To the Woman Who Wasn’t Me
I thought of you again last night. Standing on Archway Bridge, remembering Buenos Aires.
When asked why I was moving to Argentina, I mentioned writing poetry and something to do with London’s rent prices. It was summer, and the Jacaranda trees were in bloom. I loved the bunches of jasmine for sale on street corners, prices increasing in increments of ten pesos the further north you walked. At night, the city seemed to expand; hot nights pockmarked with neon and stray car horns.
At first, I had to force myself to leave the house. When I did, I walked until my feet bled. I burst into tears in public places, fell back into bad habits: skipping meals and drinking wine until I passed out.
On the sixth day, I called him.
“Can I call you?” I messaged him.
“Are you lonely?” he replied.
“Well, yes.”
“Call me.”
I’d met him nearly four years before. He’d come up to me in a pub smoking area and hit on me in an utterly direct fashion. He was attractive and inexplicably shirtless. Tall, scruffy haired, with a sexual charisma one would notice right away if sitting alone in a bar. The first few years, we spoke predominantly online and on the phone. Long, sprawling conversations thick with tangents and running jokes. We had similar tastes, both liked the poetry of Bukowski, the scene with the homeless man in “Paris, Texas.” Talking to him was like the first morning in a foreign city, wanting to find out everything. In long nights of insomnia, I would wait for my phone to light up my bedside table in the early hours.
We always seemed at our closest when he was far away. He travelled a lot. We had phone sex, though in person we didn’t actually sleep together. Our relationship became peppered with the names of famous cities. New York, Rome, Krakow. We exchanged dirty calls and messages from them all.
Buenos Aires got added to our list.
In the evenings there, I sat drinking Fernet and counting constellations in the southern sky. During the days, I walked endlessly through the city streets. One day, I bought a jasmine bunch on the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and carried it home, water from the stems dripping down my legs, mixing with the dripping of water from AC units above.
On New Year’s Day, he called me in a bad state, too many drugs the night before. Concerned, I kept him talking for hours. He told me how he had called you the night before, but you hadn’t answered. When he fell asleep, I left the phone line open, listening to him breathe whilst I chain smoked through a packet of Lucky Strikes, sweating on the floor, remembering.
It’d been improbably hot that past summer in London, and England had done well in the World Cup. None of it seemed real. Finally, one night, after three years of build up, we slept together. The next day, I went back to my flat and he went to Warsaw. I had been telling myself that the hope he made me feel was insignificant. But it wasn’t. He had brought something new into my life, had made me feel more alive than anyone had in years. He made me feel real. And I wasn’t ready for that. So I drank half a bottle of gone-off red wine and booked a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires.
Now, as I watched the dawn itch over the Argentinian sky that morning, smoking my Lucky Strikes while the streetlamps burned out, I realised I hadn’t managed to outrun those feelings. They were bigger and closer than ever. I felt closer to him here. The city—like him—had reminded me what it was to feel alive, to love, to want; nowhere has ever stolen my heart so quickly. It was a city of contradictions and absolutes. Street corners so seductive at dusk, only to be taciturn at dawn.
I spent the next few months travelling. I found him in the faces of men in downtown dives in Santiago, I thought of him as I sat jetlagged at a bar top, eating ceviche in Cartagena’s 40-degree heat. I walked up sand dunes in desert towns to shake him off, down mountain city streets in La Paz, through mangroves into a lagoon in the Caribbean Sea at night.
I was ready to go back to London.
“I ignored these shadows of you, hoping my words—the very act of speaking them—might pass right through you, as if you were mote.”
The morning after I returned, I awoke to a message from him. Fewer than 24 hours after setting foot on the puddle-strewn tarmac, I made my way through the exotic cold of Soho’s frosty, foggy streets. I walked quickly, holding myself back from a run. I pressed the doorbell, made my way up the stairs, and there at the top: it was him. “We should get some more wine,” he said, shouldering on his long black coat.
Later that night, when we were in bed, I said: “I love you.”
He asked me what I was doing the next day and whether I wanted to do something, and I agreed.
I said those words again in the weeks that came next. I thought them even more: when I saw his fascination with street sweepers; his strong approval for crying at films; his particular way of asking to steal a cigarette—roll me one of those, cowgirl?
One Sunday, we met for a walk. The trees were starting to bloom along the road, it was quiet on the tube, dusty and deserted with the gentle hum of the end of the weekend. We walked along the Thames, the sun setting, dragging pink shreds of cloud with it.
At Foyle’s, we stopped to look for a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit.
“I love that book,” I said. “I love the bit where he talks about being real.”
“That’s the bit I want it for,” he said.
At a bar on the corner of Frith Street, we drank bottled beer and stubbed out cigarettes into those flimsy metal ashtrays that slide over formica tables but that only ever appear on formica tables.
That night, he stayed at mine. He had never been there before, and I had deliberately barely ever brought anyone to that bed. We watched a Robert Mitchum film and didn’t drink. And when we were in bed together and he was above me, it felt like a quotation from something bigger, something that came from long before. So I said those words again.
In the morning, I made coffee in the two little espresso cups in the kitchen. I had never used them before but I used them then, because there were two.
But he went back to you.
I say that as if it was sudden. But you were there in the periphery the whole time, even in Buenos Aires, before I’d come back to London. You were in the shadows of those late-night hotel phone calls, always in the back of my mind. I almost suspected that some ghostly version of you rented the apartment next to me there, your ear pressed to the wall, monitoring me. He was deeply in love with you, had been for years. You’d been on and off, but his feelings never waned. I couldn’t understand how you were seemingly indifferent to them, why it took so long for him to win you back. So you infiltrated his calls to me. It was the three of us that sat under the La Tipa trees—which Porteños call the “weeping tree”—rising like ghosts above the city: you haunting him, and haunting me. I ignored these shadows of you, hoping my words—the very act of speaking them—might pass right through you, as if you were mote.
But you weren’t mote.
He spoke to me about you. I listened—even though it hurt me—because I was curious about you. I chose to ignore the obvious nature of what his stories meant, taking the intimacy and the confession as a mark of something more between him and me, rather than him and you. One time, he suggested I meet you. It never came to pass, but I’d wanted to. I imagined this imbalance of intel between us somehow gave me an upper hand.
I found you—online, of course—found the photos. So alive, without a damn to give. So brazen, so physically different to me. My sexuality is all tied up in double entendres and floaty fabrics. You? Blonde, punk, irreverent. Staring straight at the camera, whereas I always edge away from it, try to pretend it’s not there.
I think I almost grew to hate you. I thought that if you two weren’t together, he and I still would be. In the end, time has shown that not to be the case. And now I almost miss you. You were a worthy foe.
Is there an end to pain? A destination? I wanted to know its dimensions; the geography of longing, the border to wanting. I found myself walking endlessly through London. At night, you stalked me more than ever. Every place I walked into, I had a sense you’d both just left. Even being unconscious carried risks. He wandered through my dreams, sometimes a central character, other times a flicker: a passerby, a face at a window, a man on a train.
One night, walking home from work through Soho, I found myself walking past his building. It was raining, but I wanted to delay the return to my flat, to my room where he had been. I looked up at his window, but there was no light on. Because he didn’t live there anymore. He’d moved to live with you.
I had thought you were trailing me back in Buenos Aires, through the streets so suffused with longing it feels that if you walk them long enough you might pass enough bars—with their trickle of laughter and tango, a music of both passion and melancholy—that the longing would give way and desire would be met. But in truth, I had always been trailing you. I had trailed you both to an empty window, loitering under a street lamp: a figure, dripping, in the pouring rain.
About the Author
Sophie McKay is a London-based writer, journalist, and playwright. She's written for publications including iD and Novara Media. As a playwright, her work has been longlisted for BBC Writersroom and produced at the Edinburgh Fringe.
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Header photo by Sara Kurfess.