UnfortunatelyLit By Christopher P. Mooney
Editors’ Note: This piece is best read while listening to Do I Wanna Know? by the Arctic Monkeys. Song link below.
I’m in recovery, trying to get over love once shared in a relationship that spanned almost our entire adult lives.
But it’s hard, this type of grief, because the object of my affection isn’t dead; she’s still very much alive and, it seems, living life to the full. Without me.
For her, there is no sense of loss, no sadness at all; for her, now, there is only hope and happiness and the joy of new beginnings.
With
him.
With Gyles.
Since our separation and before our divorce—her decisions, not mine—she’d exhausted the online meet markets: Pre-Loved, BuyCurious, In the Sea, Up4It, Meet2Fuck, Home+Horny, Dads-R-Hot; all of them, even Tumble, BinnedHer, and Catch. She came up empty, despite modifying her profiles—while asking for absolute honesty—to include subtle half-truths and, later still, blatant lies.
Then, in July of that year, she met him, he who would be her next, while ordering an extra-large, full-fat, four-sugar latte in a takeaway cup at that place just off Viva Street, not far from where our marital bed used to sit. She doesn’t know when she first saw him —nor when or even if he’d noticed her, before it happened—but she does recall that that one good Arctic Monkeys song was on low in the background, filling in the gaps nobody realises are there. I know all of this because she never tires of telling people, and someone eventually told me.
‘With a y instead of an i,’ he said when the barista asked what name she should put on the cup. Then, after the beans had been ground and the water had been poured and his drink had been put down in front of him, he couldn’t help laughing out loud when he read what had been written: Yiles.
And the woman next to him, my wife—short, well-built, very late thirties, with expensive milk-bottle frames above a leopard-print coat I had bought her and a box-fresh pair of trainers I had not—she saw it and, possibly for the first time in a long time, she laughed, too.
They looked at each other then.
He felt nothing, of course—that sort of thing doesn’t happen, not even on film—but, because it’s impossible not to, he saw and knew immediately, as I had done in a Paris bar more than twenty years before, that she is beautiful.
All I can do in the darkness, now, when the hurt comes and images of them together are playing on a mindless loop, is ask myself, futilely: Does she love him, really, if her declarations and assurances and terms of endearment are nothing more than the repetition, over and over, of words I already know, heard now by different ears?
This only makes it worse, of course. I know she does. Because I know she can. And I always knew she would.
Christopher P. Mooney was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1978. At various times in his life, he has been a paperboy, a supermarket cashier, a shelf-stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet fitter’s labourer, a foreign-language assistant, and a teacher. He currently lives and writes in someone else’s small flat near London, and his debut collection of short transgressive fiction, Whisky for Breakfast, is available now from Bridge House Publishing.
Why we chose this piece: We love the way Chris plays with form, and he has a great mix of grief, humor, and bitterness. There are also so many little details that really pull you into his world.
