Interior monologue

I lie awake watching the stars. The stars wink and the moon hums. I say it’s the moon but you tell me it’s the boiler of the building next door. I prefer the moon humming though, because I could never sleep through the cranking of some cruddy machine. I would grit my teeth in fury and sleep would fly ever further away among the winking stars. The light of the stars is so far, so old. I’d like to catch a beam of starlight and follow it back to the beginning, back to when the star was. Now, it might not be. Would I be able to come back again if the star stopped being? If it died while I was still running along that bright path, would I be able to slide back here to this bed along the brightness that lingered like an umbilical cord cut off and slowly slowly shrivelling? All that brightness and so much of it dead umbilical cords still pulsing with the memory of stars, a sad thought when I look out at the sky.

I looked for you at night, then, still do even though you’re here now. You can see so much further at night by the light of the stars. Did you see me by starlight when I was born? You hear boilers humming, and I wonder did you hear me? You were one year old and a thousand miles away. You say you don’t remember. It was a long time ago and you were very young. But I remember your presence, fat, sticky fingers, comforting me in those first furious seconds. Did you hear me in the playground at school? It was you I was listening to those times when I’d stop in the middle of a game and stare without seeing across the clouds and the sky. So many miles away you were then, but my parents brought me a thousand miles closer. I wonder if they knew, heard you humming at night, and knew it wasn’t the boiler next door.

There were only a few miles left between us then, not like a star away or even a continent though we could have passed one another by if I hadn’t got the right grades say, or if you had chosen a university in a prettier town. I’m sure you were whispering to me when I wrote in the name of my first choice on the admission form. Now you’re here, next to me. Funny that. And lucky. Did you hear me whispering? What if you’d gone to one of those others, in a prettier town? I’d have bumped into Gerard Lynch again and you wouldn’t have been there. It could have been him beside me now. Now that’s a thought and not a nice one. Or Aidan Gallagher. Worse still. I wonder where they are, or if they are. Faded out like stars perhaps. I imagine all those stars and people living their lives that aren’t mine, and I wonder what it must be like to be somewhere else and not be me. Would I still be me, this me if I was married to Aidan Gallagher?

Sometimes I wonder what makes me me. When we’re driving I look at the people we pass, the faces in the bus heading for a destination I’ve never heard of, a country bus turning off from the main road, rumbling into the distance. Those faces, all people who live somewhere I have never been. I wonder what it must be like for that bus to be so familiar I don’t even notice it, to get out at the place name on the front of the bus and for it to be home, open a gate, walk through a garden with my washing flapping, and into a house I have never seen. What is it like to be not me? I stare intently at the faces as the bus turns away, down the lane. As if by scrutinizing the features I will find the key to their existence and know. I follow with my eyes, wondering. You wouldn’t wonder so much if you were watching the road, you say. That’s why you don’t like me to drive, you say. I wonder too much. But don’t you? I ask, wonder? We can always follow the bus and find out, you say. We could follow the bus and when it stops, watch the first person to get out into their country lane and walk into their country house. We could be there just for that moment. Just to see. It would be familiar then. Crush the leaves of the hedging shrubs between our fingers, smell the flowers in the garden. We’d have touched a life and we’d know how it felt. But only one, I say. The bus would move on, still full of unknown people that I couldn’t follow. Is it better to know just a little bit than to know nothing at all? The bus trundles away and you watch me, waiting for my answer that I can’t give.

It’s hard to sleep with so much noise, the humming moon, the bus on the country road, and your gentle snoring. Not like next-door’s boiler. A star being born perhaps. I won’t roll you over though, in case I disturb you. I love you too much.