Page 6 of Forever is Now

Ashley Kincade: Ruari wasn’t though. He told me he shouldn’t have let her get away like that. He should’ve held onto her. He was... he sort of became colder. Before, he’d always laugh, but he didn’t. Not in the year that followed. Whenever he and I met up—which, I mean, we tried to do every month—there was always this wall up around him. It felt like he was keeping me at a distance, and I knew he was hurting. But I didn’t really try hard enough to get him to talk. I mean, we’re blokes. We kicked a football around, drank pints in the pub, but we never really talked.

But I knew. Of course I knew. Everyone who looked at him knew.

Hana Burton: The thing about Ruari is that he’s vulnerable. He always has been, but he’s not the type of person to open up about it.

Ashley Kincade: Not to us anyway. It’s the kind of thing he would’ve told Summer about—you know, if it wasn’t her that he’d broken up with. If it had been some other girl. Because those two, they’d been so, so close.

But then he, like—well, it was almost like he had no one.

He started drinking more and more. I’m not saying he was an alcoholic or anything, but he definitely liked a drink. We’d usually have a couple pints, you know, when we met up, but I remember one time—I think it was March, maybe late March—and I arrived at the pub and he’d already been drinking there for a while, that was obvious. He had all these empty glasses on his table, and he looked kind of sheepish. Embarrassed. You know, that I’d seen them.

But he still ordered two more, maybe three.

Julia Rivers: He called me once, when he was really drunk. Like, slurring his words.

Hana Burton: He did?

Julia Rivers: Yeah. I’m still not sure why. I couldn’t really make out what he was saying. I just messaged Ash and Dante about it. Figured you’d make sure he was okay. It wasn’t like the six of us hung out anymore.

Adelaide James: And was Ruari okay?

Ashley Kincade: Don’t know. I didn’t get that message until later, from Jules. And by then, I think Dante had gone round his house. [He sighs]Honestly, I was having my own relationship problems. This girl I’d met a few months ago. We’d had a massive row. And so when I got the message from Jules, I just didn’t really take it in. It didn’t seem important to me.

But, I mean, it was fine. Not like he’d done anything stupid.

Hana Burton: It doesn’t feel right, talking about him like this. It doesn’t feel right talking about any of this...

Summer Taylor-Braddon: Do you want to stop?

Hana Burton: I... I don’t know. I don’t want to speak ill of him. I mean, we shouldn’t, right? But Ruari wasn’t right then. He was a mess. Drunk most of the time. My mum thought he was buying drugs, too.

Ashley Kincade: No, he wouldn’t have done that.

Julia Rivers: Well, we don’t know, do we?

Ashley Kincade: All we know is that Ruari was a mess back then. He really needed Summer.

Summer Taylor-Braddon: Okay, thank you—that helps set the scene. I will take over again now.[Sounds of papers shuffling] So, Ruari and I reconnected a year later. It was the summer of 2014, and I was close to dropping out of university, finding that academia just wasn’t right for me. He’d just finished an apprenticeship. And it was all totally unexpected—for both of us.

[She takes a deep breath] It was stormy that day, and I—I still find it weird talking about this. Because this is part of the story where it’s all about my sexuality and... I just feel like, I’m ‘outing’ myself again. Though of course it’s not like when you did that for me, is it, Adelaide? What? No comment here? Cat got your tongue? Wow.

Hana Burton: Uh, Summer, do you want us to leave, if you’re talking about this?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: Nah, it’s fine. But, see, Adelaide? That’s what decent people do. They think of others.

Anyway, the advisors I spoke to recommended that you were all here when I talk about this for the first time. They said that because asexuality is not often talked about and there’s an air of mystery about it, that it would come across—what was it? More authentic? If I spoke about it casually for the first time in this project, with friends present. That then it wouldn’t seem like this big secret or something that should be hidden away and not talked about in front of others.

Ashley Kincade: As long as you don’t get too soppy on us with your love story. [He laughs]

Summer Taylor-Braddon: [She clears her throat] So, in the last year in London, I’d started to find out about queer spaces, because my roommate Charlotte had joined the LGBTQIA+ society at uni, and she’d dragged me along to the socials. I learned about asexuality at one of them, from a pretty cool guy with spiky purple hair. And I started wondering,Is this me?

With the first year of my undergrad studies out the way, I returned to Devon, dropped my suitcase off at Mum’s new house—she’d just had to move because the downstairs had flooded, but the landlord had another property vacant that she could move into—and so there I was, arriving at this strange new house. She’d left the key under the mat at the back of the house for me, and although I’d seen photos of which would be my room, it didn’t seem right for me to go and settle myself in. I needed to be shown.

I had about an hour before I guessed she’d get in, and so I sat at the kitchen table, my phone in hand. It was reassuring, seeing the familiar marks on the kitchen table—ink stains and water rings from mugs of hot drinks placed on the wax surface when one of us had forgotten to use a coaster—but it was also eerie. Looking at the pale-yellow tiles over the sink. The much bigger room. The built-in fridge and dishwasher with their matching aluminum finishes. It didn’t feel like home, so I did the thing I’d grown accustomed to doing of late, when I was anxious.

I was Googling on my phone, and I’d been researching more and more about asexuality, feeling like it was a safe and welcoming space that might just help me. Might explain me. I wasn’t broken. But I was still skeptical, reluctant to use the word. Probably because of the negative connotations—I’d seen some talk of it in the forums. How people laughed at asexual people, sometimes. Saw us as plant-like, not human. Something wrong with us.

Wrong with our thinking, our feelings.

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