W i l l
Will’s blue eyes bulged.
“Sixty-four!” he exclaimed.
“Yup,” I said, filling in the blanks of the hangman game we were playing, “you got it. It’s my lucky number.”
“But, but,” spluttered Will, “that’s my lucky number!”
I think that’s how we saw our relationship in the beginning: as some kind of magical destiny. More than just coincidence and similar interests, we saw our coming together as an alignment of the planets. Will was the boy-next-door, although we didn’t get to know each other until we were sixteen. His house was full of music, disorder and activity, much like the mind that lay snuggled beneath his fleece of curly brown hair. Hugging him in the clear bright nights of our youth, I could wrap my arms around his skinny waist so that the tips of my fingers cupped my elbows.
Will loved me with all his energy. He wrote letters to me and songs for me. When he had the choice between answering his cell and kissing me, he threw his phone away. He spent time making me feel like the only girl in the world, his angel standing alone in a beam of sunlight. Once, after a heavy night of drinking, I found he’d drawn a picture of me as the heroine of The Flaming Lips’ song “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, assuring the world that I wouldn’t let those evil robots defeat him.
Our formative fairytale didn’t last long though; the pitfalls of teenage dating caught up with us and other relationships bled into our tapestry. Our threads were interwoven with those of new friends and lovers, but Will never changed, and eventually we grew back together. We were grown-ups now, but the sense of celestial destiny hadn’t waned for either of us.
We both moved to Bristol for university and Will’s creative personality thrived there, among friends who encouraged his quirky sense of humour and placed him centre stage. He grew more self-assured with every play, with each comedy slot and whenever surrounded by all of his friends that played music with him for hours. He no longer needed me to make him feel like he was worth something. Together, alone, we were happy but apart we belonged to different worlds.
On my twentieth birthday, I held a barbeque in the happy post-exam haze of June. All my friends came and many of Will’s as well. It happened to be the finale of Big Brother and many of my guests wanted to watch it. I was happy to let people enjoy themselves however they wanted to, and we crammed into the living room of the house I shared with three others. Will and his friends hung around on the stairs just outside, apart from the party. They convinced him that watching Big Brother was a far too plebeian thing to do, and not how a birthday should be celebrated. I know this because he barged into the room and announced this to all of my bemused friends as he switched off the TV. I was mad that he couldn’t see that it was my birthday and I didn’t care what his arty friends thought.
“Will!” I snarled. He faltered. Everyone stared. No-one had ever heard a raised voice between us. Will fled and I turned the TV back on.
We spent that summer in separate towns; he stayed in Bristol working and I went back to our hometown. We arranged a romantic weekend in Oxford where we could wander the river banks and gasp as we opened each new drawer of treasures in the Pitt Rivers museum. Pitt Rivers was a 19th-Century archaeologist and ethnologist, a kindred spirit to Will, who I always thought would have been perfectly at home in The Lost World or as a turn-of-the-century Indiana Jones. The weekend passed blissfully, and as we made ready to depart back to our respective towns I wept and begged him to come to our hometown with me, just for a day or two. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me he had a lot of commitments in Bristol, but I knew he didn’t have to work and instead his commitments were to his friends there. I was no longer his Queen of the Nile, his Boudicca conquering the world for him.
After the summer it was time for me to go on the exchange year that was part of my degree program. I left for Iceland at the end of August with Will in my heart but with a deep worry about what the distance would do to us. I thought back to when we lived in Bristol and I’d walked to his work place one evening just to check he was still alive, having not heard from him in a week. Will was always losing his cell phone or forgetting to check his email. Communication of that kind wasn’t his strong point, and now we would be oceans apart.
By November, Will professed he missed me too much and flew to Iceland on a whim to spend a couple of days with me. Most people found it romantic, but while I was happy to see him, it didn’t make up for the days on end I wouldn’t hear from him.
Finally, when I returned to England for Christmas, we came apart at the seams. He told me he realized our relationship couldn’t work at that time. I knew it wouldn’t work at any time.
The last time we met was New Year’s Eve, three years later, at the funeral of a friend we’d known at different stages of his life. He’d committed suicide. We wept side-by-side and our hands found each other’s. As we turned, I looked into his oceanic eyes and saw reflected in them the same sorrowful smile I felt on my lips. Young love had passed, adult love had caused us to slide past each other, but in our long lives ahead we knew we’d always be connected.
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