The worst thing about losing Bluefish, I realise, is that things are never going to be the same again.
Your author is a great believer in the pessimistic idea that some events cut so deeply that there can be no prospect of ever fully recovering from them. Like a shadow, they are carried everywhere.
There's a surplus of expectation here, too, that is sufficient to freeze a person into their past. It is wise to expect nothing from anybody, even if they've gone to the effort of committing the rest of their days to you. As soon as this sentimentality and sincerity is bought into, it creates the potential for disappointment, and this is the worst feeling of all.
Bluefish was always warned: expect nothing. It was repeated so often, this repudiating force that pushed us apart as we tried to cuddle together, that it became a motto, a catechism. On our better days, we would announce - I'm nothing without you! The rest of the time, expect nothing! fell down out of the sky as rain, caught her breath as we were about to kiss.
Like the child who is filled with tales of foreboding as life proceeds much the same as it always has, though, I soon forgot the message. It had been said too many times without Bluefish ever doing a disappearing act, and I soon learned to put it alongside such discarded ideas as phrenology and the steady-state theory of the universe.
The most important thing of all had been forgotten in the fug and madness of love - no more relevant than a nursery rhyme or a maintenance manual for a Trabant. Expect nothing; it is more significant an imperative than breathing.
The worst thing about losing Bluefish, I realise, is that things are never going to be the same again: but this need not be the disaster I envisage. I complain bitterly, anyway, that nothing ever changes, and all the while I cling on pathetically to the comfort of routine. Now it is a foregone conclusion that some subtle alterations of the self must occur, and this causes protest and frustration.
Having pinned all my hopes on getting her to England, and having now begun the slow process of realising that it is not going to happen, this new, disappointing truth seeps in between thoughts, startles the unaware self, manifests itself in dreams. Change uproots the comatose self from the mattress, it rattles the letterbox, screams from the front page of newspapers.
For the inert among us, change is not so much accomplished as implemented. Having felt certain she would be here, I now begin the process of unlearning all that had been internalised.
