I sat and looked at it for a while: sent at 02:47. I knew who it was of course. What were they doing still awake? Why message me this late? I imagined them sitting in some bare room like mine with all manner of hopes and horrors assaulting them, unable to sleep. They had come to the house, that meant something. Come too late and we had already left. Had they wanted to come with us?
Should I just ignore it? Harder to ignore a text than a knock at the door somehow. Just delete it? This good-natured, bright, lost person I had identified would also be difficult, troubled, have any number of problems and needs that I wasn’t able to address. And yet, I thought of times I had been lost myself, in my teens and twenties, trying to understand where I might fit into the world and how I had been helped, often by women I had got myself into relationships with, a necessary anchoring without which I might have drifted free completely, ended up among the truly lost, drugs, poverty, slow, livid self-erasure. And I had said it, hadn’t I? How long could I run from some elemental form of responsibility? Still the message I sent back was designed to suppress any farther exploration of this possibility, this hope for them that my stupid sentimentality had opened up
I’m not in London any more. I messaged back. Sorry! sad face emoji.
A pause of ten minutes or so in which I thought about switching off my phone, going to sleep, leaving it all till the morning but felt grimly fixed in place somehow. Ten minutes, twelve minutes, my relief mounting that this exchange was over, then:
Did you mean what you said
My first instinct was to text back said about what? But that was too cowardly, disingenuous even for me; one of the characteristics which had most annoyed and frustrated my partners over the years had been this disavowal, the sophisticated, contorted attempts to deny or go back on the things I had said, promises I had made, the motivations for things that I had claimed, covert manipulations I denied. Certainly, it had been a major cause of my latest breakup. You can’t go on like that, Carl.
Yes. Of Course. Smiley face.
Are you in Lancaster
Just arrived today.
I added an exclamation mark I recall, as though that could obliterate all my misgivings.
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