They moved me out in inches. It began with a mushroom trip. Pigtails and the girl, two peas in a pod went out under the stars arm in arm. I saw them seated on a log in the herb garden that he and I had built. I left them to it. I told myself I was being mature. They stayed up, or at least out, all night. I know this because he didn’t come to bed. And the next morning when I saw them in the kitchen, leaves in their hair, ruffled as if they’d slept on grass, there was a smile to them. I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog, pulled weeds, smoked pot. John Lennon taught me how to make lasagne; a voice channelled in my head, don’t ask me what it meant. It meant lasagne. I heard his voice and followed his recipe and Pigtails and the girl said something had been discovered. They said I should move into the spare room. Like the good girl that I was, I listened to them through the wall. The girl’s mother arrived and moved into the yurt at the end of the garden. She said they’d always been like this. Inseparable. I set to clearing the vegetable patch; nettle roots straining my arms, leaves stinging my hands. My back hurt. I cooked and cleaned and fed the dog and stood outside for a UFO to flash its lights upon my head and as suddenly be gone. Pigtails said his love for me was unconditional. He said, couldn’t we all live together? and suggested I move into the yurt. The girl’s mother gave me scabies. I itched through terrible spring, slept beside that terrible mother in a damp and leaking yurt and cooked and cleaned and fed the dog and lived this ménage à trois because all I could hear was him saying don’t go and all I could see was my grip upon this life and all I could feel was my love for him, this man who deserved not an inch of me. My back hurt more. I got sciatica. One evening the girl and I were alone. She said you’ll never win. I hadn’t realised it was a competition. I’d thought it was a problem of my heart, that it wasn’t big enough, that I couldn’t love unconditionally like he could. That absolute fucker. I’d been taking my spine to healers, asking them, why the pain, believing they could make it better. I’d thought the hurt snaking down my leg was my inability to let her in. But the tension that had me crouched at night clutching my leg to my chest was not a signal from the universe that I was small-minded, it was my vertebrae giving up, my body saying enough, my disc about to slip.
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That fucker
Awfulness most terrible