We used to hang out at the Bonnington Café in Vauxhall, but he didn’t propose to me there. He chose a farm trailer parked by the metal barn, straw bales against my back. He’d written a song and I didn’t see it coming. He was always singing something, devoted to his band, they wanted to make it big. My six-foot seven Angel man; when we’d moved into the farm I’d gone out to an architectural salvage to find a bath long enough. The piano player had painted clouds in a blue sky on the ceiling of our bathroom, the carpenter had built a plinth, a little spiral of steps, a German couple, obsessed with twelve egg omelettes, had done the plumbing and I probably went there, to that enormous, high up bath after the proposal, I probably sought out the comfort of water because I shouldn’t have said yes. He took me by the hand and said I want to play you something and he was nervous, I could tell and it wasn’t like him to be afraid. He led me to the trailer, settled me against the bales of straw and took up his guitar that was already there, prepared for the moment he’d planned. I listened to the words and then I heard them and then I said yes because he was so gentle and it was so sweet and I was frightened for his heart, how I would hurt it if he didn’t put it back in his chest right now, so I said yes but I shouldn’t have. I should have said, wait, let me think about it. He will be reading this and he will disagree, he will say it was perfect, what happened, it had to happen like that and while that’s true, it’s also true that I shouldn’t have said yes because the inside of me didn’t match the outside and I was yet to learn how important that is. So while the sun shone and I made all the moves of happy, on the inside clouds were gathering and I thought, what have I done? I knew I’d been proposed to, and I knew he was a good man and he loved me and had not a bad bone in his body. And I knew my friends were shocked because when we held a party at the Bonnington Café to announce our news one of them screamed and covered her mouth.
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That there, that felt like horror.