Page 1 of This Thing With Charlie

“It’s only words,” Charlie would have said. “Words don’t define you. You are just what you are, and you can’t help who you fall in love with.”

Not that Charlie is in love with me. Not the way my heart has decided that he’s the only thing allowed in that big cavity in my chest where my feelings hang out.

“I’m in love with Charlie,” I say to the mirror instead. “I’m in love with him, and I don’t know what to do with all that.”

This thing with Charlie? It has to end. I can’t go on like this. I just…

“Get a grip, Daniel,” I say to the face in the mirror. “Get a fucking grip.”

This thing with Charlie started six months after my divorce finally came through. At the time, I had just moved into the modern-looking budget hotel on the corner of Chistleworth’s town square, having put my meagre belongings from thirty-two years of living into a weird green storage facility on the other side of town. Everything left of my old life, and everything I now owned, securely packed up in pristine cardboard boxes with my surname neatly printed on barcoded labels. Now, it also included an official letter declaring me, once again, a free man.

I didn’t feel free. I felt burdened with a life I didn’t know what to do with. I didn’t even know how to get around the town I was now going to call home, having lived all my life in London. I had run away from that life faster than I could say arguments, heartbreak and divorce.ButI had found myself a new job, packed up the remnants of my splintered life, and decided that life in Chistleworth would heal all my wounds. I had also bought a bike because if I was going to embrace small-town living, I was going to do it properly. No more packed tubes and buses, just a healthy commute along tree-lined streets, with the hills as a postcard-worthy backdrop.

I should have known then that life as I knew it was over. But it wasn’t the first time I had needed to pick myself out of a deep, dark hole of misery, and it wouldn’t be the last.

I knew that with certainty now as I slowly unwrapped myself from the comfort of sleep. I was still in the same dingy hotel room with its sleek Scandinavian-wood theme, white crisp linen and framed cheery prints on the walls. It was just that I intuitively knew that he was gone, and the clouds sailed into my head, humming the inevitable song of depression and grief.

He was gone. Just like he said he would be.

I tried to sniff the bedlinen, hoping to catch a lasting memory of him, only to find the sheets smelling of detergent and the pillows of nothing at all. It was almost like I’d imagined him, and that nothing from the last week had been remotely real at all.

I sat myself up and tried to gather my thoughts. They were all over the place, half screaming at me and half wanting to make me cry. The rest of me?

I was not a hopeless mess. I was not unable to love. Nor was I unable to find someone to love me back. I had so much more to give, so much more to discover, and I thought I could be happy again—one day. If I could just manage to wake up in the morning and figure out how to be me because this new me was like some kind of crazy cartoon version of myself. I needed to learn to be someone who was more normal because I realised that I had absolutely no idea what to do with this strange person I had mysteriously become.

So, I threw the covers back over my head and let myself sink into darkness as the alarm on my phone set the world alight with its almighty electronic shriek.

I supposed it was time to get real. Wake up. Stop trying to be something I was not.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and hobbled out into the bathroom, the stark light from the bathroom mirror making me look even paler and more dishevelled than normal.

“Hello, Daniel,” I said to myself in the mirror, grimacing back at my reflection. My hair was too long, unkempt and straggly around my face which was blotchy from sleep. Justine used to say that I looked like an older, scruffier version of fitness guru Joe Wicks with my messy dark curls and stubbly chin. Just less muscular and a bit more mature.

“Homosexual…” I said sternly. “I am a homosexual man.”

I giggled, feeling embarrassed at the words coming out of my mouth. If Charlie were here, he would’ve laughed. Joe Wicks would have told me to hit the floor and do push-ups until I cried.

“It’s only words,” Charlie would’ve said. “Words don’t define you. You are just what you are, and you can’t help who you fall in love with.”

Not that Charlie was in love with me. Not the way my heart had decided that he was the only thing allowed in that big cavity in my chest where my feelings hung out.

“I’m in love with Charlie,” I said to the mirror instead. “I’m in love with him, and I don’t know what to do with all that.”

This thing with Charlie? It had to end. I couldn’t go on like this. I just…

“Get a grip, Daniel,” I said to the face in the mirror. “Get a fucking grip.”

This thing with Charlie started on December 2, in the year when my now ex-wife went to Lithuania to get veneers and came back with a different personality instead.

She had strange new teeth as well, of course. Then she went back again a few weeks later to fix her nose. Huge bandages covering the face that I nursed and cleaned and tended to, soothing her when she was in pain, and checking her medication when her scars got infected and bled.

I didn’t fully understand why I became so resentful towards that thing on her face, because I’d loved her just the way she was. Her smaller size, her tiny waist and her slender frame. I’d loved her because she was Justine and I’d known her since forever. We’d gone through medical school together, graduated together, had a pregnancy scare together and gotten married because that was what people did when they had jobs and money and wanted to buy a house. That was what people did when they were in love.

We had done everything right.

Justine had always wanted to fix her nose. Her boobs. Her teeth. My teeth. My nose. My ridiculously thick chest hair, my paleness and my weird taste in jeans. I told her not to be so vain and self-obsessed. She sulked. We couldn’t afford it, yet suddenly we could. The teeth thing was first on the list, of course, to fix some imagined fault that I struggled to see. It became the most important thing, and I agreed because she was my wife and I wanted to give her the world.

The truth was, I hated her new look. She loved it. Her newfound confidence annoyed me. She annoyed me even more. I hated all her new clothes, the new underwear she ordered online and her new tanning routine. I hated the looks people gave her and the plunging necklines she suddenly wore, just to show herself off. I hated the new bright red lipsticks she bought. Yet, I loved her. Then she suddenly didn’t love me anymore. I didn’t blame her because I was truly being an arse. I was jealous and controlling and possessive and, frankly, weird. She was nothing like the girl I had married. And me? I was nothing like the boy she used to love.

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