What do you want?

Alison Eastaway
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

We asked each other, endlessly, fruitlessly, that whole summer.

Sometimes the answer was simple, one you didn’t need to think about: a glass of rosé please, thrown casually over your shoulder as you carried on talking to the cute, young stranger in front of you.

The stranger had Russian literature tattooed on his torso. You quoted Kundera to him and he knew exactly what you meant; what you were using the old man’s words to say. You’d both been to the same metal festival weeks earlier, and the improbability of this was exaggerated by the champagne and the mid-summer twilight and a thinly veiled longing to have something in common with one another. You found it easy to confide in him, this magnificent stranger who described his job as ‘deliverer of dreams’ (you later discovered he meant he worked for Amazon, but by then it hardly mattered). He told you the things you wanted to hear, that you were smart and pretty and different and wild and complex and most definitely deserving of great things. You bade him farewell off into the dreamland from which he came.

What do you want?

I want a man with Russian literature tattooed on his torso, you thought to yourself.

She spotted you sitting alone at the bar, she’d probably seen the whole thing, actually. Granted we stood out a little, a couple (well not a couple, couple: more a pair, a duo) in the middle of all those groups. Sitting close but not touching, flirting for sure, but without that heady fug of uncertainty and anticipation that hangs over those who are yet to touch. She’d seen you kiss him: the kiss that felt taken, not given. And she’d seen him walk out of the bar, telephone in hand. She was younger than you, with a “shit job, no, no really, it is”. She’d led a quieter life than you, never left the city, her nice boyfriend waited for her at home. She offered to buy you a drink and though you knew that you were the older, wiser, richer woman in the situation you let her, because it felt so absurdly nice to be noticed in that particular moment of need; so unlikely that a stranger would reach out in this city so known for its brusqueness.

What do you want?

Caramel-flavoured vodka, please.

Later, the sting of the extended absences, the phone calls, the days and weeks of unavailability sufficiently dulled by alcohol and the midnight hour and a general reckless desire to live in the moment and f*ck the consequences, the question would come again.

What do you want?

I want to see you, to touch you. To talk to you.

That’s all.

You added, as if highlighting the reasonableness of your demands would hide the patch of soul you’d just bared.

Friday afternoon, workweek-weary, in the bright glare of reality and daylight.

What do you want?

I want to stop (no I don’t). I want to want to stop. Don’t you want to stop?

What do you want? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Idontknow.

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