Such sweet sorrow

I lay my head on his chest. The sound of his heart blocks out everything else.

Whomp-whoosh-whomp-whoosh-whomp-woosh.

It's not a beat. Not the rhythmic tick of a machine keeping time. It's muscle and gristle, practically turning itself inside out with the effort of it all. Then doing it again and again. Organic.

I wish I could fall asleep like this.

I kiss the side of his cheek and move over, put my cheek down on the cold pillow there.

I need to sleep, but I can't. The next sound I hear will be of the alarm. Then that'll be it. He'll be gone. If I can just stay awake I can keep adding minutes, driving it further away with every moment of consciousness I manage. I can keep pretending it's not happening.

But then the bells of Big Ben ring out. That's it then. 3am, time's up. And before I know it we are hugging goodbye, clutching, hanging on for dear life. And it hurts. Maybe a little more than last time, maybe less than the next time. How do you measure something like that?

The cluncking slam of the front door is so final. I sit up staring stupidly into black space. Then at the last minute throw back the bedclothes and run to the window. The shutters are all down but there's a tiny gap between my shin and the floor so I drop down to my knees and peer out like a madman.

Just in time to see the red tail lights of the taxi disappearing out of view.

The floor is cold and the whole quality of air in the room has changed. You are alone, it says. Completely alone, it screams.

But I've had it worse than this.

………….

I remember him sweeping the floor. Waking up with another hangover and everything just being so white. Full of light.

No-one has decent curtains in England to keep the sunlight out, but I didn't know that then. Or I did know it, but it didn't register. It's something that you only notice once you've slept in a room completely darkened by shutters. Why would you bother keeping the sunlight out when there's not that much of it going spare?

You wouldn't have recognised the room from what it had been just a week before. Now just white empty space, but once full of wires, studio equipment, books, tapes, records, ashtrays, boxes of random shit. Pictures of people I would one day get to meet, and places I would go. Though I didn't know that then. There was so much I didn't know back then.

I must have been 21. That's so hard to comprehend right now. Nine years ago.

The summer was just beginning but it was all over for us. That time round anyway.

The flatmates were long gone, and the house was just a empty shell of memories. But once we slammed the door shut and posted the key through the door there was no-one left to remember them.

I went with him all the way to Gatwick. I don't know you but I'm sure I love you. Six months to last a lifetime.It was like nothing before it, totally incomparable.

Sun shining through the dirty windows of the train as text messages arrived on his phone. Goodbye and good luck, we'll miss you, all the best. One of those shitty Nokias everyone had. No iPhones, no Skype, no Facebook, no nothing. So much harder to stay in touch. So much easier to be out of sight, out of mind. Fade away into the background.

And thinking, I just have to get through this then everything can just go on as normal. But not really believing it.

Then that moment, when he has to turn his back and go. Slow motion. I'll see you again, I will come back.

I don't know you but I know I love you.

But something's wrong, It's not going to work out the way I want it. I know it's going to hurt. And about that I'm right. It's harder being the one left behind. Looking for things to fill the gap. Constantly searching.

The sliding doors swept shut with an almost silent click, and that was that. I was just another girl crying in an airport.

That was the real goodbye. But not the final one.

A different world

The actors looked different when they weren't on stage. Some of the magic had gone. They were smaller, and if you looked closely you could see blemishes and wrinkles.

What a surprise to find out they were human after all.

Watching them interact in the bar was like gatecrashing a private birthday party. So familiar were they, you almost felt you shouldn't be there. Eyes on eyes, gazing. Tucking each other's hair behind the ears mid sentence. Earnest touches to the face. It was all so intimate. They were a different breed of people.

And in the middle of it all the bloke and me, and of course Alicia, the one we had come to see. But with her the magic was still there, it always seemed to be.

On stage she was altogether the same and different. Speaking with the same voice, but with subtle nuances and shifts that made her into another person.

Seeing her there brought tears to my eyes. My cuñada, my sister-in-law. Who lives in a different world.

Some of the words jumped off the stage and bit me.

"¿Por que? Si creéis en Dios, y yo creo, ¿por qué tenéis miedo a la muerte? Y si creéis en la muerte, ¿por qué esa crueldad, ese despego al terrible dolor de vuestros semejantes?"

"Why? If you believe in God, why do you fear death? And if you believe in death, why this cruelty, this drawing away from the terrible pain of your fellow human beings?"

Nothing less than a slap in the face.

In the bar she showed us pictures on her phone. Her playing Federico Lorca's piano in the house he used to live in. Told us stories of how he had the keys to the Alhambra, and would do his writing there, or hang out with friends, getting inspired.

She introduced us to the niece of a famous flamenco singer whose auntie died of a drug overdose. The girl - who less than an hour ago was a different being up on the stage - asked me if I could follow the play, being British, and all. Her concerned frown turned to delight when I pulled out a copy of the original text and told her I've been studying it.

"That is so British," laughed Alicia. "I love that you did that."

I laughed too. Some habits are hard to shake. And I will always have my very British idiosyncrasies. But I felt a million miles from Britain.

Today I sat with the hot sun on my face and drank wine. Climbed the steep hill up to the Alhambra, the place where Lorca himself used to go for inspiration. Drunk on wonderment I strolled the grounds with the bloke, devouring it all with my eyes. Thinking back to what it would have been like in ancient times, when kings and queens held court here.

At the top of the towers that look out over the picture-perfect landscape of Granada, we stood and watched the sun begin to sink in the sky, covering everything with white light.

It was one of those moments when you realize that you are just one tiny speck of dust on the vast map of life.

But it doesn't scare you. Not this time anyway.

life goes on

I dreamt of Dario last night.

We sat together in a forest clearing at the dead of night, at a round wooden table. His face was illuminated by the glow of my computer, which he used to check his facebook page, just like I did, many times over in the days after he died.

There he was, reading the tributes people have left, smiling at some, laughing at others. Sometimes saying: "I didn't even remember I 'ad 'im as a friend."

It was the most normal thing in the world.

"I can't believe you're stuck with picture of you in your chef's uniform kissing the pig's head as your profile picture," I told him. And amazingly, we both laughed.

It felt so good to be laughing with him again.

I tried to ask what things were like for him now. But his face clouded over. He wouldn't talk to me about it.

"But I miss you so much," I told him. "Won't you just tell me how you are? How are you coping with all this?"

"I'm gone, tesoro," he said. "I'm fine, you gotta let it go. Life goes on. How are you coping with this? That's what you gotta ask."

Evetything else is just fragments. My hands on the table, engagement ring sparkling in the moonlight. Birds in the trees, watching and waiting. "You have to go soon, don't you?" and "this isn't real, is it?"

How are you supposed to cope with the end? When it grabs you by the hair at strange moments during the day and pulls so spitefully?

I've shut it out of my life for so long. It never even occured to me till recently, that all this is so very temporary.

Trying to live with it, though it sits badly- like co-existing with a new flatmate you instantly take a dislike to.

Just because bad things happen doesn't mean they'll happen to me, or the people I love. But saying that is easier to believe it.

But I must. A life lived in fear is not much to shout about.

Because life does go on. And when you have bad dreams you wake up and put them away. Wash them down the plughole with the shower water.

Get dressed, take the dog out as normal, and feel the warming light of the morning sun on your face. Look at the sky- is it not more beautiful because he is up there somewhere?

And if you're lucky, stop in front of a tree, and evesdrop on an unseen bird heralding the coming of the new day. A sweet sound, a music far purer than man can ever make with his machines.

Because life goes on, and today everything feels different.

Or at least that's what you want to believe.

Grey days

Some days are grey days. Like dirty dish water. Yesterday's newspaper- worn, torn and faded. No great rhyme or reason, no big event, no drama. No "because" or "why" and especially "solution". Just grey, grey grey. A mantra for the hopeless, a tuneless ditty for bowed heads, lifeless eyes, slouching hearts.

Some people have grey days more than others. Some you would look at and say: "What reason have they got to complain?" And others, well, you would get it, or just think you got it. And really you would only see the hint of the shadow, or the footprints of that black dog. Snapping at the ankles.

Some hide it better than others.

The idea you will never amount to anything, you're wasting your time. You'll never be as good as x and y. One day you'll be gone and no one will remember you and you'll be nothing, nothing nothing.

Days like these, when asleep seems better than awake, and time slows down. Frame by frame, the moment in the film when the hero takes a bullet, sinks to the floor.

But you bought me roses. And the grey dissolved. Replaced by velvet red, and vibrant green. And you hold me so tight, and wring it out of me - drop by drop.

Thank god for you.

The place where I will marry

Today was a special day. Today we visited the place where we're going to get married.

It was the second time we'd stepped through the heavy wooden doors of Finca Casa Esquileo. But this time, with the bloke's parents with us, it felt official.

Like old pros we showed them the pretty garden that'll make a great place to hold the welcome cocktail. Then on to the rustic old banquet hall, with the 18th Century graffiti on the walls. And the old preserved house where we can do the family photos.

Because we're actually going to do it. We're going to get married, and we're going to do it there.

And even though we're in the grip of winter and your breath freezes in front of your face and your toes are icy slivers in your shoes, I see it as summer with my heart's wet eyes.

I can see the tables all laid out, with place names for all the people I love most in the world. I can see my Dad stood up at the top table, thanking everyone for coming. I can see us swaying across the dance floor, taking tentative steps into the next chapter.

I can't say that I was ever one of those little girls that daydreamed about the day I would get married. In fact, at one point I thought I would just never bother.

But now it seems like I can think of little else. I'm prone to letting my mind run away with wedding thoughts in spare moments, or searching online for details I can steal. And it's only two months down the line, what's come over me?

One thing will stay with me from today. On the way back to the car after checking out the cute little church close to the venue, there was a group of Japanese tourists taking a photo. I waited patiently for them to finish, but the guy with the camera said "pasa, pasa" (ie - you can pass)

I thought to myself, oh, they think I'm Spanish. As as I continued on my way, to where the bloke and his parents were waiting, I realised - I sort of am. I'm marrying a Spaniard, I work here, speak the language - I've built my life here. This is home. I will always be proud of being British, but in some respects I am Spanish.

And that's a great feeling indeed.

Back

Some days are worse than others. That's the way it's got to be. They can't all be ten out of ten for fun. Like Christmas or the last day of the school term, the day you finally rode your bike without stabilizers, or even just one brightened with a nice detail like the delivery of a crop of new movies fresh from Amazon.

Those are the gems. But some of them are just plain crap. And nothing takes the Oscar for downright rubbishness like the first day back at work after your summer holiday.

When the alarm goes off at 7am, first you don't remember where you are. Then you do, and the dread sinks in like paintbrush colour into the water jar of despair.

This is an outrage, you think. It's still dark outside. Just a day ago at this exact moment in time, I woke up, took a piss, then went back to sleep for another four hours.

Marbella to me is heaven on earth. You go from your bed to the pool – via breakfast – then to Las Sardinales for lunch. Eating coquinas or on an extra special day Arroz con bogavante (Rice with lobster) which the bloke manages to get down his front and over half the pristine white tablecloth. All of this with the sea breeze in your face and the thick sound of the waves lapping gently on the shore.

Then it's back home for a siesta, movie, more pool action, or if you're feeling extra energetic – a trip 400 metres down the road to the beach. After the sun has set – if you're lucky making a pink and purple mess of the sky – it's either a nice dinner at home, swapping stories with the family – or one out, where you might get to try something completely new, like rabo de toro (bulls tail) And this deserves a blog all to itself!

Repeat this sequence on every day of your holiday. Does it get boring? Not for me, and not in this lifetime.

And it's all just a memory when you rip yourself from your womb-like bed come Monday morning. The clinking of glasses around a round table by candlelight. The smell of la dama de noche in the garden while you dangle your legs over the wicker furniature and loose yourself in a book. The warm soft skin of the bloke's little nephew as he gives you a hug at bedtime.

Gone gone gone.

And in the real world your morning tea is too hot, the radio too loud. Your key feels alien when you turn it to leave the house. Your beloved little dog rubs your nerves up with sandpaper when she lingers too far behind.

The bus driver's: "buenas dias" is loaded with fakeness. The air con is on too strong and everything is slightly wrong, tiled 30 degrees off centre. The final stretch of pavement to those glass double doors of the office feels like a walk towards the GCSE maths classroom.

It's all, one, big, laboured, sigh.

But really, it's not that bad is it? Well not for me anyway. I have no business complaining really.
"Welcome back," says my boss. "How was it?"
"Oh it was great. Amazing, in fact. I can't believe it's over now, though."
"Ah come on, It's hardly a big chore, is it," he says raising his palms upward and outward. "Imagine if you had to go back to England"

Mood lifts by 50 feet immediately. He's right. My "back in real life" scenario is not rain, cold, sky to floor grey concrete and a job I hate. Post holiday blues have no place in my heart or my head. I need to remember that.

Things I like part four - being friends with my parents

We're sitting in el maison de puerto, the bloke and I with my parents. They look so out of place to me here - staring round the room like it's an exotic foreign place they've landed in. Which, I suppose it is.

We won't be long, just a little stop off on the way to having lunch with the bloke's parents. As he is such a regular, we're being treated like kings. Plates of tapas keep appearing at the table, which we pick at. Mum is torn. "Oh this is so lovely," she says. "We shouldn't leave it or it'll look rude… But we don't want to fill ourselves up, do we?"

Dad has no such qualms. He'll have room for everything. "This is marvelous, isn't it Margaret?" he says to my mum, between putting slices of jamon and queso manchego in his mouth. He is hypnotized by the huge sizzling plates of t-bone steaks - chuleton - being whisked out of the kitchen door and carried through to the restaurant, leaving trails of steam in their wake. Nothing impresses my dad as much as food.

At this point he turns to me, and grabs my arm. "You've made the right choice here mind pet, " he tells me, and I feel that he's talking seriously to me for the first time since they've arrived. For the first time in maybe years, actually.

"You have such a great life here. Much better than you would've had in England. We're so happy for you."

It's a sentiment that mum expresses too. Almost with a sense of relief.

"The people at the Spar supermarket always ask granddad after you," she says. "He tells them, 'Oh she'll never come back to this country. She's got it good over there'."

It makes me laugh as I can see him doing it. Walking stick in hand, and his cheeky lopsided smile - one side higher than the other.

They are both relieved, bless them. How hard must it be when one of your children is living somewhere so far away. And you don't really have a clue how they're doing. When for so many years the phone calls are few and far between and the standard answer, rolled out without much of a thought, to the question of "how are you?" was always: "fine".

Somewhere, in the golden space of time between when I left home - aged 18 - and now, my parents stopped being mythical bullet proof creatures and started being real people. I couldn't tell you exactly when I started seeing them this way – perhaps it's something that's crept up over time. More likely the thought began to take root when I began to really fully process the fact that they aren't going to be around forever.
 
And in turn, their perception of me seems to have changed. My mum is no longer incredulous with disbelief when she rings up to find I'm cooking something. There's a sense of being a co-conspirator when we launch into one of those 'oh how hopeless our men are (but we still love them)' chats. Though we were never that inseparable, 'tell each other everything' mother-and-daughter team of which everyone knows at least one, we have become equals. We have become friends.

Over the course of the weekend they're in Madrid I realise how much I enjoy their company. We have real conversations. Even dad's crappy jokes - "I was born just after the second world war - it was in all the papers" make me laugh rather than irritating like they did when I was younger. Even though he's still rolling out the same ones.

They've been married over 40 years. And though they're not the type of people to kiss or hold hands in public, it's clear to me how much they love each other. They simply couldn't function apart.

They met in a sausage factory. My dad did deliveries and my mum worked in the office. She had lots of young men asking her out, but she chose dad, and they were married when she was 23, and he was five years older.

I feel so grateful that they're still both here, and still together. And I'm beyond relieved that they love the bloke almost as much as I do, and he loves them in return.

When we have to say goodbye at the end of the weekend, something strange happens - I feel tears prickling at my eyes. That never happened before. Is this what being a proper grown up means?

"I'll miss you," I shout down the road after them. These two people who are my now my friends. Who will go home with lots of happy stories about eating baby pigs and huge slabs of meat. "I can't wait till Christmas to see you again." And I smile inside, knowing I really do mean it.

Memory lane at Munki’s 30th

I saw her a split second before she saw me. You know how it is. That strange recognition light turns on in a comfortable part of your brain. Features automatically realign into an expectant and friendly greeting. Then there’s nothing to do but wait.

We locked eyes and she stopped mid stride, almost did a double take. Then a smile lit up her face and we were exclaiming each other’s names and reaching for hands. Two ghosts of work and social past reunited in god knows how many years, we couldn’t even hazard a guess.

Anna was just as I remembered her. Petite and beautiful like a porcelain doll, effortlessly feminine and chic in a way I’ll never be. But she was the same and different – more worldly looking, more sophisticated – and I told her so.

“We both look so much more grown up now,” she said in return.

We began our journalism careers together on the same London dance music magazine. I was the editorial assistant and she had just been selected for a graduate scheme – a bright young thing come from Sheffield, where she’d finished university and ended up totally skint, staying on her mate’s floor and working in a call centre to keep the wolf from the door.

This was her big break, as was it mine. I’d muscled my way in via work experience, leaving a job behind in the Civil Service, Policy Correspondance Unit. I felt like I’d won the lottery.

So Anna arrived, and we became fast friends and sometime partners in crime. Skulking around festivals, free drinks, club nights and house parties, circa 2000. I never ceased to be amazed at her ability to stay out for eight hours straight in heels I probably couldn’t even walk round the room once in. And she never smudged her lipstick either.

Eventually she went freelance and I went back to University, and we lost each other in the accelerated mess of London living. But before that we shared many memorable moments.

One particular night stuck in my head. One of my many flat warming parties (me and my then boyfriend seemed to move house every six months back then). Surrounded by red wine stains on the hours earlier pristine cream carpet. Lying on fronts, legs lolling in the air like kids at story time, telling each other: “No, you don’t understand – you just don’t understand how gorgeous you are.”

We laughed about it and many other silly little snapshots from our shared past.

It was certainly a night for a hop, skip and a jump down memory lane. It was my best friend Munki’s 30th birthday party. And in between just watching her enjoy the party she worked so hard on making happen (this I did with what I imagine to be the air of a proud parent) I played over a similar scene as the one with Anna, with many other key players from my past.

It really felt like a work reunion when I got a tap on the shoulder from Stan. Not only did we all work for the same magazine, but me and Stan shared an apartment – Casa Wonky – during my first season working for our magazine in Ibiza.

Where to even begin with the reminiscing?

Me: “Do you remember the time you swapped clothes with Phoebe that New Year’s Eve, and you walked down the street and no one even noticed?”

Him: “that time I had to change a tire on Jimmy’s car and you didn’t even get out of the front seat?”

Me: “What was it exactly that happened to Giles’ car – something about a television landing on the roof?”

Ibiza was a whole new world. I really had no clue what to expect. And Stan, having done it all for many years in a row, was something of a guru to me. We shared a room, though we were hardly ever in it at the same time.

Somewhere near the start of the season he told me: “Ibiza changes you – you wait and see.”

And he was right. But perhaps not in the way I expected. I didn’t turn my back on modern life to become a hippy and live in a squat. But I did make my mind up that leaving London was the right thing to do. More than that – Spanish culture, I thought, suited me nicely. It would do just fine.

So there we were, a decade on from when we first got acquainted. “So what have you been doing with yourself for the past ten years?” Anna asked.

“I hardly know,” I told her. “A lot of growing up. I learned a lot. I thought I knew it all when I was 20. turns out I knew shit.”

“Do you ever wish you could go do it all again, knowing than what you know now?” she asked.

For me it was an easy and iron clad no. My mistakes and fuck ups shaped me into who I am today, maybe even more than the things I’ve done right. They moved me along my merry way, stumbling to where in the world I am now. Small bits of the journey sucked, sure. But I wouldn’t change a thing – not even the bits that make me cringe.

It was all pretty philosophical stuff for 4am Sunday morning as we stood there in a disused leather factory-turned party venue in Shoreditch.

In days gone by we might have got the shots in and set out to find as much trouble as it’s possible to find. But times had changed. We were all flagging. I was gulping banana and strawberry smoothie straight from the carton and Stan had to drive back to Kent. He wasn’t entirely confident about where he’d parked his car – a dodgy type had asked him if he wanted to buy any acid before he’d even reached the end of the road.

So they left, with promises to come see me in Madrid, which I hope they keep. And I turned back to the party, replaying past scenes of my life in my head like chapters of a DVD. Till someone drew me back to the present day with a touch of the arm and something indecipherable shouted in the ear. It was definitely time to stop being wistful and start dancing.