3. SYNCHRONISATION

On the Timing of Love

On the same day that I write the letter to him, on the same day that I fall (at last) out of love, my closest friend breaks up with her boyfriend. I’ve been on this planet for a number of years and I’ve learnt that these things have a habit of aligning. Your period will always sync up with everyone in your friendship circle. When one of you feels like going drinking often the mood transmits psychically to everyone else. You pick up the phone and your friend relays the contents of your mind down the line.

Do we become our best friends? Is closeness the first step to cloning, the activation of some sort of naturally-occurring Bluetooth? And if so, what about lovers?

I think now about all the nights I slept next to him, all those hours in each other’s space. The way, at certain points throughout the night, we would instinctively reach for the other, seeking reassurance that they hadn’t disappeared, that their (read: his) body had not been conjured by the mind. Our hours of waking and sleeping seemed always to align: if I reached out, he was awake. Never was I pulled from sleep by his touch, but I would feel it after a thought or a dream had ruptured my sleeping mind. What was this uncanny synchrony and why was it so reliable?

At the time it had felt like evidence, like something I could point to and say, “Ha! He does love me.” His body knew what his mind refused, I thought. It seemed impossible that he could spend so much time with me without something being transmitted. I am part of him now, I would think in the early hours of the morning. He will never forget me. Then he went and did exactly that.

Now I am forgetting him, too. Every day I think of him less and less, and some days not at all. We are disconnected and yet synchronised, still. What is this supposed to prove?

Perhaps I was wrong: synchronisation is not love. Synchronisation is merely a symptom of entangled timelines. On the drive home — on the last day I would see him — he called what we had a situationship. Two people in the same situation. Two people in the same room. We were connected only by the chance workings of time and space and could be pulled apart by the same fickle forces. Where I saw gravity, fate, design, he saw only coincidence.

In that moment the ties connecting us snapped. In that moment I realised the ties connecting us had been my own invention; there were no ties and never had been. I might remark that this is typical of me: I always seek out design in chaos. I mine for meaning in nonsense. I see pattern, synchronisation, connection, and I see it everywhere¹. Is this what makes a good writer? Or is it perhaps this in harmony with perfectly timed suffering?

We drove further and further from any space we’d occupied together. He said more words I barely cared to hear. He was next to me but he felt distant, unreal — or rather, I felt he had become someone else. It was not sorrow I was experiencing but grief. The man I so loved had, for all intents and purposes, just died beside me.

There had been a night, years before, when we had drove around in this same car. It was after midnight. The streets were deserted. We had only materialised in each other’s lives a few weeks prior, and everything — every look, every word, every touch — was jolting; something would flash behind the eyes. He parked on a quiet street bordering a park and I eased across the divide onto his lap. There was a song playing, something I’d heard a million times before — the kind that had a build-up before the chorus. I went to kiss him but just as our lips were close enough to touch, he held me back. “Wait,” he whispered, smiling. The song built, gained new layers, each strengthening and growing louder. When I pushed close he would push me away again. Wait². The windows fogged from the heat of our bodies. Our mouths brushed, moved apart. Wait. The air passed out of his body and into mine. Out of mine and into his. I felt a desire I’d never experienced before: something hot and angry, desperate almost, like I would do anything to extinguish the distance between us. My body shook with the force of it. I would tear space to shreds. I would kill.

When the chorus finally arrived, he kissed me deeply. Synchronisation was not an experience for him. It was a creation. It was a tool. He knew the power of timing. From the start he knew exactly the ways to make me burn.

1. I have considered the possibility that it’s my own stupidity which makes the world seem so complex, so mysterious. Could the things I label mysteries not be quickly understood and filed away by a sharper mind? But if that’s the case, I am glad for being stupid. The world is infinitely more interesting this way.

2. It occurs to me now that this scene was a synecdoche for our entire relationship. I was always pushing closer. He was always pushing me away, telling me to wait. “We’re too young for a serious commitment,” he would say. He always used the plural when he meant the singular, as though that would lessen the blow. What he meant was: I don’t want to be connected to you. (There was a time when I had interpreted it as I don’t want to be connected to you yet. That time has long passed.)