Page 98 of Monarch
I fall silent, processing.
“What?” Roos whisper-hisses.
“Lex’s grandad died,” I say.
Roos looks just as confused as I am. “I didn’t even know he was still alive. Xe never mentioned him to me.”
“Anyway,” Mum continues in my ear, “Lex said the funeral was yesterday, so I assumed xe was in town for that.”
“I guess so,” I say. “What else did xe say?”
“Just that xe was heading back to Amsterdam,” Mum says. “Xe said xe had a really important art piece to finish. Xe called it the best collection xe has ever made.”
Chapter Forty-One
Roos
Two Months Later - July
Lieve Lex,
I don’t know why I’m writing this. An email, for fuck’s sake. You are the leastemailperson I know. But it’s been three months since you left and I still can’t seem to stop talking to you in my head, so I figured it would be better if I got some of those words out of my brain and onto, not paper, but a screen.
Two months ago, we heard through Mari’s mum that you were headed back to Amsterdam. We also heard in the same conversation that your grandfather had died. We were sorry to hear that. We hope it wasn’t too heavy.
I’m saying ‘we’ a lot, and that’s because we are a we, Mari and me. We are still living together. We eat our meals together and we sleep in the same bed together. We still go to QISS every Sunday night together, sometimes on Fridays too. We don’t say it to one another, but I suspect the reason Mari is so keen to go regularly is because like me, they go there hoping you’ll show up.
I search for you everywhere I go. While riding my bike, while in Albert Heijn doing theboodschappen, while drinking in the bars near my work on a Friday evening, while laying in Oosterpark with Mari on weekends now the weather is warmer. Sometimes I catch them looking for you too, but they would never admit it and I don’t have the heart to challenge them.
The only sign of you we’ve received came two weeks after you left. Two paid for memberships to QISS. I asked Joel to find out who was behind them, but he refused to tell me. Data protection or some shit. I pestered him to find out but he told me ‘not to look a gift horse in the mouth’ which is a ridiculous English saying. And you say Dutch phrases are the worst!
I’m 99% sure our memberships are from you. And I’m 99% sure you want us to use them. So we do.
My epilepsy is under control. I’ve only had one seizure since you left – the week after, in fact – and it lasted less than ten minutes. I was on my own and I was fine. I actually needed that, I think. I needed to know that I could navigate it on my own.
Just like I needed that night topping you and Mari. To know my illness has made me stronger not weaker.
I never thought I’d say this, but I feel like getting epilepsy was a missing puzzle piece I didn’t know I was missing. I know you’re supposed to say things like that about people you fall in love with, or maybe about your child or a new pet, but all my life I have wanted to feel complete and whole in my own body. All my life, I’ve wanted to feel like myself, in the skin I was born in. All my life, I wanted to be able to look in the mirror and love not necessarily what I saw on the surface, but what I saw inside. Because there is so much to see in a person. I didn’t realise this until epilepsy came along and showed me that no matter how perfect somebody may seem on the outside, you have no idea what’s going on in the inside.
It sounds too easy, too simplistic, but I think I stopped worrying about my outside appearance a lot once I was diagnosed with epilepsy and really had to focus on my inner workings.
I realise now that most of our relationship, both before and after Mari, especially in those months after my diagnosis, you focused on me. On my inner workings. On my health. On my well-being. Selfishly, I loved that. I think, at the time, in the beginning,after we first met, I also needed it. I know I tried to get you to open up, and I asked questions you dodged or didn’t answer, and I got frustrated on your quiet days, or when you’d go out for ‘a drink’ with your artist friends and then not reappear for thirty-six hours, but I know now I didn’t push it very much because I liked your focus being on me. On my struggles. On my transition. On my vulnerabilities.
That was wrong of me, Lex. And I’m sorry.
Conversely, I’m also sorry for pushing you that night in QISS. There was a time and a place for that conversation and it wasn’t that moment, in that bed.
But I’m not sorry for saying everything else I said, when we played Imagine. You and I both know I wasn’t really imagining, I was, in fact – for want of a word that’s less wanky, as Mari would say – manifesting. I was manifesting what I want. I was envisaging our future together. I was making plans.
I wish I’d done it in a better way. I wish I’d told both you and Mari that that was what I wanted, that that’s what I believe is possible. And not just possible but powerful and beautiful and so very fucking hopeful.
You’ve always given me hope, Lex. I’m only sorry I didn’t do the same for you.
But I will. If you come back, I will be your hope.
Fuck, even if you don’t come back, I am still your hope. I will always, always hope for you.
Heel veel liefs,
