4/100, One Day

or if not now then when?

Like almost everyone else in the country, I binged on One Day. In less than two days there’d been The Zone of Interest, a party, Frank Auerbach’s heads, emotionally it had been a lot. I cancelled evening plans in favour of One Day, and what a mistake that was. Not because it’s bad, it’s really very good, it’ll win Nicole Taylor another BAFTA, and Leo Woodall certainly one for Dex. His performance in White Lotus 2 was so nuanced, and he brought the same subtly to One Day, quickly shaking off any fear he might just be another pretty boy actor, to inhabit Dex for the duration of the series, and it’s a long series. Not that I knew that when I started it, I thought it would be one thing, and quickly found it was the perfect way to compound the heightened emotions of the past few days. It doesn’t feel long, I sped through the first 12 episodes in one evening. Tried to eek it out after that. Cried a lot. Thought about it a lot. Thought about life a lot. Thought about my Dex a lot.

We all have one, don’t we? That’s why One Day appeals so much, why Past Lives does too. Why we’re heaving messes on the sofa during and after watching it. Normally, I like my art hard and dark and cynical but sometimes, I just want to cry, to feel something other than the void. And God, I like the void. I wish I didn’t.

A while ago, a long time ago now really, one life ended, and for a while, another didn’t begin.

It’s hard really to explain that kind of rupture to people who haven’t lived it. I wrote a book about it and still didn’t do it properly.

In The Last Days, I wrote about many endings. I wrote about Dieter, a German I met one summer in Edinburgh, of course it was in Edinburgh, 2007, and of course we climbed Arthur’s Seat and of course we walked down the Old Town drunk as it got light at 4 in the morning and of course I was in love with him, or so I thought, as much as it was possible for me then, confined as I was, to love anyone. Because also, I’d been conditioned to love God more than anyone else. And to complicate the plot twist further, I was married. In seeing Dieter, I ran the risk of being kicked out the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I avoided this narrowly, later in the summer and in doing so, avoided losing everyone and everything I knew. That came later.

In the book, he goes back to Germany and that’s it. In real life, he existed in my phone, on my laptop, up Arthur’s Seat again one spring when he came back. In my memory it’s dark and we’re up there, the city lit up and the wind in my hair but I know that’s a lie, we wouldn’t have gone there in the dark. Maybe it was dusk. Maybe it was morning. Best part was, he told me he’d been reading One Day and I didn’t pick it up afterwards because I’d had enough of his reading lists. In real life, his presence made things more complicated, because he was always the one who’d upended my life, who’d wakened me up, who’d made me begin to question and to doubt and really, it had been ruinous, but losing everything isn’t always the disaster it looks to be at the time. But it was also complicated because, on the simplest level, he was the one who got away. In being so, I had the safety of nostalgia to preserve how I felt about him.

And it’s the one who gets away who stalks both One Day and Past Lives. The what ifs. The maybes. None of the disappointment of having to stack a dishwasher with someone else. None of the my god why are there two opened milks in the fridge. Just the simple parts: the walking, the talking, the drinking in the pub; the falling in love, not the falling out of it. It’s the unfinished business of it all that holds the appeal. And the memories of those pure times, because in a way that’s what they stay when they turn to memory, even if the memories are misleading, even if it was daytime when we climbed Arthur’s Seat, even if it wasn’t all that, even if maybe he wasn’t all that - it’s a story to tell ourselves.

And there’s comfort in memories as much as there’s pain. You see that on Dex’s face at the end of One Day, for all it’s hard, he still has his memories. Em has them too, in the box she keeps of their photographs and letters. I have lived the scene where Steve empties the box more times than I care to remember, my notebooks the source of much interest. When this has happened, it becomes very hard to write your life down, knowing it’ll be analysed. Weaponised. For a long time, I felt sick trying to write Dieter into The Last Days, getting to that level of emotion on the page was hard when I knew it would be dissected. I re-read emails and messages, building a picture of what we’d had that summer. It was voodoo really to go back into it that way. The past is a strange place to fall into.

After you lose everyone, all you’re left with, apart from the rubble, are memories. It was in a way a mass extinction event, no one was dead, but I couldn’t and can’t access them anymore. Without a thread tethering me to the past, memories mattered more than the present. They became the most valuable thing I owned, but after I wrote The Last Days, something strange happened. I found all the things I’d written in the book, I could barely remember anymore, as if it had happened to someone else. Maybe in a way they had, I’d characterised myself, I’d written and rewritten and written and rewritten obsessively and repeatedly for three years. I’d walked around those memories from numerous narrative positions. In crafting them, I turned them into something else. I didn’t like this, I found it unsettling. But suddenly I was remembering other things, as if in exorcising those initial memories I’d made way for something else - and make no mistake, it was a violent exorcism. The newly surfaced memories tend to focus around my mother, and in a way I still value them more than anything tangible I possess. These are memories I have no desire to make public. They’re mine and I’ll keep them that way. I sometimes wonder if this is why when we’re old we often return to the past. The weight of the past is a lot sometimes, this line from Time’s Shelter one I love, how much past can one person bear. Maybe this is why we dispense with the nearer past, returning to an earlier time to become lighter. I am thinking now of Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms. There is a quote in that that I have misremembered about mostly how all we want is to be told everything is going to be alright. In my memory the quote goes, hoot owls and mama’s eyes, although in print it is hoot owls and papa’s eyes or papa’s eyes and hoot owls. Funny thing is, we never know what memories we might need to keep, or in the case of Dex, when we might need them.

It was raining in Soho on Friday, the BT Tower looming over Fitzrovia. I was trying to track down Barry Lopez’s Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, which wasn’t easy. On Charing Cross Road, I banged into another writer, we talked for a while and then she ran off into Foyles as I went to Waterstones on Tottenham Court Road and it struck me then, that suddenly London is full of memories. Especially this silly part of it, and there I am, at three in the morning trying to find the right bus stop on Oxford Street and there I am in puff sleeves and ballet pumps on Fitzroy Square with that particular smell of dunk in the air and there, running around the Barbican trying to find my way out but every corridor is a dead end and there and there and there and.

It takes a while to build memories in a new place, and more, memory isn’t automatic, it takes events, occasions, place, people; it takes stories to build them. And I need those too, to make sense of now. And because I am hungry to new memories of a new life I’ve worked very fucking hard to make meaningful, that’s why I do everything all the time, hurling myself at things because to not would be to miss the chance to amass something that at some point, might become a memory. Something I might need to reach for in the middle of a long night.

The summer of Dieter was three months long. Felt much longer. Felt much hotter than maybe it was. I haven’t checked the truth of it, don’t need to know the actual temperature. But that summer, I drove home one night, the car idling at traffics lights, the window down, a poster outside the synagogue and it said if not now then when? I thought it a sign then that if I didn’t leave my husband, my religion, my life then, then I’d never do it and in not doing it, I’d lose myself. I’m selfish. I chose myself, and now, I still think of that phrase at least once a week, all the times I want to stay at home or don’t want to finish a piece of work or want to delay living it comes back; if not now then when. Memories are made from life, it must be lived. Like One Day reminds us, all we have are days.