
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

Dinner was on me this evening. Usually he pays. There have been a number of occasions when I’d planned to pay but then the meal had ended so badly that I no longer felt like covering the bill. So many meals ended badly. Was it the drink? Certainly when we drank less we fared a little better.
Claire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
Sometimes I think about Xavier. There was a time when I wanted him to kiss me, very much. There was a time when I got lost in kissing him for whole afternoons. But not any longer. And I suppose truth be told that is why he was so unkind about my book and why I haven’t heard from him since. He might be old, and he really is very old now, but that
... See moreClaire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
The following Tuesday he emailed to tell me he’d read my book, which was, he said, ‘some sort of HELL.’ I was queuing in the supermarket when I read that. It winded me. I almost ditched my basket of groceries. I did not reply. What was there to say? That was three months ago and not a word since.
Claire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to. There really was no way of responding to it. I sort of feel like calling him now – I wonder what he would say? But it seems irreversible, that’s really how it feels. It’s better, I suppose, to have nothing
... See moreClaire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
why have I changed my mind all of a sudden? Why do I want to give it back now? Is it just that I want to throw something back at him because I’m upset and angry? Am I upset and angry? I am intensely indignant.
Claire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
It didn’t suit us, the apartment. Its windows are floor-to-ceiling, and the walls paper-thin. Too much of the outside world got in, putting us on edge.
Claire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
He asked me if I’d like to kiss him, which surprised me. He hadn’t asked me that for a very long time, but it had been a year more or less since I’d last seen him, a strange year too – it would be forgivable, wouldn’t it, to forget, or overlook, how things stood. ‘Oh,
Claire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
A peculiar intimation came to me in the early days and I understood and accepted that I will be beside him when he dies. It seems that a witness is needed for the event and that witness is me. That is something, a sacrosanct role, which has been assigned to me, whether I like it or not.
Claire-Louise Bennett • Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
I made sure that I always had at least one of his voice messages saved. He could die just like that at any moment.