copyright©2025
THE STRUGGLE TO FORGET
It was not long after the end had begun to take shape, though I didn’t see it clearly then, that he came to my workplace to borrow money. He knew well how hard I laboured for every pound I earned—how each coin carried the weight of hours spent—but that knowledge did nothing to slow him. Sandra was on shift with me that afternoon. She watched from across the room, her expression unreadable, as the brief transaction passed between us.
Only once he had gone did she wander over.
“Teri, what was he after?” she asked, her voice soft with curiosity.
“Nothing—only money,” I said, a little too easily. Resignation coloured my tone. I didn’t even think about the fact that I was speaking to Sandra, who could twist a whisper into a knife. But the words were already in the air, and there was no calling them back.
The following day, the small town’s machinery of gossip clattered into motion. Somehow, through Sandra’s boyfriend, Jack had learned of what she knew. His retaliation was swift—words, sharp as stones fell on my head. He was enraged, pacing like a caged tiger. But I was past being cowed. I despised his obsession with secrecy, the way his greatest fear was that anyone might see him unmasked—especially his parents or friends. He called it betrayal when I spoke of him to anyone at all. Perhaps he was right to be afraid.
In Bagenalstown, news travels with an unnatural swiftness, and rumour runs faster still. This time, I didn’t try to defend myself. In truth, there was a quiet satisfaction in knowing the truth had escaped him. Was it not true that he was forever borrowing from me? I could endure many faults, but hypocrisy was not one of them.
Our final quarrel came at Phelan’s, where the air smelled faintly of spilt beer and old wood.
“How is it Sandra knew I borrowed something? You told her, didn’t you?” His voice was a shadow—low, threatening.
“Jack,” I said, holding my temper in check, “Sandra’s not so foolish she couldn’t guess why you came. She saw you take the money. And besides—everyone I know has known for a long time.”
His anger flared, and I saw the familiar move coming—the threat to end us. But I was faster. Before the gathered crowd, I told him I was done, that this was the last time he would ever see me. I left my half-drunk pint and walked into the night, the cool air breaking over me like water. I’d had enough of his threats, enough of the way fear had followed me like a shadow. They say a cup can only hold so much before it overflows; mine had long since done so.
When we parted, I believed—perhaps naively—that it was final. I thought I’d found the road back to myself, to my freedom. But my first steps down it were wrong ones, for they were taken with revenge in mind. I wanted some redressing of the scales, some bitter symmetry.
At Phelan’s one evening, Gary—one of Jack’s friends—joined our table. I’d once seen Jack surrounded by a cluster of girls, one of them a pale-haired beauty whose eyes seemed fixed on nothing at all. That memory festered. When Gary suggested we leave, I said yes without hesitation. In the back seat of a taxi to Carlow, we kissed as if we meant to be seen. At the disco, beneath the slow sway of the music, we picked up where we had left off, my mind only dimly aware that he was Jack’s friend—that this was the point.
And then I saw him.
From the balcony above, Jack stood watching, half in shadow. My heart thudded in my throat. I pulled away from Gary and went to him, accusing him of spying. He feigned indifference, claiming coincidence. But when I saw the same sly smile on both their faces, I understood—this had been their game, and I had been the piece. I left without a word.
Stan appeared in my life not long after, quiet where others were loud. Once, he took me to a pub on the edge of town—the same where Jack had once abandoned me to strangers. Inside, a pool tournament rattled the air. My luck, it seemed, had not changed; there was Jack at the bar. Stan spoke briefly to him, then announced we were heading to Royal Oak.
Two hours we sat together, talking, laughter easing the weight I carried. On a vast screen before us, boys gripped joysticks, racing go-karts as though the world depended on it. Stan, always with a trace of a smile, kept insisting that Jack was somewhere nearby, watching.
“How could you possibly know?” I asked.
“Because I know him,” he said simply, as though it needed no further explanation.
He was right. Later, I learned Jack had been at the window the whole time.
I have never known the right way to sever myself from someone I once loved. The harder I tried to forget him, the more recklessly I moved, letting myself drift into entanglements without feeling. I did not know how to be alone. No matter whose face was before me, it was always Jack’s shadow in the room.
Patrick came next—a man I dated only to drown another man’s memory. I liked him well enough, but I knew our time was temporary. Once, in a Carlow pub, I caught sight of Jack at the bar with a dark-haired woman whose beauty cut me like glass. I ducked behind a pane of glass, breath held. Patrick asked what I was doing, and when I told him, he only smiled—he and Jack had gone to school together. Jack was everywhere. Later, the cruelest discovery: Patrick’s sister was Sarah—the one who had shared Jack’s bed while he was still mine. Our affair faded without ceremony.
Even Stan, whom I thought safe from the pull of such games, faltered. One evening, as we drove, he asked if I wanted something more with him. I turned him down at once, sadness overtaking surprise. Do I have it written on my forehead—Take me, I belong to no one?
We ended the drive by the river, where benches waited in the dusk. Stan left the car door open, Queen’s music spilling into the night. We sat and talked, and at the end he gave me a single quick kiss. “It’ll be all right,” he said. And for that moment, I believed him.
copyright©2025
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