. How easy they were to make. I stopped making an effort, always walking around the house with Sudocrem on my spots. Carrying on talking about my work even when he was trying to relax so that falling asleep would come easy. I was so secure in this love, I thought that he would forgive me for each and every one of those mistakes, but soon they all piled up and there were too many of them and all these tiny ones were enough for him to say, ‘I want to be on my own.’

After the bath I lie on my bed all twisted up in a towel, not moving, not even to grab my phone, and it’s not even like I’m thinking about not picking up my phone; my mind has just drifted off somewhere else where phones don’t ask to be looked at. Time passes. I’m not sure how much of it and I don’t know why, but there’s this flicker of realisation where I come back down into myself and snap upright and as I do I see myself in the mirror that sits over the fireplace, all strawberry pink and puffy, and I smile at my reflection as if saying hello. I never confront myself like this. Sometimes it happens when I’m drunk and I’m in the toilet, talking myself through the motions to try to stop myself from doing something stupid, like, Yeah, use that toilet roll. I get it’s a bit gross that it’s damp at one end but it’s probably better than getting wee in your knickers, and when you get back out there try to drink some more water and be nice to Hannah cause you were a bit short with her last time she made a joke. And it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life. And in the towel now, with coldness starting to prick up all the hairs on my arms, and the sheets dark with damp, I experience another ‘over’, and this time it’s a promise, to keep on being nice to her. To order expensive takeaways, and go on walks, and watch films that are difficult to understand, because this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.

‘Are you going to sweep that up?’ I asked, knowing that you hate being told to do things right before you actually do them.

‘Obviously,’ you said, spitting the word out at me like chewing gum onto a pavement.

I never feel that angry anymore. If someone does something I disagree with, like uses the last of my margarine when they know I like toast in the morning, or turns the oven off when I was warming it up ready to put something in it, I don’t shout. I think about why they might have thought they could do that. Maybe they were worried about the house burning down. Maybe they thought I was finished. I follow the thought patterns until the red glow eases away and I can fall asleep on the pillow at night without gritting my teeth.

I’m still not sure if you learn anything from pain, though I do think you learn from what you do to get away from the pain. Finding ways to process your emotions better. Learning who you can rely on. No longer positioning your sense of self around another person. Months after lockdown first started, I’m like one of those people who comes off a TV survival show, turns to the camera and says, ‘Now I know I can get through anything.’