Girlfriend. It’s a funny old world when the same word is all you find on the shelf when you come to talk about both a woman you lived with for more than nine years, and a girl you kissed just two weeks ago. Need to go shopping for some new vocabulary, I suspect.
But girl – don’t want to say new girl, but yep, new thing in my life, is definitely Girlfriend. Funny, really. Like, one night we kiss, and part chastely each to a different home and bed, and that weekend we’re already parading together in front of the world. And it feels frighteningly right and good and proper.
Then I’m sick for the whole of last week, and she visits me when I’m a sick old man with insane bed hair, whiskers and stained pajamas, and makes my heart warm and happy and content.
I was going to talk about insinuations by the black-hearted that I am on a rebound, a topic which is suddenly at grave odds to my sappy and madcap mood. But pfah. Rebounds are for teens, or twenty-somethings. Adults dust off and get back in the ring, swinging for the nearest moving b… well, you know what I mean. If they have to get up and move, they might as well set their eye on a good reason to do so, a worthy goal, and make straight towards it with no nonsense or sentimental fluttering, no batting around the bush. Unvexed by teen doubts, adults aren’t afraid to reach out and grab at happiness.
Even if this happiness is in the form of sweet and sappy teen romance. Even if it takes me into the tangled heart of a social swamp that I have regarded with dispassionate eyes from a distant orbit for very, very long. Because it feels – and this is more of the scary stuff – like the most adult relationship I have had in my life.
I also wanted to talk about being sick. Sick people should not cook. No, especially not this “soup” stuff. Hearty meals are for the healthy. Sick people should eat light stuff like bread and chocolate and biscuits. I should make a note of that, believe me I’ll thank me later.