You find yourself thinking about him more and more. It used to be occasional, when you were feeling blue or restless or discontent. But now your thoughts settle on him regularly.
What would have happened if you’d kissed him? You did want to – well, you had been curious but not quite into him enough, he wasn’t quite cool enough, not who you thought you ought to be with. But if you had kissed him, what might have been? What if it had been wonderful, and it had made you want him forever, and made him want to stay alive?
When you feel alone, like when you left the solicitor’s office for the final time, or every time you walk away from the nursing home unrecognised yet again, those are the times when your mind flits to what might have been if you’d seized the moment, thirty years ago. Your different life, the destiny you avoided.
You stay up late at night and Google ex-boyfriends and one night stands and crushes. You find them in joyful family photos or civil partnerships – why so many civil partnerships? – and old, balding men with bulbous noses. It’s clear that you dodged many bullets. But avoiding those bullets doesn’t elate you. It brings no sense of victory, no feeling of being alive.
You cannot Google this boy. This boy was gone before we all had a digital footprint. The one who got away is also the one who checked out, stupidly, ridiculously, tragically early. But always you wonder, if life had been different, could you have been the one to keep him safer? In that parallel universe where you had kissed him, would the butterfly never have beaten its wings? Would he be alive, would you be together, and would you be happy?
So you calculate. You start a notebook as you learn how the process works. It’s not witchcraft, it’s technology. You save up for a long time to afford the software. Meanwhile you find the date and time of his birth and every fact available to you about him. You remember the perfume you wore, the records you were listening to, the food you ate. You read old diaries until you’re certain of the date and time of the party where you didn’t kiss him.
Week after week you build on your memory. It gets clearer and more vivid. The computer gobbles it up and asks for more. The more clarity you have, the better the computer sets the co-ordinates and triangulates them to the right place in space and time. Finally the computer tells you it’s ready. You wire it up to the power source, an exploding star in a distant galaxy. You run the programme. There is a flash of blinding light, and it begins.
There you are. The very moment, in a long-demolished tenement flat late on a Friday night in October 1994, although you have gone nowhere. You could, if you wanted to, focus on the dining chair you’re really sitting on, the hum of the computer in front of you, but instead you focus on what you’ve created.
You can smell the sickly sweet of Southern Comfort, and how the underwire in your wonderbra pushes into your ribcage as you twist your body to face him. You feel how your Doc Martens have made bloody holes in the back of your ankles while you’ve been dancing.
He is very close beside you. You sit with your backs to a wall, legs outstretched on a sticky carpet. Everyone else at the party seems slightly older and so much more confident than you, and you are nervous together. You’ve spent the evening with your shoulders touching, leaning in towards one another. It gave you confidence, and the first time round, but you worried he might misinterpret the touching. Now it has intention.
His skin is so smooth, around his eyes and his mouth, no laughter lines or wrinkles, and his face is only slightly stubbly because he isn’t a man yet, hasn’t had the years of practice at shaving. His black jumper is loosely knitted and fraying around the neck, which draws your attention to the elegant vulnerability of that part of him, from collarbone to jawline that you long to touch, that intimate spot where you know you’d feel a rush of electricity flow between you if you just reached out. Your fingers tingle in your lap at the thought of it.
You consider, how could he not want this too? Because you were gorgeous too, you were youthful and energetic and life hadn’t worn you down with mortgage payments or elderly parents or health scares. You could have become anything, you knew what you wanted out of that fresh, undisturbed world that lay in front of you. You were in flow, it was easy, the smooth passage of the closing years of your second decade, when you knew everything and everything was possible and you wanted everything.
With a confidence you never had when you really sat on that floor, you reach your hand behind his head and feel the spring of his tight black curls and you look at his eyes and close your own as you gently, gently draw his head towards you and put your lips to his.
He tastes like lager and cigarettes, as most boys did. His lips are soft and smooth as you move your lips against them, slowly and gently, finding the edges of his mouth. You feel every inch of your body, feel the edges of yourself, touching the wall, the floor, your boots, your bra, his head, his lips. Your stomach drops and flips and flies, and it feels like the time your first husband proposed or the time your daughter won the swimming gala or the time your son fell down the stairs: each time your world moved on its axis.
It’s beyond wonderful. It’s like the feeling of flying you only get in the very best of dreams that you can’t remember when the alarm goes off. Like throwing yourself into the cold sea, or running up hills till your lungs want to burst. But those things are only ever a pale imitation of this. Those are the things you do in your middle-aged life because you no longer have this. This kiss, this is how it truly feels to be alive and this is the feeling you’ve been chasing ever since it didn’t happen.
You start to feel the movement of his lips against yours as he kisses you back, and it’s tingly. It’s not too wet like your first husband, not too dry, not too fast or hard like your second husband. This is, you think, the perfect kiss, and this, this, this must be why you never let go of this imaginary moment, this is why you’ve spent 30 years regretting your failure to draw this boy in close and kiss him.
Gently, softly he pulls away from you and you feel such a lacking, a bereftness, like you never want this kiss to end, and you gasp. He pulls back and looks at you with those beautiful brown eyes that you always remember, and then he looks down at the floor and back at you and he says, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let you do that. I really like you, but I’m not into you like that. I’ve thought about you a lot and I really want to be friends. Can we do that? I’m sorry.”
It feels like a stab through your heart. You know the feeling well because this is not the first time, not the first rejection, not the first walking away by someone you wanted, with every cell in your body. It would have been, then, but now it is sickeningly familiar.
But this one is different. This one means even more. It means that your silly, regretful ‘what if’ that you’ve harboured every time your life has been shit, it was never, ever your alternative story. Not only has he rejected you, he’s given you proof that the life you’ve lived was the life that destiny had always planned for you. You didn’t make a mistake that night. All the roads led to the same place.
He gives you a consolation hug without much eye contact, because he’s a boy and he’s awkward, and you don’t want to make it worse, so you let him. He offers to get you another drink or perhaps a cup of tea, and he pushes his youthful body up easily from the sticky carpet and ambles to the kitchen, all skinny legs and big jumper. You know he’ll be dead in a year.
You hit ‘escape’ on the keyboard and you sit in your dining chair and you cry and you cry and you cry.
Tea is my typewriter 