10 :

I had a life before her. I had dreams, hopes, ambitions. And I have a life of a sort after her. I’ve never understood people who kill themselves when someone leaves. It’s just a heartache. An event. Whatever happened, you can get back to where you were first. It can’t be the same. You can sow it up but you still see the tear. You can’t get the time back. You can’t get those long hours of silence, contentment in the same dreams, those short whispered nothings in bed, the secret names we have.

Without her I had to survive. To not survive would be to let her win. She could not win.

Now that she’s gone, life has taken a different shape. I used to live in a film with a happy ending. Where the guy got the girl, killed the baddies, and saved the entire planet. Where good triumphs over evil. Where those with black souls were cast away, banished into a pit of fire by those pure of heart and divine of soul.

Now I’m the fallen preacher, whose wife God cruelly took away. Now I’m the old man without faith. The man who screams to the heavens "KAHN!!!" at the randomness of the universe, at the cruelty of people. This is my middle act, my moment of doubt in the test of faith, where the stasis at the beginning has gone, the redemption has yet to arrive, the Carbonite moment at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

We all have our secret names. She called me Han Solo. And she was my Princess Leia. Starcrossed lovers who met in the most unusual circumstances. I was the handsome bandit, a man of good heart who fell at the hurdle of a bad world, trying to job my way across the galaxy, who met this princess in the most unusual circumstances, with her strange hair and her regal gait, the woman who was so far out of my league she was a completely different game.

What could she want with a scruffy looking Nerfherder like me?

So whenever anyone says the words "Han Solo" now I’m transported, warped back to a dead time. A galaxy far far away and a long long time ago. A land where the power of love can conquer all, cross galaxies, defeat empires. And when she told me she loved me - I just told her "I know".

At least I wasn’t strapped in, surrounded by Ugnauts, and with a wildly varying set of black waistcoats that disappear mid-conversation then reappear, about to be tested in the Carbon freezing process. I’m worth much more alive.

But I can’t do that now. I can’t even tell anyone that "I know" when they say they love me. Not only does not anyone say they love me anymore, I don’t even know that I know that anyone does love me. Apart from my mother, whose the only woman in my life.

Mention of Han turns me around. I can’t watch my favourite trilogy anymore. And Paul is my Chewbacca, scruffy, hairy, uncommunicative, and he owes me. Lots. So he makes it his mission to find me stray princesses who I might get on with, who also need rescuing from a dark, evil fate. Spinsterdom.

What a strange word. Spinsterdom. Being a bachelor sounds glamorous. It sounds as if you are somehow jetting over the Pyrenees in your own 4 seater Locklear as I type. Finding, Bedding, and Killing young beautiful women with a licence to thrill. (Though not always in that order). But a Spinster? A spinster is the abandoned widow. The sad, lonely black clad Scottish Widow, endlessly walking the long lonely mile across Devil’s Causeway.

Of course, after the end credits, Han and Leia lived happily ever after. My impossible princess inherited me a kingdom and a title, we had children, and grew old together.

Life isn’t like the movies. One day Han Solo came home to find Princess Leia had left whilst he was out saving the world from the remnants of the Dark Empire. I had no princess.

All those things are gone. The secret names. The private jokes. The final moments before sleep where logic goes fuzzy and quiet, where conversations take a surreal turn, where a nudge in the ribs for some imaginary crime committed in a dream (what? I was sleeping with Kylie? In your dreams? Why not mine?) spreads out for weeks into a silent grudge, where arguments over whose going to pay for the shopping, all gone.

Those long weeks where sex was used as a weapon. Where the simple things couples take for granted, the gentle caresses, the coldness and remoteness of sleeping in a bed with a lover whose becoming minute by minute a stranger to you, slipping out of your orbit, over the event horizon, into history. All gone.

As if I had never existed. As if I had never even been alive.