Violet Young

You don’t strain the way I do to maintain a facade of order and rhythm. You just are. And in your presence I just am: I feel normal.

The problem of being me, I’m slowly starting to believe, is not a curse to be carried tiredly through life, or to be mollified by reckless pleasure-seeking (I’ve tried that). Instead it’s a challenge. A worthy challenge.

Being single appears to be a celebration to the young(ish) men in my life. To their exact female contemporaries, it’s just an accepted reality.

Give me another dose, I say, and move determinedly towards him. He needs encouragement, I say, once I get there and find him desperately trying to shirk the flawless shell I insist he wear in my presence.

I cannot see the middle of a relationship at the beginning, but I can see the end from the middle. I know that there will be an end. There has to be. This is just a stop on the road.

I think about the things we’ve done when we’re away from this place, and I wonder whether once we get far enough away from its gravitational pull, we spin off our axes, we lose our way.

As I enter the shop on any given morning, he becomes ebullient, or so it seems, and so do I. Recently I’ve taken to looking at the ground to hide the fact that I’m smiling.

For years I have been trying to impress you from afar. An unintended consequence of this is that I have, now and then, been able to impress myself.