His gaze moved over my face. "I'm trying to remember the last time we actually met..."
My heart almost seized up in my chest. Were we really going there?
He glanced away, then refocused, all bright-eyed candor. "Was it my engagement party to Elisabeth?"
That was the last time we'd occupied the same room. But we hadn't even spoken that night.
"So about eight years ago?" he said.
"About that." (It was eight years and four months.)
He was trying to set the tone for the next two or three days. We could neither ignore nor acknowledge our long and complicated history. But by presenting a sanitized version of events, he was laying out a surface we could walk on. It was as fragile as thin ice over a deep, dark lake but if we stayed light and careful, we could probably do it.
There's more to this story than the clickbait headlines, but yes, in simple terms, I had a dream life—then I took a flamethrower to it. In no particular order, I broke up with my long-term partner, bought a small loom, gave away all my stilettos, resigned from my fabulous-if-frightening job, got into a situation in the street with five teenage boys, received a medical diagnosis which didn't delight me, bought a slightly bigger loom and, after living in Manhattan for nearly twenty years, relocated back to Ireland.
The first sign that something was up came one Friday morning, in an apartment on the Upper West Side, eight months into the pandemic. Deep, discordant moans dragged me from the depths of sleep.
A quick look at my phone confirmed I was still entitled to a precious sixty-seven minutes of slumber and I flared with fury.
The first time I'd ever heard the atonal groans, I'd thought Angelo was in the next room playing a didgeridoo. But the noise came from a large group of monks. Not actually clustered in their orange robes in Angelo's living room, swinging their canisters of butter-tea, but on Zoom from Tibet. Having been prematurely woken by them most mornings for the last several weeks I felt as if I knew each one personally.
Effing lockdown.
Angelo Torres and I had been in each other's lives for over a decade. We loved each other, spent at least four nights a week together but had always kept our own places. Slightly irregular perhaps, but it worked.
Then along came Covid. Angelo and I had to choose between living together in a bubble or being separated indefinitely. We went for the bubble and we picked his place because it was bigger.
But being trapped together almost all day every day, in an apartment that seemed to shrink by the hour, was tougher than expected.
The monks were still giving it socks out there so I pawed for my earplugs. The most important thing was to not think about work.