Composed at 2am, at a distance neither of us voted for
Two Coffees, Both Mine
It is 2am here and breakfast where you are, which is the whole problem in one sentence. Your side of the bed is a metre away and also in another country. I have not touched it. Read this slowly. Take your time with it. Nothing here is going to freeze halfway through and cut out.
Current standings
6,400 kilometres of it
You are eight hours ahead, which sounds like an admin issue and is in fact the entire situation. I have never been awake in the same room as your morning. Your whole day is over before mine gets going, so I never get the day, I get the recap, like a match I was not allowed to attend.
We overlap for two hours in the evening. You are exhausted, I am half distracted, and we use the time to establish what each of us had for dinner. Gripping.
So: two clocks on one wall, and one of them is not mine.
Treat the rest of this page as a formal complaint against the second clock.
Until arrivals, Terminal 2
until the arrivals bench
My answer to the second clock. It shrinks while I sleep, which makes sleeping here feel almost productive. I check it more often than I check the weather.
Now the bit I skip on the phone
Right — that was the press release. Here is the leak.
The version I give people is that we are handling it brilliantly, that the countdown makes it fine, that eight hours is barely anything. I have said it enough times to be genuinely good at the delivery now.
Here is the leaked version. On the bench outside Terminal 2 you cried and blamed the wind. Thirty-one degrees, not one leaf moving anywhere in that city, and I nodded along like a meteorologist with no follow-up questions. I have thought about that bench roughly daily and told nobody until this sentence.
Also, on Sundays I order two coffees and drink both. I have described this to three people as a habit. It is not a habit. A habit does not have a name.
So the countdown does not make it fine. It makes it finite. I will take finite.
Four locations currently holding this together
- The last morning
The bench outside Terminal 2
You cried and blamed the wind. Thirty-one degrees, not a leaf moving in the whole city, and I agreed with you about the wind, because the alternative was saying something true at a departures gate.
- Sundays, still
Two coffees, both of them mine
I order for two out of habit and then drink both, slowly, at a table laid for two. The second cup is not a mistake. It is a seat, kept until somebody comes for it.
- Every night
Your side of the bed, in another country
A metre from my elbow and six thousand kilometres away at the same time. Nothing on it has moved since April. Not a shrine — I am simply not using it, because it is not mine to use.
- That August, 2am
The road we walked for three hours
We had nowhere to be and took the longest possible route to get there. You talked the whole way. I remember almost none of it, only that it took three hours and I would do it again tonight.
Evidence that we have shared a postcode
All from back when we shared a postcode. No airports, no benches, and no wind that was not there.
In the event of buffering
Twelve minutes of me on that road, unedited
I walked our 2am road alone last week and recorded this rather than ring you at four, which we can agree was the responsible option. There is a bus halfway through. It stays.
Emergency supplies, to be opened at the wrong hour
It was the line, not us. Whatever you were halfway through saying, type it badly and send it at whatever hour it is there. I have never once minded the hour.
Go and sit on your side of the bed, which is still yours in this flat too, and remember that we once walked three hours at 2am for no reason at all and called it the best night of that year. Bad hours are not automatically bad.
Tell them eleven more nights, then the bench at arrivals, and let them do the sum themselves. Tell them there is a date, and a bench at arrivals, and that we have already done the hard end of it.
Then stop explaining it. It does not need defending. It needs a flight number, and there is one further down this page.
Send it. Out of focus, out of context, at eight in the morning my time. Those photographs are the closest thing I have to you being in the next room.
My end of it, itemised
Having confessed the coffee thing, here are my terms.
- 01To stop giving you the summary of the day and start giving you the day, including the parts where nothing happened.
- 02To answer at eight in the morning your time and at two in mine, and never to make you feel you have rung at a bad hour.
- 03To say the difficult sentence on the call itself, instead of saving it up for a page like this one.
- 04Never to leave you as the one who books the flight and explains us to your family on your own.
- 05To keep your side of the bed exactly as it is, and to stop describing that to people as though it were a joke.
- 06To have the next date booked before the current visit ends, so there is always a number getting smaller.
A list of small things, none of them romantic
Everyone assumes the missing turns up on the big dates. It does not. Anniversaries are straightforward — there is a scheduled call and a script.
It turns up on a Tuesday, in a queue, holding a second coffee I have no plan for. It turns up when I make a noise in this flat and nothing rattles back from the next room. It turns up at half eleven, when I get into a half-used bed and still lie on my own side, like a man observing a border.
So it is not the holidays. It is the Tuesdays, and no twenty-minute call has ever been long enough or honest enough to carry one.
That is what I mean by missing you. It is also why I stopped saying it out loud on the phone.
You have to walk this bit, like it is 2am again
Four places and a bed, in order. You have to stop at every one, because home stays locked until you do. Yes, that is deliberate. Yes, I remember how long three hours felt.
- The gate
- —
- —
- —
- —
Two coffees. Every Sunday.
Both of them mine.
I have told three people
this is a habit.
A habit does not have
a name and a seat.
A toast, delivered at 2am to nobody
To Terminal 2, and to never sitting on that bench again.
- To the bench outside Terminal 2, and to the wind that was not there.
- To Sundays, and to the second coffee that has been keeping the table.
- To three hours at 2am, spent going absolutely nowhere.
- To your side of the bed, held open in the wrong country.
- And to the second clock, which is nearly out of time.
Before you close this
I have booked the bench at arrivals.
We kept saying we would sit down and look at dates properly once things settled. Nothing settled. I looked at dates anyway, at 2am, on the night I wrote most of this.
It is paid for. It is not a plan to visit. It is a flight number.
Right. Last thing.
I have put your name on a star. I know how that sounds.
You cannot see it from your hemisphere. I found that out after I chose it, and I have decided to call it thematic rather than an error.
Alpha Centauri
Centaurus
- Designation
- Rigil Kentaurus
- Constellation
- Centaurus
- Right ascension
- 14h 39m 36s
- Declination
- −60° 50′ 02″
- Magnitude
- −0.27
- Distance
- 4.4 light years
- Type
- Triple system · nearest to ours
- Dedicated to
- Aarav & Ishita
The closest star system to our own, and still so far that its light takes over four years to arrive. Two suns orbiting each other closely, with a third, Proxima, keeping its distance and taking hundreds of thousands of years to go round. Nearest is a relative word.
Look at what it is before you judge the gesture. The nearest system in the entire sky is four years away by light. Four years. Suddenly eleven nights and a bench outside Terminal 2 is nothing.
Southern sky. You would have to travel to see it, which is rather the point.
Right. The sincere bit, with nobody buffering.
I keep a running list of things to tell you, and by the time our two hours arrive it has gone off, so you get the headlines and none of the texture. That is my real complaint. Not the missing. The compression.
Texture, then. I have never once said out loud that there was no wind at Terminal 2. There was no wind. There was thirty-one degrees and a completely still afternoon and you looked me in the face and blamed the weather, and I nodded like a man who had never seen a tree.
The second coffee began as forgetfulness in May. By July it was policy. Your side of the bed has not been touched since April, which sounds tragic and is simply accurate. And I walked our 2am road alone last month in fifty minutes flat, which rather proves the three hours were never about the road.
You have handled this considerably better than I have, and you have never once made the geography my fault, despite it being entirely my job that moved.
There is a flight number further down. After that, the distance is one bench wide, and this time I get the good side of it.
— yours, two coffees deep
Until the clocks stop disagreeing.
Until somebody else drinks the spare coffee.
Until your side of the bed
is a mess again.
Until Terminal 2 is a building
and not a location
in my personal history.
Go and look at the calendar. It is real.
It is breakfast there and I should have been asleep three hours ago, which is the most on-brand sentence on this page. Go and have your day. Report back in exhausting detail.
made at 2am, badly, instead of sleeping