Open Water, Caleb Nelson [best summer books txt] 📗

as you describe language plucked, plundered for the amusement of a few. She takes your elbow in her soft palm, asks if you’re OK. You tell her that you’re real cool because this is a place you have come to live. Come on then, she says, weaving between clustered joy, heading towards sound system where you feel bass slap thud, like a heartbeat. There is a pleasurable freedom in this slowness; where the frequencies lower and it is not so much a matter of the head but of the chest. She winds hips loose like elastic, takes your hand around her waist and encourages you to slow down. You take pleasure in the muddy fervour of a generous moment found under the miserly grey of a London sky on Carnival Monday. Unexpected miracle in these moments of freedom. Catch wines, sweat under arms and resting on foreheads, but no mind. Slow down and be guided by bass thudding in lazy rhythm. There’s a nudge on your elbow, a young man offering small hazy fire between finger and thumb. Eyes crackle red with each soft gulp until pupils turn wide and Black. Slow down. Take pleasure. Your hand around her waist, small fire in palm, eyes ablaze. Loosen up, she says, and your hips break like the language. No need for mimicry. Miserly grey of a London sky on Carnival Monday, muggy heat stalling on bare back as you danced the day away with a stranger.

21

You are ending the summer like you began the winter together, twisting through the backroads, from New Cross to Deptford. You run into one of her friends, and you watch their conversation dance around each other, such easy rhythm, such beauty in being. Walking on, comfortably drunk. Sobriety extends a hand in the late-summer evening, and you both bat it away. Not now, not yet.

When you’re a turn away from her flat, your fingers tangle. The seed you planted so long ago grown, the roots clutching in the darkness, pulling each other closer. Your lips meet under the canopy of a tree already showing autumnal symptoms.

You are ending summer, splitting a cigarette with her. She watches you fumble with the lighter. You’re not a smoker, and she knows it, but the alcohol makes it easier to succumb to the idea. Besides, there’s an intimacy to sharing this with her which you love. She takes the cigarette from you as she has done many times before, kindly, calmly, lighting up.

‘You know,’ she pauses to take a drag. ‘OK, we’re doing this now, I’m drunk, and we’re doing this now.’ Another drag. ‘I was talking to my friends about you, about us. And there’s parts of me you’re gonna have to learn and understand.’ She gazes at the ground for a moment. ‘I haven’t really done this before. I mean, I have, you know that. But this feels different.’

There are words and phrases rattling about your brain. You want to tell her, one day at a time, as you have been. You want to tell her you cannot wait to learn more about her, about all of her. But that you can and will wait, that time means nothing to you and her now, not really. You want to tell her how much you love her, but you’re met with an impossibility, so instead you chuck under her chin and pull her towards you for a kiss, hoping she understands.

You are ending summer, hands resting on each other’s thighs. Sitting across from each other on the train home, you were holding a gaze you could be forgiven for suggesting will never break. In moments such as these, time acts as it does in your relationship, falling away; past, present and future melding in the warmth of their touch. Neither of you wish to let this gaze go, but you know you must, if only briefly, knowing the return is an inevitability.

Later, lying in bed together, the feeling of timelessness heavier now you have come to a halt. This moment seems to be going on forever. What is it Kierkegaard says of the difference between a moment and an instant, of the fullness of time? Unimportant, as you fumble in the dark, knowing each other fully, in a way which will not be forgotten, in a way which feels right.

You are ending the summer, wondering how it is possible to miss someone before they have gone. There are lives moving around you but they are of little concern. Leaning against a noticeboard, your arms around her, running your chin over the softness of her shorn blonde head. You’re both watching nervously for her train platform to be announced, and right on ­time –

‘That’s you,’ you say.

‘That’s me,’ she says.

She’ll go from London to Holyhead and take the ferry to Dublin. On the platform, she kisses you, one foot on the train, one foot off. The whistle blows once. You need to step away from the train but you’re not ready. You have never loved from a distance, but then you have never known love like this. You want to tell yourself, and her, that it will be OK, that nothing will change, but you don’t know. All too quickly, the whistle is blowing again, and the train doors are sliding shut. You hold off the tears until the train has pulled away, until you are stumbling down the platform. It is like the summer has been one long night and you have just woken up. It is like you both dived into the open water, but you have resurfaced with her elsewhere. It is like you formed a joint only to fracture, only to break. It is an ache you have not known and do not know how to name. It is terrifying. And yet, you knew what you were getting into. You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a