so I sent a “happy birthday” message to him, ahead of time, to give the impression that I would be out of town and busy on the day itself. 

although I’m not…

and he said “thank you”…

of course i fell in love with you through words... we spoke so rarely then, but typed typed typed the day away... worked late so we could keep them bouncing between us, reluctant to drag ourselves away from that vector of communication... keeping it going was uppermost in both our minds then and stuff that got in the way was stuff to be brushed aside.…

we were just sugar, spinning around for the hell of it, trying out for a little piece of giddiness and fun, something to make the time go faster in otherwise boring days.

until the spinning teased us apart and wrapped us back around each other in a foam of candy floss, a new shape, amorphous, light and lovely and we didn't notice it was full of holes…

I hurt myself today. 

After the last two weeks, four days and forty-three minutes of snot nosed mouth breathing throat itching bleakness since you finally admitted you would not make an effort to meet again because it posed too great a risk to your oh so fucking perfect life, curiosity got the better of me.…

In the bar/restaurant, all red walls and dark wood seats against clean Scandinavian birch tables, chic party-somethings attack beer kegs while those of us in the shadows pick out a drink each and something to eat, not watching but unable not to be aware of the fun other people are having.

I want the surroundings and the occasion to warm me, and it…

there are marks on my body that i didn't know about, i don't spend time looking at myself if i can help it. a bruise on my stomach, blackberries drowning in cheese sauce, old before i even noticed it and even now i have no idea what made it. too wrapped up with the hurt in my head. leaving you behind was supposed to stop all that.

there are marks on my…

You will think I am funny and confident and clever and kind and so many things; it will take you so long to realise I can't see those qualities but when you do, such is the power of my imagination that you won't see them either.

When you have been nice to me for a while, and then for some reason impatient and nasty, that's when I will fall for…

they won't see us kiss again, those nameless strangers.

no-one you ever knew or i ever knew saw us, we saved that only for strangers, for places where we were not known. meetings at the airport, pubs that were not locals. my flat my sofa my bedroom, inside my four walls, but i was never inside yours. goodbye kisses in underground car parks, hotel…

its been a week now and i hope you still hurt as much as

it annoys me that you were too cowardly to make a choice so i had to make it for both of us and i don't know how to tell if i made the right one…

I think, as a writer, the hardest job we have is to describe, to make the reader feel pain, to make someone empathise enough to understand why we feel the way we do about something.

If someone wants you, longs for you, wakes in the night having popped their cork thinking of you, having to get up and change boxer shorts; while laying next to their…

"I want to see you do it like you do when I'm not here," he said, part way through that afternoon, lying on his side on my red duvet, propped on one elbow with the length of him, his body length, scarcely fitting on the bed.

"But you are," she pointed out, which wasn't that common, and she thought that really she should be taking full advantage of…

After the distinctly not-Good Friday, Saturday glimmered into life behind hazy clouds, the snow gone and the mellowed light almost a promise of…

I should have been out and about yesterday, and today too, doing things, enjoying being in a foreign country; and perhaps if I was more gregarious I could have done...

Armoured with my innate English class snobbishness, I visited the hotels "kick-back" on Friday - free drinks (at least, up to three free drinks, Michigan state law being what it is) and…

On my laptop screen the camera pans around, picking out the more gaudily dressed supporters; thin pickings today as the sleet slumps down, a few Italians dancing, with shiny gold lamé Roman helmets keeping the rain off, making the atmosphere festive although no pundit gives them a chance of winning the game.

A charmingly stereotypical handsome Italian…

I do love my flat, with its high ceilings and missing walls, so that the kitchen and living room and 'study' all mingle together; like when people are here, I don't miss anything as I potter through my daily life, making coffee, reading, checking out the internet; people only a glance, a smile away.

And I love the underfloor heating, padding from…

The sheets always feel colder when I haven't slept here for a while, I travel so much I am used to it, coming home and having inclement bedlinen, do you get that?

It's funny, funny weird, when you wake up unexpectedly there is only the rectangle of the bed and first you try to work out what side you are lying on, where your feet are, and then your brain kicks in and tries to map a landscape…

Another dose of killing and revenge and twisted thinking.

Another hour gone, such neat packages of time to take me through the day.

After the cleverness of the testator silens, with the wrenched and…

The dusk is hiding any signs of the predicted snowstorm behind a grubby, undramatic dampening of light, and the glow of the street lights, except the one flickering in pinks as it has only a few hours left.

She has gone to her mothers, taking my  little girl, our little girl to stay the night with Granny, the official story is that because of the storm, we are dropping her off for her…

The beach stretches for miles in each direction, shingle built out of thousands upon thousands of brown wet pebbles, like the final resting place of chocolate mis-shapes. At night, you can't see the colour, only the dark wetness as the drizzle seeps out of the air and the waves stir the stones like fingers rummaging through a jigsaw puzzle.…

I'm sure every 'other woman' has fantasized about the moment that the good wife finds out her trusted husbandloverfatherofmykidsetc has strayed; it's almost a cliché. Not that, as the other woman, you are ever short of those, no, clichés go with the territory. Picturing (at a family home, you evil bitch) the air rent with arguments and sulks, waiting with thick clotted breath to find out if it changes anything, anything…