It was always much worse at night. I dreaded the bedroom, sometimes sleeping on the vodka-damp sofa even though I knew I’d get no rest. If I went to the bed, I knew it would begin. I’d pull my knees up to my trembling swallow-like chest, grip the dirty pillow and wait for the tears to come. The first few would trace a path down my trembling cheek, pooling around my lips before dripping onto the duvet. I’d imagine him holding me, pulling me into his chest, gently folding his heavy legs into the back of mine. He’d squeeze my fingers and I’d return the gesture. A wordless love song, cocooning us within its visceral lyrics and keeping reality at bay for a few hours every day.

If I woke during the night, he’d kiss my forehead and tell me nothing could hurt us. I remember him nestling his chin into my hair and his toes playfully meeting mine, our bodies sharing so much more than a bed. Now, the thought of his embrace sent waves of agony breaking on the shores of my pain. The physical ache for him only eclipsed by my longing for the gentle tenderness he bathed me in.

Waking now in this filthy hovel, alone and cold, I had adopted a routine, a way to move forward when all I wanted to do was close my eyes and stay still. Shower, hoping the tepid water would wash the sadness away along with the sweat. Dress mechanically, dropping my contrived identity on the grubby floor with the soiled bath towel. Make a coffee and leave half of it to go as cold as my heart.

I’d light a cigarette and welcome cancer, knowing that my enemy’s enemy was my only friend. I’d eat a rice cake, its brittle blandness perfectly mirroring my own desiccated, pain-drenched consciousness. I’d brush my long dark hair, each stroke numbing my senses and rendering me close enough to a catatonic muteness to survive reality. Lastly, I’d kiss his picture and replace it in my bag knowing that he’d never return the kiss with his soft lips. The tears would threaten the dam. The floodwaters swelled within me, swirling into an eddy and calling me into the maelstrom. I’d resist and feign a buoyancy no more real than my badly acted desire to continue.

My thoughts always ran to a question…what am I now ? The answer lit up like a neon sign above a cheap amusement arcade…nothing. He gave me all that I ever valued, made everything shimmer in the glow of his affection. Now I valued nothing, with the exception of knowing I’d been accepted and loved without judgement once.

I’d been wanted despite being me. I’d grab my rucksack and bury my feelings like a gravedigger a corpse. I’d stumble out of the flat knowing that I’d fall, statically aware that he’d never catch me. A broken heart is gravity’s acolyte and worships the chasm chiselled by loss, deepened by tears cutting away any sense of self like waves battering the adamantine, but inevitably vulnerable rocks beneath a cliff face.

We’d been trainee doctors until his murky past had caught up with him and drenched us both in a tsunami of vengeance neither of us could withstand. We’d fled the drug lords but he’d been too brave. Standing his ground was his final bad decision, the knife cutting both flesh and hope. He’d died in a pool of hot viscous blood, spluttering and mouthing the word ‘sorry’. He’d squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes with guilt-laden remorse , before coughing once and dying as I cradled him. They had let me live. Sadists.

I’d crammed the meaningless props of my life into the rucksack and run in search of a new life. I’d imagine him holding me as the train carriage rocked impersonally, en route to nowhere I wanted to go. Hugging the backpack, I held back the pain with a barricade made of tissue paper. When you need someone so badly your body shakes, others give you something so much more useful than compassion. They give you space. Enough of it to make nothing matter.

A year after arriving, the tragic play of ‘us’ had set the stage for the final act. I’d been scraping a living by scraping away the filth others layered upon all that they touched. I’d obsessively tried to cleanse the rank squalor in an attempt to give my half-life something approximating meaning, however false. Scrub enough at anything and you will only find more filth. I’d become a shadow without a sun causing it. A scarred wound bleeding unbandaged and raw. The surface dressing had long since decayed, leaving nothing but torn, ugly flesh clinging to fractured bone with no interest in the pointless partnership.

My train was running late. I leant my bike against the tunnel’s heavy, moss covered stone and checked my watch. This was a connection I had to make. The irony hit me like another train, this one thundering to hell. I’d arrived in this shithole courtesy of these unyielding tracks. They had brought me here with their linear callousness. I’d stepped off that train and marched to the turnstile with a faux bravado worthy of a bad B movie actor. I’d wiped away hot, heavy tears and grabbed my notebook looking for the bedsit address. An epoch away. A past craving a now.

I walked to the tunnel entrance, sat down on the tracks and retrieved his picture. The cracked black and white image breached the damn and I began to cry. We’d catch this train together, cuddling as it rattled into us and onwards into oblivion.