August

By SM Colgan

She was wearing denim shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt. And it was burning hot and she was drunk on half a bottle of white wine swallowed in fifteen minutes. Not messy-drunk but a little lightheaded, a little unsteady, a little prone to laughter and a little more prone to tears. Not sad tears or happy tears. More the tears of something deep and unnameable and a heart aching to release it, aching to be able to breathe again.

So she was drunk and listening to a recording from a conference, of a man talking about his grandfather nearly twenty years dead.

Perhaps it would be more correct to say she was drunk and listening to podcasts. That was not the only one.

It would be most correct to say she should have been doing neither of those things. Certainly not while doing the washing up, using a bucket of hot water to boil the grease off the pan.

But she was lonely. Lovely not just in a way that was the absence of other people. She was quite used to being alone. She was good at it and it was contentment of a sort to be able to live in her own head, just for a little while. That simplest of desires – the fundamental human right to be alone.

So there she was. And she was doing the washing up. And she was drunk to the comfortable place in her head where though she was alone she did not feel lonely. Though she was lonely, still. In a way deep in her bones, positioned somewhere between her lungs, or maybe just beneath them. Lonely to her very diaphragm but she was past being able to feel it and really that was an achievement.

She knows she was wearing the blue denim shorts, knows the sleeveless t-shirt was grey. Blue and grey and they have always gone together, even in contrast, the blue-grey of the sky at dawn. She can see the quality of light that day, golden and bright pouring in the window. And her, in the middle of it, at the old tin sink. And she pictures her legs tanned and brown, pictures her hair blonde and hanging down her back, the dust motes in the air. But she has never been tanned, has never worn her hair blonde, so where did the image come from? Where, and how? The wine. Pinot grigio. The podcast, that touch of wondering humour, of indignation, of fond remembrance of a man long-dead. And that, too, is dispelling loneliness. Dispelling her loneliness. Dispelling the loneliness of those left behind.

There was something guilty in her listening, something furtive. Knowing she would not be disturbed, everyone else away. So she chose then. Why did she choose then? Was it that she might be laughed at, mocked? Was it the sense of intrusiveness? Never mind this was put out for people to hear, designed so that they could know.

She ought not have been listening to it, but why not?

That guilt in enjoyment, in taking pleasure. The loneliness something earned, deserved. The wine and the podcast and moving past the loneliness.

Pretending it didn’t exist. Pretending it had never existed.

The dust motes danced and the voices spun around her. And she should not have been doing it, more correct to say there were other things for her beyond that. But she was there and that was what counted. She was there right or wrong, grief or happiness, lonely or merely alone, and there was nothing else that mattered.

It was in her bones and in her chest and in the wine upon her tongue.

SM Colgan (she/her) is a bi writer living somewhere in Ireland. Her work focuses on emotion, history, sexuality, and relationships, romantic and otherwise. She writes to understand people who are and have been, and to ease the yearning in her chest. She has recently had prose published with Emerge Literary Journal, Stone of Madness Press and more, and poetry with Lucky Pierre Zine. Twitter: @burnpyregorse.