29 :

I woke with a start. I always wake with a start. Often I try to pull myself out of bed, but it fails. I am not awake then : merely I am conscious. In some way aware.

There’s no easy way to wake up. You can try and hide, try and remain submerged in a dream world, but you always get pulled back up.

Gravity works. It always pushes you down. It always pulls you up to the surface. And those first moments of consciousness always feel to me like The Bends. A world bent out of shape, being forced to suddenly submit to a new, ugly pressure.

I woke in a strange bed. That’s why I woke with a start. I didn’t recognise this place. From the dim amounts I can see I can make out a television, a dresser, a bedside table, a make-up cabinet. A small CD player. An alien world made of familiar objects. And yet something I could never find in myself to recognise as less than threatening. Not yet.

The trick is not to panic. I hear someone’s heavy breathing.

I remember. I couldn’t forget - but for a short while, the first few disorientated seconds - I had no memory. The amnesiac Generation. The one that walks out of things and pretends that nothing ever happened, that there was no history beyond last nights TV and Star Wars.

This is her room. I turn around, and see the dim outline of her sleeping form. Her hair has fallen halfway down her back, the sheet covering our bodies. I tried not to move to let the draught into her and chill her. Her hair was the first thing I saw. The outline of her back, the softness of her skin.

We made love last night. I’d forgotten what it felt like to actually make love. I’d forgotten what it felt like to go to bed with someone and do something other than empty, soulless, animal fucking. To do something other than meet strangers, and to be fucking a stranger. What it felt like to do something that felt like it meant something, as opposed to two people wasting time and devaluing the most sacred gift that you give someone, turning love into some kind of sport.

What it felt like to be with someone who could love you, who liked you, who gave the gift of their body as an act of affection, not an act of boredom and ritual.

Afterwards we slept.

When you’re asleep - truly asleep, not just stealing moments from a world of stress and employment - time is elastic. An hour passes in the blink of an eye. And so, between my eyes closing and them opening, hours had passed.

I felt newborn. As if an old life has ended, a new one had begun.

The next morning we slumbered in her room. Her flatmates were oblivious to the world in the surrounding rooms, unconscious, having stayed up too late watching bad television and smoking.

The world was hazy. I slept like a child in the womb; warm, protected, ignorant of the darkness. Thin shafts of light cut through the darkness, through the cracks in the curtains. I didn’t see them.

Consciousness came in slow, lonely steps. Mumbles and odd words. It didn’t feel right holding her. It didn’t feel right not holding her. I had been out of practice.I had forgotten what it was like to love.

For a short while, for a golden hour, a golden day, a week, months, years maybe, our love would blossom in the honeymoon period. A flower.

Everything was right. Sunlight brought in new colours. All those who didn’t love were deprived, living in madness. If only they had someone else, some chemical they could react to. Something that they could mix with, some walking chemistry that for a while could glow, and then maybe explode, leaving nothing but damage. Every relationship of mine had failed : every one of the others. With that high a failure rate, the future doesn’t look good.

The future never looks good. Dry oil wells. Recending hairlines and icecaps. Expanding waistlines and debt payments. But maybe, just maybe. Maybe every little thing is gonna be alright. Like the song. Maybe it wouldn’t be. But if it wasn’t, then the hope of love, the false dawn that could cure all ills, would not blind them.

Love is just a different set of problems. But a set of problems I would always accept.

In the morning she stirred gently. Mornings are always the worst. Where you have to face the wreckage of the night before, the consequences. Waking up next to a strangers face.

This would not be a regret, but a glorious moment of love.

Be cool, take it all in your stride. Act like you’ve done this before. She fumbled in the bed, rolled over, and wrapped an arm over me, dimly coming to consciousness. This is not some disastrous mistake. Unlike so many other mornings. Today could be beautiful.

She didn’t recognise me either. It’s the way of the world. Instead, like me, in the haze of halfsleep, she rolled over and embraced me. Her eyes blinked open slowly, her lips blew me a kiss. Through half-opened eyes she spoke.

“Morning, darling” she said, half slurred in the haze of consciousness.

“Urrrr” I replied. Eloquence was always my strong point. I said the first thing I could think of, something useless. “Morning”

I blew a kiss back. How cheesy. I am King Cheese. Master Of Cheeses. Cheesus of Nazareth.

She smiled, looked over at the cabinet. Half yawned, half moaned. Through habit, her hand reached over, looking for a small piece of plastic with a red LED display that read four numbers.

It was a good thing it was a Saturday morning. She ruffled my hair, called me by my secret name, the name that lovers share between themselves that means nothing to anyone else, but a word that is changed forever. A simple obvious word.

We all have two names. One for the two aspects of our personality - the lover, and the unloved. The light and the dark. The duke and the messiah. The man I was, the name I was born with, and the scruffy space pirate, Han Solo. The man I would never be, for the love that that secret name belonged to was no more. Another secret name. A new name.

I smiled. We were already building our mythology. We were already carving out our history together. We were already building a new future.

Instinctively my arm snaked out behind her, my fingers stroking her back. I was still stealing glances at her body, the curves and the contours. Even after seeing your twenty third naked body, the novelty never wears off.

I took her offer of a cup of tea, and wondered when exactly it was going to be made. I couldn’t take my eyes off hers. I held her gaze for five, maybe six seconds. She leaned forward to whisper something silly to me.

And I stole a kiss from her lips.

Her face crumpled in a smile, as the sunlight caught her arms, and the tell-tale slashes of healed skin on her forearm glinted. As did the mysterious scar.

I tried to put that thought out of my mind. That was a different life. A different name.

A different girl in the same body.

What else to do on a Saturday Morning with a new lover, except stay in bed, sleep-in, talk the talk that lovers talk, and help her with the shopping and a romantic lunch?

I had no better ideas.