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‘I’m sorry,’ I say, the word stiffened by a detachment I don’t really feel. ‘But I’ve made up my mind.’
‘Fuck you,’ she snaps, pushing at my chest. I can tell she’s never had a violent impulse in her life, much less acted on one. ‘You don’t even love me, do you?’
The question tips everything off the edge of the world. You don’t even love me, do you?
I’m standing in one of those mirrored rooms at a fair, a thousand versions of myself reflected back at me, and a thousand versions of Olivia are there, too. I try to catch her and can’t—which mirror is real? I love the way she speaks and laughs, I love the way she is good and sweet, I love her brain and her mind and her absolutism. I love that she sees me and wants to know all of me. I love that she loves me—and I hate it, too. Her love is a poisoned chalice. The answer to everything I’ve ever wanted—with the power to destroy us both. I blink and the mirrors disappear; there’s just her and me and this moment.
‘It’s a yes or no answer,’ she says, the words shaky.
But it’s not. There are different types of love, and love demands different things of us all. What I feel for Olivia is a need to protect her, a need to give her everything she deserves in life, even when I know I can be no part of that.
‘I love you enough to walk away,’ I say eventually, the words heavy with finality.
‘But not enough to stay and fight for this.’
‘You deserve someone better than me...’
‘Don’t you dare try to take the moral high ground here! As though you’re being selfless and honourable. You’re walking away because it’s the easiest thing you can do.’
‘If you think this is easy then you don’t know me at all,’ I roar, my heart racing, my chest bursting. ‘But it’s what I have to do.’
She glares at me, her cheeks red, her eyes furious. ‘Then go! Get the hell out. But when you get to Ireland and realise you’ve made a big fucking mistake, don’t even think about coming back to me. If you walk away from me now, that’s the end.’
Her words are like bullets in my soul, tearing through the fibre of all that I am. I stalk across the room and pull her into my arms, dragging her to me, kissing
her with all the aching love I know I do feel, a love I can’t acknowledge and don’t know how to give. I kiss her one last time and then I straighten, and I stare at her for several beats of time, committing everything about her face to memory.
And then I walk away.
* * *
Professor Winterbourne took over Connor’s classes. I turned up on that first day, still half expecting to see him. Hoping, against any reason or logic, that Connor had changed his mind.
That my arguments had got through to him and he’d stayed.
Hoping that it wasn’t as over as my heart knew it was.
But there was no Connor, and I wasn’t the only one who felt his absence. It was only with his disappearance that I realised how much his dynamism had changed the classroom. And now he’s using that skill in court.
A bitter taste filled my mouth and I resolutely avoided newspapers and refused to Google his name.
I didn’t want to know about whoever he was defending. I didn’t want to know anything about the life he’d chosen. It was a life away from me. That was all I needed to hold onto. I’d laid everything out for him, I’d begged him to stay with me. And he’d left.
Days dragged. Nights dragged more.
His absence became a presence. I became a bystander in my life—I was there, and not. I ghosted through family lunches, I studied and sat my exams, and I know I did well, but I couldn’t tell you anything of what I wrote.
I became half of myself.
I thought not reading about him would help; I thought refusing to search his name on the Internet made me strong, but it kept whatever was missing inside me missing.
I came to like the brokenness.
I have heard it said that in darkness there is light, and it’s ironic that it took Connor’s departure for me to understand that this idiom is something that drives him. He spends his life looking for light in people who are all dark, and perhaps he’ll never find it. He won’t stop, I think, until he does. Until he can find some sort of redemption for humanity.
What if there is none?
I have heard it said that in darkness there is light, but in my darkness there is only more darkness. I fall into it, deeper, darker, letting it throb around me and rob me of breath. I wake in the middle of the night, sweaty, breathing hard and fast, convinced our fight was a nightmare.
