Love

While the coffee brewed he went over to the dining table, the pages of the paper warm yellow against the darkness of the timber in the light pooled from the single hanging shade above.

The lifestyle section had wormed its way to the top of the messy pile now that sport and world were somewhere else, probably still on the bathroom floor.

‘These are the things I know about love’. The headline spanned the page and ran out at the small picture of the young woman who had penned the piece.

Andy smiled to himself, looking wistfully off towards the blackboard shadowed on the wall beyond. The coffee maker gurgled and he hurried over and took it off the heat. The rich scent filled the kitchen as he poured in the milk. He almost forgot the paper as he padded quietly back towards the lounge, picking up the section in his free hand as he passed the table.

Sitting down he reached for the book and then thought, ‘no, I should give this a chance’, and retrieved the paper from where he had tossed it on the coffee table.

She spoke of many things, good and bad. Needy and selfless. Hurtful, hurt.

He sat for a time with the paper on his lap and then got up and took it with him as he went to his bedroom and brought back the pen and folder that had been sitting proudly atop the chest of drawers.

Taking the pen from its case and opening the folder he ran a finger across the paper, feeling its weight.

‘These are the things I know about love’, he wrote carefully across the top of the first page.

He thought of how the years had borne upon those words, changing them from those he would have written at the author’s age.

He crossed his legs and rested the folder against his knee, and began.

‘I don’t know if I know more about love, or just different things now I am older. I do know for sure that I have had the chance to be loved by women who could give everything of themselves, if they could just be sure that they were safe. They were strong women, the only thing that they ever asked for in return was honesty.

The only shame I have left is that I didn’t give them that. They knew real, searing pain. Because of me. Because they loved me.

Words like empathy go into love. When have I not shown empathy? When I haven’t been honest. When I knew the things I was doing were killing those women, driving them away and pretended I didn’t.

Selflessness. When haven’t I been selfless? When I asked those women to lie for me, to lie about the things they saw me becoming. To make do with the little I had left to give them.

It doesn’t hurt at all to be honest now. What hurts is that it’s too late to be.

I haven’t known many people implicitly in my life. But I knew Ben better than most. He loved everything in life, so long as he could love it as he needed to. When his wife asked him for honesty he left. When his work asked him to be honest he railed against it. When it came to the point where for him it seemed the world had backed him into a corner and nothing but honesty would do, he was enraged. He gave love in great bursts, wanted everyone to just wait for the next piece, knowing that it would come, that the pain he caused in between was less than the love to come.

I know because I did so many of the same things.’

The pen flowed so beautifully he stopped and held it up to the light, turned it in his hand. He thought of his knife.

‘I love courage. Courage isn’t anything other than being able to bring yourself to do something that most others would turn away from. The type of thing that hurts and may keep on hurting, and the pain may not bring the thing you want. But you do it anyway.

I didn’t have that courage. I ran away from my marriage because I couldn’t be honest. Ben is gone because he didn’t have that courage. He was the strongest man I ever knew, he would have ground my bones to hear me say he lacked courage.

You’re not running Sam. You know there may be nothing more to what you are doing now than an end. And you’re still trying. That’s courage. That’s love, because it’s honest.

I fell in love in high school, head over heels as everyone does. She was amazing, still is I’m sure. We could drive out into the country and just sit there, park in a farm gateway along a tiny road that hadn’t seen anything but the occasional tractor in years and share a cigarette with the windows down. In the late autumn back there the air is so still and heavy it laps at you like the sea. That night with the car on the hill, the air felt the same way.

The sun would be just strands of colour behind the hills and smoke would rise in ribbons, the cattle would come and stand at the gate, snorting so that gusts of hot breath rose steaming over their heads. I told her everything, left nothing out. And she did the same.

If I could have only known then that was love, purely and simply, and it couldn’t be anything else. I have no regrets. But I wish I had never forgotten that love can’t be different to that.

I’ve been so honest about the things that have happened lately. Left nothing out. And for the first time since way back then I can understand love.

He signed off with a single ‘A’ and went down the hall, and put the folder on Sam’s bed.