I’ve always thought that love is a little bit like Wonderland – a world of bright and painful nonsense. “The rule is,” the white queen says, “jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.” It’s a metaphor for life, or happiness, or disenchantment, I think. Mark would have known - would have spouted off about surrealism and Dali’s illustrations and the absurdity of pleasure delayed. He was all about abundance – jam everyday! jam for all! orange jam and pink jam and sweet jam and tart jam and jam falling out of the sky! Snowball got fat after I married Mark. Her graceful leaps onto the window sill turned into uncoordinated, thudding plops. I scolded him about it on a weekly basis – “Stop giving her so many treats - she’ll get a heart condition!” He would only laugh, and say, “At least she’ll die happy.” 

 

Mark died at work. He was in-between classes, sitting in his office alone. He might have been bored, or impatient, or thinking about what to have for lunch. He might have noticed a sudden pain in his chest, might have tried to call for help. He might have been terrified. He might, a small voice in my head offered, have thought about me. There was a half-empty cup of coffee on his desk when an unsuspecting TA found his body. Mark had walked down the hall, put the kettle on, measured out two spoonfuls of instant coffee, poured in a splash of milk. He had intended to sip it, slowly like he always did. He had intended to finish what he had started. He had intended to live.

​

A colleague of Mark’s sent me a picture of his office door a week after he died. There was a disorganised mess of bright post-its placed on the dark oak. “We miss you professor!!!!” one read. “You didn’t teach me about literature – you taught me about life <3” said another, in neat block letters. I was numb to all of it. The emotions of everybody else seemed distant and faintly improbable, like Jupiter’s seventy-ninth moon. What did I care about the sadness of strangers? The only memorialising post-it which prompted a response from me was bright yellow, and read: “For his mourners will be outcast men // and outcasts always mourn.” I couldn’t help but laugh - Oscar Wilde’s epitaph, used for a middle-aged straight university professor. Was Mark an outcast? He watered the garden obsessively. He drank exactly two and a half cups of coffee every morning. He wore socks to bed in the winter. He was completely, utterly mundane. He didn’t know the secrets of the universe, of course he didn’t – I just loved him enough to pretend. 

 

I didn’t realise I was pretending, before Mark died. I thought I was clear-eyed and level-headed, a pragmatist at heart. Mark always knew, I think – he told me often that I was the most logical hysterical person he had ever met. He told me often that I loved him too much, and didn’t like him nearly enough. I don’t remember the last words I said to him — see you at dinner? have a good day? bye, honey? — but I remember the last meaningful conversation. It was in the living room, sitting on the plush green sofa. The wan light of dusk was reflecting off Mark’s glasses, in a strange pseudo-halo. He was frowning and quiet. It was infuriating - how badly I wanted to make him smile.

 

Before I fell in love, I would deal with people’s bad moods by not giving a fuck about their bad moods. It was a very effective system. But Mark – Mark’s emotions had a gravitational pull. Sometimes, this meant I was floating. But sometimes it meant I was lying, cracked open on the side-walk, Humpty-Dumpty like, crushed into a one-dimensional mess of spilled yolk and bone. Every new expression on Mark’s face made me feel like I was walking on the moon – disoriented, heavy, stupidly miraculous. If I was Newton, I would have tossed that apple right back at the damn sky. Of course, the problem with that is obvious - eventually, it all falls down. 

 

“What’s wrong?” I said, reaching out to clasp his hand. His palms were cold, and his fingers tightened around mine until it almost hurt. “I don’t think I can live like this anymore.” He was staring in the distance, otherwise he would have seen the wreckage of his words on my face. “I’ve got to quit my job.” I calmly ignored the rush of relief flooding my system. “You love your job,” I reminded him, “You said it was the only spot of brightness in a cold, dark world.” His answering laugh lit up his face. ‘One small step for man,’ I thought, breathless, smiling back at him softly. “That might have been a little dramatic, in retrospect,” he admitted. “Oh sure, you’re a little dramatic, just like hell’s a little hot, and Snowball’s a little fat.” “Snowball is a beautiful lady,” he said - and his fake-frown was warm at the edges, his lips turning up in amusement. “It’s just - I don’t know. I feel like I was meant to do something bigger, you know? Something important.” 

​

“Like what? Your skill set is severely limited, darling.” I said, trying to be gentle - but knowing he needed honesty more than the brief pleasure of false flattery. Mark knew a lot about poetry, and philosophy, and romance, and very little about everything else. “I think I want to write a book,” – and the casual tone of his voice told me this wasn’t one of his manic whims. This meant something to him. His posture didn’t shift, but the fingers in his free hand began drumming unpatterned rhythms against his thigh. “Well then,” I said – and his gaze burned into me when I started speaking, his eyes bright - “you better make it happen.” His shocked, nervous little smile unsettled something in my chest. I was flying up, up, over the city, above the atmosphere, watching clouds and meteors and angels pass by. He would write his book even if I had to pull it out of his brain with my bare hands. 

 

“You know - I don’t really have to quit, I could write a book in my spare time. It doesn’t – I know that it’s inconvenient with all the inflation and everything.” His voice was guarded – he was doing that thing, where he would cover up his desires with salt and shame just so I wouldn’t be able to do it first. He did that sometimes – in the middle of a particularly fervent speech, or when asking for sympathy or kindness, he would become suddenly uncertain as though he was burdening me. His knee would begin jiggling absently, his hand would go up to ruffle his hair, his jaw would tighten. As a firm believer in abundance – when he doubted himself, he threw his whole body into it. It was, I thought exasperated, his most frustrating and his most endearing quality. Mark had no idea what the inflation rate was. He might have been able to guess what our rent was if I gave him several hints. 

 

“You’re allowed to walk away from things,” I told him, and he avoided my gaze. I placed both my hands on his face, and forced him to meet my eyes. “You are entitled to happiness.” He was unconvinced. “You’re allowed to have jam today,” I said, firm, “Strawberry jam, even. If you know what’ll make you happy – don’t hesitate.” The clouds cleared from his countenance, and I could tell he understood – that he had shaken off his anxiety. His uncertainty never lasted longer than it took me to reassure him. “I love you,” he said, and the world seemed to right itself, he went back to holding the universe together, and I fell back into my subatomic attraction. 

 

The sky didn’t fall when he died, two days after that conversation. The galaxy didn’t untangle itself into a million useless threads. I didn’t float into the ether and disappear forever. That’s just how it felt. It’s outrageous how physical loss is – how it sits on your chest like an overweight cat and makes it difficult to breathe. Ellen Bass called it an obesity of grief. The thick, unforgiving flesh of missing him must make me the heaviest woman on Earth. My feet must make craters in the dirt, deep enough to be graves. Why, I must be extra-gravitational. 

 

A blessing, I remind myself, to be able to count my losses on one hand. A sad, savage part of me doesn’t care if I lose everyone — if I lose handfuls and armfuls and life-fulls of family and friends — as long as Mark could stay. Just a few months longer, maybe. Just long enough to finish his book. What would he have written, I wonder? Fantasy, maybe. He would have liked that – to make up an entire world whose rules he could create. Would he have typed my name up, on the dedication page? Of course, he would have had to write a sequel. Maybe it could have even been a trilogy - just to give the hero enough space to struggle, to become worth his narrative arc. “It doesn’t matter if you spend all your time losing,” Mark said to me, once, while watching the finale of Masterchef. “As long as you win when it counts.” The hero would have won when it counted. He would have gotten the girl. She would have loved him so much. An obesity of love. 

 

Getting married so late meant that love arrived as a surprise for me. Mark let himself into my life as though he had always belonged there, and had the nerve to act surprised when I convinced myself he was an illusion. I didn’t let myself love him for a long time, not truly, not properly – at least not out loud. And then we got married, which meant I had to love him, contractually. It was easier then – signing the papers made it permanent, made it real. I let myself relax into marriage, like an old wound into a warm, salt bath. It was silly of me. I should have known that the only constant in love is that it is the precursor to loss. I should have remembered how my father looked, sobbing on the living room sofa. Small. Helpless. Alone. 

 

I could have gone up to him, I suppose. I could have offered him a shoulder to cry on. But what’s the point? When you are remembering someone a certain way, lovingly unscarred, any other person is a hostile witness. My father didn’t want me to intrude upon his sorrow - he didn’t want the reminder that his uncle was an alcoholic by the time I was born, always slurring, and banned from almost all the pubs in England. I have forgotten the last words I ever said to Mark, and I have forgotten the last words he ever said to me. I would prefer to keep it that way. My vision of Mark is wildly inaccurate, and entirely necessary. I am completely preoccupied in mourning his death; I have no space left to grieve his life. 

 

At least this much is entirely objective, factual, an accurate recounting - I loved everything about Mark, except for all the bits I forgot. He wasn’t perfect, but when I look back – he is a giant, astride the world, holding all that was and all that will be in his sky-sized hands. He is the only thing holding up the universe, and it’s him, just him, all the way down.