The week before Clover came, everything in my life was working at once.
I’d moved my desk into the conservatory and made it my own little writer’s paradise. In the mornings I’d sit there with the green pressing in at the glass, already dreaming up the next project, the library the spare room could one day become. Walls of books and the good kind of quiet. Work was hard, but it was the hard that means something. Daisy was well. My new relationship was good, better than good actually, and in a few days we’d have our first weekend away. I remember sitting in that room thinking, with something close to disbelief, that it was all finally coming together.
It didn’t feel like pure joy, even though I wanted it to. Underneath it there was something else. A bracing. A faint held breath. Some small part of me stood back from all of it, arms folded, waiting.
But the good just kept coming. The weekend was everything I’d wanted it to be… happy. Seeing old friends. A new tattoo. Long walks through winding streets with Daisy at my side and on the final day Clover arrived. For a little while the picture had every piece in it.
Then it began to come apart. Quickly. Clover was gone a week later, and after her, so was everything else. The relationship I’d been refusing to see clearly. Daisy. Work. The house. My own health. A life that had spent a month climbing towards the sun had dropped out of the sky.
The falling didn’t stop for weeks. And one morning, sitting in the rubble of it, I asked myself the question I haven’t stopped asking since. Was it me? Did I do this?
Because it wasn’t the first time. More than once this past year I’d got within reach of something enormous and good, and watched the ground open exactly then, for reasons I couldn’t have caused if I’d tried. After enough of that you stop believing in coincidence. You start looking for the thing all the wreckage has in common, and the thing it has in common is you. So you begin to wonder whether some hidden part of you waits until things get good and then quietly pulls the pin.
Guilt is a strange kind of shelter. It lets you believe you still have a say.
And the strange part is how much I wanted the answer to be yes. Blaming myself was the more bearable option. Because if I did this, if there’s some flaw in me that pulls my own life down whenever it gets too bright, then at least it makes some kind of sense. At least I’m the one holding the matches. What I couldn’t sit with was the other possibility. That I’d built it right, and it fell anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with me and answered to nothing I could hold. That the good is real when it comes, and there is nothing I can do to keep it safe. Guilt is a strange kind of shelter. It lets you believe you still have a say.
There’s something older underneath even that, and it had been in the room with me all week. Real calm has never once felt like safety to me. It has always felt like the top of the climb, the second before the drop. So even with everything finally good, the wary part of me that never quite joined in, the part standing back while the rest of me dared to hope, was already at work. Brené Brown calls it foreboding joy, the rehearsal of loss we run inside our happiest moments so the loss can’t take us by surprise. I was sitting at that desk picturing the conservatory, the library, two wet noses and the patter of little paws, a warm coffee being handed to me with a kiss on the forehead… and underneath all of it, without ever once deciding to, I was picturing the day it would be taken from me. Staging the ending in the middle of the best week I’d had in years. So when the ending came, some cold and practical part of me felt almost relieved to be proven right. There. I told you not to trust it.
I still can’t answer it. When something good turns up now, I feel the old arithmetic start. How long have I got. Where’s the catch. Whether it’ll be me this time, or the world. Maybe I’ll never know which. But I’ve started to wonder if that was ever the right question. Maybe it was never about who breaks the good. Maybe it’s about whether I could let something good come and not brace against it at all. Whether I could leave my arms open, just once, and see what stays. I haven’t managed it yet. I’m not sure I can. But for the first time, I want to.