Your Saturn Return, my best friend said, will seem to make you trail destruction in your wake. Like the opposite of Midas, everything you touch will turn to shit. My head was spinning. I tried to concentrate on breathing, and simultaneously ignoring the sharp tang of the bleachy, pissy air.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, then buzzed again. I closed my eyes, sent up some arrow of prayer to God, or Saturn, or whomever, and got it out.

Rachel Work

Come on babe

35 Rachel Work

You don’t need to do this

Rachel Work

It’s all gonna be ok

It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t him.

For a moment, I thought of dropping my phone right into the toilet, so no one could text me, or not-text me, ever again. Instead, in the blue light of the cubicle, I swiped away her messages and scrolled down to his name, our conversation.

Can I call you up by sheer force of longing? The answer was always no, but it didn’t seem to stop me trying.

There were some days when – for no real reason at all, the angle of the sun, the cloudlessness of the sky – I’d be sure he’d message me. He’d say, I’ve missed you so much, these last few months, I know now I just want to be with you. I’d check my phone all day, until the evening, when it began to be clear I’d been wrong – but how? It just never made sense.

I need more time, he’d said. I need more time.

I’d been sure he’d text me today. My birthday, by some weird fluke, also happened to be what in Poland would be my imieniny: the celebration of the saint who shared my name. ‘It’s very special,’ he’d told me when he first realised, ‘it means you’re very special,’ and for a while I’d let myself believe him; or let myself believe, at least, that to him I might be. 36

People tell you everything. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they already had, or maybe they never would.

I scrolled up, up, through our conversation. Even the birds are in the know, he’d written, I saw them writing in the sky / brazenly and openly / the very name I call you by.

Beautiful, I’d written, inanely. I scrolled back down.

The messaging service told you when someone was online, and when they were typing. Twice, after I’d ended things and quit the archive, I’d seen him, typing … typing … and my whole body had been instantly liquid with relief and desire. But the messages never came. These days, though I tried to make myself not check, he was never even online any more.

You’re not there, I thought intensely to my phone.

Then I thought: You never really have been.