A Kind of Love

We were not in love. When I heard that you’d died I felt sad. I knew that I wasn’t going to be invited to your funeral, because we had met while you were at university and I never met any of your family. I only knew two of your friends. Every time we went out we went out alone, just you and I, to strange, hidden bars where people played the banjo on rickety stools. I remembered wearing your leather jacket as we smoked in the alleyway outside, and I remembered apologising on your behalf because of your drunkenness in a pub on the way home.

I did not have a period of disbelief, when I was told. It came out of the blue because we hadn’t spoken for a while, I had thought of you in the years between our disconnect and your death, but we’d unintentionally kept our distance. We only had one mutual friend, but she was more my friend than yours.

You died on a boat, I was told, in Greece. You had an epileptic fit and didn’t make it through this time.

We were laying in your bed when you told me you had epilepsy, and that it was severe. You told me because I had to keep an eye on you when we were together and I had to learn to take care of you. I didn’t mind. You’d had this conversation with your roommate, Misha, before, too, but not in bed.

I found your parents on facebook two years later, because I was still thinking about you. We were only together for a short while and yet I found that you were appearing in my thoughts more now that you’d died than the you had been alive. I looked at photographs of your funeral and I felt like a voyeur, like I shouldn’t be looking. But I had wanted to go. Our mutual friend said that I could go if I wanted to, she’d given me the address, but I thought it would be weird of me to just turn up. I looked at your parents’ photos, and photos of your siblings.

You all look alike. I wonder how your parents feel now.

One night, after a bottle of wine, I’m back on your facebook profile. You said that you don’t use it much, and that you’d log in just to accept my friend request, and you did, and now you’re dead I feel like I’m part of a privileged club. I now have two dead facebook friends. I’m flicking through your photographs, remembering how you looked when you slept. I go into your friend’s again and I find your brother. I look through your brother’s photographs. You’ve been dead for two and a half years or so, and his facebook has moved on. I go to your mother’s facebook. Hers hasn’t moved on. Her last post was your funeral. I wonder if that’s just because I can’t see the most recent things, or because she doesn’t really use it.

I’m a bit drunk, and I decide to write to her.

Dear Helen,

You don’t know me, and I’m not sure you’ll even see this message, but I thought I’d write to you anyway. I knew Tom quite well, he and I were together for a little while. I wanted you to know that I still think of him often, and of you and your family. I wonder how you are and how everyone is dealing. That’s all.

And I send it.

I suppose it is a kind of love.

Farrah Moore is in her first year of a part-time MA in Creative and Life Writing. She is a writer and mother of two who is based in London. She writes about bereavement, grief, babies and parenting after the death of a child.

12 hours of our (acrostic) love

1100

Waking to the smell of eggs and bacon. You aren’t next to me, but humming softly in the kitchen. I hug you from behind and kiss your shoulder. You turn around. “Happy anniversary,” you say, placing your lips on my forehead. “We’re going to have the perfect Sunday”. I tell you to watch the bacon.

1200

Up for an hour and you’re already dressed. You know it takes me too long to get ready so you don’t say anything, you just smile. I pull my hair out from its towel cocoon, letting it fall down to my shoulders. I turn around to say “What—”

1300

“—next?” I ask, as we come back home from our walk. “Picnic,” you reply, holding up a cute woven basket like the ones from the movies. I light up instantly. “I made your sandwiches with mayo,” you say, then laugh at my squirm. “But you know I hate mayonnaise,” I tell you. You laugh once more then bring me in for an embrace. “I know,” you whisper, “I lied. I just wanted to see that cute face you always make.”

1400

“To many more years to come,” you say, clinking your wine flute with mine. We’re at a cafe now. There’s a folded newspaper in front of you. “Look, the crossword,” you say. “Twelve across. Eight letters,” you continue. I reach for your hand. With your other, you scratch your head. “I’ve never been good at puzzles,” you say. I smile at you. “I know.”

1500

You kiss me twice, then twice again. A sigh escapes your lips. “I love you so much,” you tell me. “I love you so much, too,” I say back. The wine has made us both tipsy. I remember the time you first fumbled over those words. You were scared of the vulnerability but also desperate to let it out. “What are you smiling about?” you ask me. “Nothing,” I hum.

1600

“Is this going to take long?” you ask in feigned annoyance as I drag you into a clothing store. “You promised me the best Sunday,” I argue. “I promised you the perfect Sunday. That isn’t the same thing.” You’re right about that. I don’t tell you this can’t be the perfect Sunday. Instead, I say “Well, it’s the best.”

1700

My feet begin to hurt. I start to limp as discreetly as possible but it doesn’t work. You notice it immediately. “My heels aren’t that comfortable,” I explain. You stop us there and take off your shoes. “Wear mine,” you say. “I’ll go barefoot.” You catch my hesitation and swiftly pick me up, throwing me over your shoulder. “Put me down!” I squeal. “You either take my shoes or I’m carrying you home like this,” you declare. We laugh together.

1800

“—favourite spot?” you ask. “Yeah.” We end up on the park bench, eating chips and cheap hotdogs from a food stall nearby. We observe the people passing by, coming up with stories of who they are and where they’re headed. “See that guy carrying a frisbee?” you ask. “You don’t know him yet, but soon he’s going to be recognised as the first ultimate frisbee gold medalist from the Olympics.” I smile at you and say, “A man made to go down in history.”

1900

Part of me wishes the sun would never set. I tell you the day has been so great, I kind of don’t want it to end. “It doesn’t have to end, you say, “not yet, at least.” I can see your eagerness. You just want to please me. I don’t tell you the other part of me wishes it was tomorrow already. “Let’s go home.”

2000

Of all things, you extend your hand to me and ask for a dance in our living room. I accept, and you give me a twirl. You pull me close and we sway side to side, dancing to the distant melody of a man playing his guitar on the street below. “This is my favourite song,” you tell me. “I’ve never heard it before,” I reply. “Me neither,” you say. You look into my eyes.

2100

“Any second now,” you say. I hush you. We’re curled up on the couch, watching a horror movie you picked out. I scream when the horribly fake ghost appears. You laugh uncontrollably. “I hate jumpscares,” I say out of breath. “I love how terrifying you find this unterrifying movie,” you reply.

2200

“Day has come to an end’” you sigh. You ask me which part was my favourite. “That hasn’t happened today,” I say. You look confused. This time I’m laughing. “I’ll let you figure this one out.”

12 hours of our (acrostic) love

- waking up next to you is my favourite part of any day

Alexia Beatrice Guglielmi is currently a first-year Media and Communications student. Her favorite pastimes include reading, writing, and procrastinating from doing both. It is not uncommon to spot her watching cooking videos and daydreaming about the food.

Seek

I seek for solace in your chest. I dig and carve into it to find a place I can call home. But your ribcage holds a shipwreck, your treasure washed ashore. Your waters seize me and I am capsized like all the other boats that have ventured here before. Your pirate’s smile gleams; deceiving me into thinking that drowning is somehow euphoric. And against your currents’ warmth, all my thoughts are clouded, like a beast, I search to fill my whirling hunger. A feeling of longing arises as I dissipate to the bottom of your seabed, my hand reaching for the surface, calling for air.

Yet I am here to tell you that drowning me will not kill me. You may waterborne my body a hundred times, but I will come back with the same mean look in my eyes. You may have been defeated, crushed by an ally even, but I am not here to give you my condolences. Part of you has died. Accept it. The funeral flowers have wilted and the candles out. I seek for the life that exists after everyone departs. I am here to rebuild upon the aftermath, not sit in wallow and waste. I am here to discover the city that hides under your waves of heartbreak. The world moves forward and I am asking you to move forward with me. Let your waters calm and set the gale afar. The sun is rising and we are awake with it.

Current Editor in Chief of GoldDust and Goldsmiths’ alumni, Anna McNutt’s dream is to never stop writing - no matter what direction life may take her in. Her ambition to make GoldDust a supportive space for creative minds translates in her own personal projects, working freelance as a producer and script editor.

Doreen and Barbara

Some days the branches of the giant conifer tree at the end of the garden sway in the wind so hard I think the whole thing will snap. I watch from my bed every morning through the seasons, a reminder that people are out in that weather, existing, living their everyday lives.

I long for a life I never had.

If only I had more time and I’d seen more places, met more people. Women now can have high up jobs in cities, no husband. Live their life on their own terms. I overheard Mary’s grandchild, no older than twenty-five, talking about her business trip to New York City, how she went to the top of the Statue of Liberty. I’ve never been outside of Europe. Scared of going by myself, I suppose. Stan always said he didn’t see the point, that we were able to do anything that we could

do anywhere else here, in Bexhill. The problem was we never did. Stan would tell me the things that I wanted to do were pointless anyway. My little friends were too gossipy, he’d say. ‘I don’t know why you’ve got to tell them all our business, Dor. It’s not like you do anything interesting enough to talk about anyway.’ Every Sunday before my coffee catch ups with the ladies from church he’d sneer and tell me not to bother going, and I’d walk out the door anyway.

I never realised what I’d missed until I met Barbara. She moved in not long after Stan died. It started with a conversation about the bland food: they make it mushy so the old dears can munch through it with their missing teeth, and tasteless because we don’t digest spice apparently. She said the food ‘wasn’t a patch on the Hilton’. I laughed, thinking she was joking. Obviously an NHS-funded care home isn’t going to be serving Michelin Star meals, but she was deadly serious. She gets confused about where she is and forgets that we get the same dinners week after week.

I sometimes wish I could forget I was here, even just for a minute.

Barbara’s eighty years were significantly more exciting than mine; she was a dancer, her husband an actor, and they spent their best years drifting from one country to the next, making glamorous friends while wearing glamorous dresses. I could look around her room all day at the photographs of her past life, worn out jazz records. Barbara’s favourite song is Girl from Ipanema by Stan Getz, her eyes light up when the soft refrain begins, as if she’s back in Rio being serenaded by her husband. Her lips mutter along with the words while she beams from ear

to ear - ‘... tall and tan and young and lovely

the girl from Ipanema goes walking’

‘He made me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world!’ She’d exclaim while padding around her bed to the rhythm. ‘We’d dance in the moonlight and he’d hold me close and tell me he never wanted to let me go!’

I don’t think I ever felt beautiful around Stan. That was his way though; he couldn’t seem to show me he cared. If I’m honest I don’t know if I loved him enough to spend my entire life with him. You can’t love someone who treats you like an inconvenience. But I didn’t know any better. I thought that was what all marriages were like.

Barbara forgets what we’re talking about in the middle of conversations sometimes, repeats herself. She can’t remember what day of the week it is and constantly moans about the room being to cold or too hot, too noisy or too quiet. But occasionally she’ll recall how the sand felt between her toes on the beaches of Brazil the night that her husband proposed with a clarity unlike anything I could recall.

She has a daughter who comes and laughs about things that happened in her previous life and even though Barbara often can’t remember, I think they just like to see each other smile. Seeing them together makes my heart drop in my chest. I wish I had someone to worry when I get ill, to bring me my favourite flowers on my birthday. Sometimes, when I pray, I ask God why I was never able to have children. That’s the one thing that I truly regret. Not caring for a child, even adopting. I have so much love to give, and no one’s ever taken it.

But then I look up from my spongy carrots and Barbara’s watching me and making a disgusted face while letting the mashed potato drip from her fork; I feel the corners of my mouth twitching and I think maybe things aren’t so bad after all.

Laura Brampton is a third-year Media and Communications student specializing in Creative Writing, from a tiny village in Devon where she found a love for writing because there was only sheep for company. She has a website for videos she makes at: lebrampton.wixsite.com/lebrampton