Page 12 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

Thirty. FUCK. How did this happen? It’s really taken me by surprise, like a bath that runs too quick in a hotel room and is about to overspill and flood. I’ve woken from a long hot summer of twenty-nine years and suddenly a brutal everlasting winter is coming and I didn’t prepare for it because I’ve been dicking about, thinking I was immortal and that life had no consequences. Suddenly I’m scrambling around for miracle eye creams; am I meant to be making collagen bone-broths or to be vegan? Why did nobody warn me that UNLIKE ALL OTHER BODY HAIR if I plucked all my brows off as a teenager they’d take an entire lifetime to grow back? And now I’m just desperately waiting for the day they announce that skinny/bald brows are back in fashion. Why didn’t I drink more water? Gallons of the stuff. Why did I drink all that tea and stain my teeth? Nobody needs that much tea in one day, ever. Why didn’t I exercise and tone? I did eat two fistfuls of food as my portion sizes, but my fists were inside generous oven mittens. Or BOXING GLOVES. Why do I still wear the same bobbly bras I wore when I was nineteen? Why do I sleep in a massive oversized t-shirt for a marathon I definitely didn’t run? Why do I own so many fucking tote bags for corporate events I definitely didn’t go to? Why is my whole wardrobe full of clothes reserved for a Cinderella ball that I never get invited to because it doesn’t exist? Why am I excited to go to the Big Supermarket? Like it’s a day out. Only to find myself crying in that Big Supermarket, panic buying, my basket full of dark green leaves, vacuum-packed mackerel and Yakult. Overwhelmed by the vitamins. It’s time to take evening primrose, isn’t it? Burp up repeats of cod liver oil. I could have sworn that yesterday, when the cheap semi-permanent ‘chocolate’ box of a home hair dye kit hit my basket with a hopeful plop, the woman on the front of the packaging, with her perfectly shiny dark chocolate wig, jeered at me through her white-toothed smile and said, ‘You silly, silly girl.’

Oh, NOW you tell me I was meant to be taking care of my mental health the entire time too? Oh, for fuck’s sa—

Thirty years spent as an optimistic feminist and now I’m deemed an adult purely because of my age. I still secretly look at emerging girl bands and, honestly, in my head, I believe with my whole heart that I could slip in as a fifth member and the general public would be none the wiser. I thought that by now I’d have everything sorted and be a millionaire mother of five happy gorgeous children with reels of Super 8 footage of me looking glorious in a big floppy hat at the beach to play as a montage at my funeral to Spice Girls’ ‘Viva Forever’. I thought I’d be living in a mansion, CEO of some ginormous company, and have travelled the world. I’m not and I haven’t. What made me think that taking out that student loan was for fun times? I thought I’d be elected the next poet laureate and I’m not even on the poet laureate choosers’ radars. I thought I’d have a pierced belly button, for crying out loud! At the very least I thought I’d like the taste of anchovies, but I haven’t even become sophisticated enough for that. Even if I was a millionaire, turns out that in London, a million gets you a normal house. Not the house in Home Alone that I just assumed I’d be living in aged thirty. Put it this way – the thought of a child drawing me now scares me. Would they see me as an old woman? And why am I the only one with wrinkles anyway? Oh, because all my friends are secretly running off and betraying me by getting Botox and pretending it’s just ‘good foundation’.

I’m not being ungrateful; I’m just saying it how it is: thirty is the biggest disappointment since Sea-Monkeys. Look, I know I’m not old. I know thirty isn’t old. I get it. I’m just not there yet. I still have to make an ‘L’ to show me the difference between left and right. I still think I’m in a music video when I walk to the train station with my headphones in, listening to the same songs I always did with lyrics about our ‘thirties’ thinking thirty was so old! And oh, now I’m just still listening to that music without a shred of irony like nothing has changed, oh ha, ha, ha. Songs from my youth are making comebacks as samples. Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ probably counts as Dad-Rock. It’s DE-PRESS-ING. Sometimes I find myself googling how old actors were in films who once looked old to me to find out that they were in fact younger than I am now at the time of filming and they look like my friends. The dads in the films I used to watch as a kid look hot, like I’d be lucky to get with them. Fancying the boybands I used to like makes me feel like I need to hand myself in at the local police station.

I don’t feel old in my soul – that’s why it takes me by surprise that my knee cracks when all I’m doing is climbing a singular stair, that my back hurts for no reason other than I laid in a bed and slept. That if I were to ever have too many tequilas and perform a spontaneous roly-poly in a friend’s living room, I’d have to retreat for a week afterwards. That I have to listen to an audiobook so I don’t have to be alone with my thoughts. That I’m still gobsmacked at the price of a Freddo. It’s in the way teenager’s eyes pass over me like I’m nobody; they no longer want to mug me in the same way, never mind chat me up. And all those things I always said I was so sure would come back around … have not.

I message back: ahaha

Even though my face is not smiling one bit.

Ronks replies with a laughing face and sends back a photo of herself glowing at pregnancy yoga. And oh, and here’s that pie recipe I was telling you about.

See? We’re OLD.

Thanks Ronks x

I hope I didn’t tell Jackson I caught the bouquet last night? Cheesy rituals like this annoy him. They’re gimmicky. Tacky. Uncool. He hasn’t mentioned it but he’s obviously seen the massive bouquet of white fucking roses in our bedroom. If he asks, I’ll say I was given them. That they were left behind on the table at the end of the night. I can’t say the truth: that I chased, hunted and killed for them. It’s embarrassing, desperate. It’s out of character. An act of madness, maybe? A cry for help?

He comes up for air. ‘God, got sucked into a vortex there, hate this stupid thing.’ He throws his phone into the blankets. ‘Right.’ He springs up. ‘Coffee?’

Jackson works (long, stressful, boundary-less hours) at the ad-company KTPLT (catapult – don’t ask me why they’ve spelt it like that) – where I met him, just over five years ago, after they commissioned me to do some writing. It’s now where I continue to help out making their pitches and treatments poetic. I work from home, occasionally going into the office for a meeting (enjoy free snacks, feel sense of community). I remember the first time I met Jackson, this gentle giant, ducking down to shake my hand. The eye contact – true and deep. Snap. Talking in the meeting room with his colleagues, all strangers to me, Jackson made me feel so relaxed, his hands animated and open. I actually thought, at first, he’d be PERFECT for Aoife. The two of them would get on so well – they’re both kind and funny, with that nonjudgemental frankness that I subconsciously always look for in a person – but when I spoke, it was like I was reading on stage and he’d paid for the best seat, his elbow on the meeting table, his fingers twisting his ear, hanging on his lobe. He was flirting. I remember sharing an idea I had for a trainer ad that was so far-fetched and ridiculous (based on a folk story about how shoes were invented and involved covering the ground with fake-leather) and – for some reason – it tickled him. He laughed easily and freely, his face scrunched up, tears rolling down his cheeks, which obviously made me laugh. The rest of the room like what is going on here? His arms hugging his belly, how a child might, like I’d shot him in the stomach with an arrow of joy and he was protecting the wound from further attack. Every time I went to speak he’d surrender, no more, go away, I can’t take it. I knew I liked him and his Robert De Niro mole right then.

He never laughs at my stories like that any more.

‘You should have seen Mia yesterday,’ I say, grabbing my granola, shoving a handful into my mouth. ‘She looked so happy.’ So happy it was spooky.

‘Well, it was her wedding day?’ Jackson plunges the coffee.

‘It must be hard to be yourself though? With everybody watching. You must feel pressure to put on a show to give people a good day.’

‘Do people do that?’

‘You know what I mean.’

He does not. ‘Then they’re getting married for the wrong reasons.’

‘Why are you being so stabby?’

‘I’m not.’

‘She just looked … they both looked … so happy and in love. That teenage, electric, young love. You could feel it; it was contagious. I thought everybody lost that when they’ve been together a long time and they’re older.’

‘But a wedding is meant to be a celebration of love, so if there’s ever a day for it – it’s then, surely?’ He sips his black coffee, starts building his little protein shake. ‘But I can’t see why anybody feels the need to do a whole spectacle.’ He still hasn’t mentioned the flowers.

‘No, I can’t see why Mia would want to look absolutely princess-divine with the love of her life when she could be slobbing about in a just-shy-of-six-hundred-feet South London granny flat, in a bobbly jumper saying CARBS CLUB.’ I point at said jumper to make him laugh.

I load my spoon. ‘When you turned thirty, were you, like … happy with where you were?’

‘Are you crazy? Course I was. I had just met you,’ Jackson says matter-of-factly. It’s kind of hot actually.

‘Very cute. But you’d just split up with Nicole? And you’d been with her for ten years, so obviously you had a bit of a freak-out?’

‘I didn’t have a freak-out, Ella. Nicole cheated on me.’

‘See? Nicole had a freak-out about turning thirty.’

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