Over pho and salad rolls, Josh asked when I was happiest in Halifax. There’s an image or a collection of images that I always return to, diffused across memory, this one St. Patrick’s Day party at Keanna’s apartment. Watching us in the mirror as F made appletinis, watching F and Keanna smoking outside, their big smiles as they waved through the window. Rowan pulled me aside and said, I can see how much F loves you. It’s obvious from across the room. I didn’t feel like putting on my boots when everyone went outside to smoke again so I piggybacked on F and we stood in a circle with everyone I loved, under the streetlight, warm and glowy, watching my breath mix with theirs in the cold air. In the Uber home, squished between Tommy and F, I was drunk enough to solve the Wordle out loud without looking at my phone, enveloped in the laughter of my best friend and my lover. (It was all too much, the moment too full¹.) Of course I knew, of course I was writing the story even then. It felt like a perfect scene and it still does, every time I’ve thought about it as the last time I was happy (as if that’s real, as if I haven’t been happy since, as if I wasn’t writing it even then).     

Whenever someone loves me I wonder how long they’ll be able to sustain it. In my first year at King’s College, I wrote about narrative psychology as a solution to this problem of modernity – or if not a solution, as a means of construction, of understanding². The self in modernity: fractured and incoherent, desiring intimacy but never fulfilled, a heap of broken images struggling to collect itself³. The modern solution, then, is self-creation through self-narrative. The modern world evades our attempts to ascribe to it a sense of coherence, a linear narrative. We need that temporal coherence to make sense of our atemporal lives in modernity, our grasping and failing to reach. And so narrative psychology prescribes the life story, the linear self-narrative, a neat solution to our incompleteness, our inability to find consolation. At least this is how I wrote about it when I was 19. Now I understand narrative psychology to be as much a reaction to modernity as a response. There is no centre to yolk together the fragments and so we create metanarratives of our lives to cope. I’ve always done it. I’ve always mourned the ends of relationships while things have still been good, while I’ve still been happy (as if even then, I hadn’t known). 

Contemporary narrative psychology suggests that the unfulfilled desire for a life partner presents the greatest problem to the completion of the modern self. When I was 19, I loved someone who hurt me in ways that I still find hard to talk about. I was barely real to L, barely real to myself, and so the things he did to me weren’t really real, either. Putting a name to something makes it real: isn’t this what narrative psychology promises us? In the early days of all of it, when the three of us still hung out together in that basement apartment, S said, even if L and I broke up, I would still be a real person to him. I misheard, I thought S had said I wouldn’t be real, and I accepted this mutely at the time. I didn’t expect that in the years that followed, S would become more real to me than anyone else, and in the process, I would become real, too. At least we would within the Halifax narrative, before it unravelled. This was the story: I lived with my best friend, we bought bread and strawberries at the farmer’s market and duck fat at the French butcher shop, he left breakfast sandwiches outside my door when I was too hungover to make it to the kitchen and I wrote papers in the cafe while he served honeycomb lattes to tourists with an hour to kill. In the end there was a cleavage and I saw myself as no longer real to him in the way I’d believed we were to each other, two best friends, two perfect characters in a perfect story. I was left with images: how he glowed in the kitchen the night I was out of my mind, when we were so drunk on our balcony and he said nobody thought about me, the nightmares I had about him burning down the apartment, his sweaty forehead under my palm in the Uber home. The joy of recognizing part of the self in another (mon semblable, mon frère), the despair of losing it. His bad behaviour, a text I never answered. The mess of it all. If there was no ending, how could there have ever been a story?

When I left F, the world fell out from under me. It was a heartbreak so destabilizing it made me wonder how long I’d been looking at the world the wrong way, how long I’d willed myself to see what wasn’t there. In my notes from a flight to Montreal that autumn after I left them, when life grimly kept moving even after my own momentum had lurched to a halt, I wrote about scrolling through my camera roll, taking inventory of the love I had left. A thumbnail on the photos app insists that one year ago you were in the back of the bar with two people who, in that second, you loved more than anything. S is grinning and F’s eyes are wide, a glass of beer held to their lips, their arm flung around S’s shoulders. The narrative in operation. Without it, what was real? It made me crazy. There are more pictures at different restaurants, and as I click through, in each one it seems as though F smiles less, begins to look through me, fixes their gaze on a spot somewhere above my eyes. I know I’m just seeing what I want to see, trying to find a pattern where there is largely nothing. Love means relinquishing control over the narrative, admitting you didn’t know. You can only see the patterns in the aftermath. You can only construct the narrative out of the fragments. There is no narrative. It can only operate in its own absence.

Marie Howe: To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason. To get to the thing itself, I need to get beyond narrative. The thing itself: fragments, the sun on my shoulders on the casino pier, my shoes clicking on the second floor of the Killam as I walked through static, binge eating Raisin Bran, my hair in the sink, the Beanie Babies-themed calendar in the break room at the vintage store I worked two shifts at before quitting, the indignity, the bottles of water F dropped off on my porch before the hurricane, after I’d left them. Walking down the aisles of the organic grocery store at night, reading the labels on imported protein bars, and maybe I’d stepped over the boundary of time, maybe I was standing just on the other side. There was no narrative propulsion, no momentum, just treading water, only images, static.

Still, it’s addictive to go back and put it together like this, an epistolary exercise. Why is it so hard to endure the thing itself? After I left F, I called my mom, trying to put it together. I said, but I was so happy. My mom said, when you were together, you called me crying every day of it. I’ve written about it before, but I think it bears repeating. The thing itself is always messier than we want it to be. Why did I try so hard to make sense of it? Why do I still?

When I first met Josh it was like picking up a conversation, a continuation of something that had always been there. I walked in and saw him at the table next to the open window and his deep brown eyes, so full of light, how they crinkle when he smiles. This love has arrived in flashes, in images, beyond narrative constraint. The curtains that blew open at his old apartment and the mornings we spent on the balcony and how he looked across the table telling me about the speech he gave at his sister’s wedding. Sometimes when I look at him he is familiar beyond the months we’ve known each other. Sometimes when I look at him I’ve never seen his eyes before. And I probably tell him too often that I love him and I still wonder how long he’ll be able to sustain it, the love he has for me, complicated and unconsoling. But there is no perfect night, or maybe there is but only as a collection of images in memory rather than a time when I was happiest, a perfect scene in a perfect story. I don’t want narrative coherence, I want momentum. I want to endure the thing itself, I want it.

¹ Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness

² Dan P. MacAdams, Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self: A Contemporary Framework for Studying Persons

³ T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land