Don’t You Forget About Me. Mhairi McFarlane

our relationship was unconsummated, there wasn’t a conclusion of any sort. No conversation whatsoever. Exams were over, school was out forever, and we didn’t have any mutual friends to pull us back into the same orbit, that summer or ever after. When there is so much left unsaid, your mind is free to fill in the words that were never exchanged in a hundred thousand different ways, and believe me, I have. Then my dad died, I quit university shortly after, and really it’s been a race to the bottom since. Lucas hasn’t been a user of social media as far as I could tell from my searches – unless he blocked me from view – or I might have weakened and approached him in the years after. But being honest, I have no idea what I’d have said if I had found him. It would’ve been pretty tragic. Better that the temptation was taken away from me. What I wanted was to hear things from him I was definitely never ever going to hear.

      At the end of that session, Fay said, What if it’s not what happened with this boy you regret, it’s you? It’s the you who you left behind. It’s who you were at eighteen and the things that happened subsequently and you look back on it as a watershed. You broke up with yourself.

      This hit me as fearsomely true.

      I mean, if I was Doctor Who’s new companion, and he was agitatedly racing round the Tardis, throwing levers on the control panel, the noise like bellows starting as the time machine mechanism booted up and saying, ‘Where to, Georgina Horspool?’ I’d waste no time in identifying early evening in a crap pub in northern England in the early twenty-first century.

      A blonde girl in a red dress from Dorothy Perkins and uncomfortable shoes is unsteadily making her way there.

      For the time being, she has no experience of managing chronic pain.