4th May – but tell me does he kiss, like I used to kiss you? Does it feel the same, when he calls your name?

Do you remember Frances? Slight, reticent; cool bob – crooked fringe; skinny legs sticking out of her ironically, other-era, mini-dress. How I loved her edgy confidence that was punctuated by giggles, as if she was withholding what she really thought about everyone else. How I wanted to tell her that I recognised something in her that I shared, but lacked the experience to know what it was, or call it a name.

Then I saw her again later, with Eggo, and all his other imbecile acolytes in the rugby club shortly after I first came back; her wishing to be anywhere else but there, just as I felt too. I didn’t pursue her, and nor did she me, mainly because neither of us know how to do things like that, but eventually, slowly, reticently, we arrived at a moment where we sort of acknowledge that we belonged to each other, like we were two-halves of a single entity.

And then, I don’t know… as I see it now, a fleeting moment of success happened along and ruined everything. I suppose, at the time, it felt like life had finally got going. I couldn’t see it for what it was: a temporary blip on flatlining life-support machine chart. And worse still, because of that, I couldn’t see that Frances was the real beginning of the exponential curve of my life. It seems ironic now, as I try to frame those events in history, that having led a life bereft of defining features, two occured at the same time, and I didn’t know how to handle them.

I can’t even recall the details of what actually happened; it feels now, like I dreamt it all.  I think I sort of became and un-became a TV writer, and acquired some money, and then did as I usually did, became ADHD-fixated on some single task and ignored everything else. You know, like in a dream, where you leave something going on in a corner, knowing that you can always go back to it, then never do? Then I ran away to Africa to be like Jacques Cousteau. I think I must have watched some Wes Anderson films, realised he had the same taste in music as me, followed up with some Yungian perspective psychological training videos on YouTube, and persuaded myself that no one else in the world could get to me, then went to forge a new life in Namibia. Didn’t I realise that Namibians are arseholes too? And that all the sub-par Eggo’s and that ilk, wash up in places like that? Is that what happened? I don’t know, I’ve been dead for a long time now.

I’ve seen Frances again recently, in real life. From a distance only. She’s a success now. She’s got this app that’s made her some money, and a bit of fame. She was outside the baker’s, eyeing a currant slice (I like to think). She was probably just trying to catch a glimpse of me in the reflection of the shop window, checking out whether it was me, wheeling my mum in her new bath chair, shouting, “Bastard in a basky.”

She looks a little older now – I suppose she would, it was lockdown-ish when we met again – another country. Her face, which used to look like it had almost fallen into the right place, now carries a more deliberately maintained hollowness. More designed now, than the happy accident that I first knew, as if somehow a resolve that once wasn’t there, is slowly rising to the surface.

Does my unresolved inner child want to believe that she has waited for me, or is it that I sense that our destinies remained entwined and inevitable? I didn’t have the nerve to approach her, but I have chatted with her a bit through her app. We both act like we don’t know it’s me – but we do. The other day, she posted to a group of just four or five of us, apropos of nothing, and said, “I am just here to say how much I love you. I feel that I am home here.” Interesting enough, but all the more telling because a moment earlier, she told the anonymous me, that I had said something that, “had made her day.” I know she knew it was me, because a few weeks earlier, she’d said that we would walk the Jurassic Coast together one day.

She has other suitors, of course. There’s this particular creep from France, who’s only recently arrived into our digital space, but persists on saying things like, “I’d love to show you round Paris,” every couple of days. I can’t decide whether he’s a French Eggo, all businessy, with a top of the range car, and a skinny suit; or a middle-aged baldy, who’s never had a bird, but has reached that stage of life where he’s acquired status and a pension, and can present himself to the second-hand market as barely-soiled goods. Tellingly, he has no profile pics.

Anyhow, on the back of her warm and encouraging words referencing love, she has suddenly started to abandon her app every weekend. Where once her main posts came every Saturday, and solicited a flurry of reactions, she is suddenly, conspicuously silent at weekends, only to return on Monday. And then, she acts like she’s never been away – though she does drop the odd line about fine-dining in France, punctuated with knowing, winking, emojis. I know what winking means! I’ve done enough of it in my time. The proof of the desserts is that while she’s away, the, normally prolific, Thierry Crapaud, stops seeking her out with constant messages, and goes silent too.

What is worse, is that Frances has always been, well, if not demure, shy. You would never see a thumbnail for her new video below shoulder-level. Throughout her dalliance with me, and anonymous me, she was particularly so. Now, on the back of a couple of trips to the Moulin Rouge, she’s gone all click-baity. Is it wrong to think of that as a message to me? You have dallied, I have dillied – I have been liberated by my fling, which once could have been yours, and here’s how I now present to the male of the species, like a coquette who’s taken up lap-dancing for a laugh.

All of this has set me wondering whether it’s been a mistake to have taken up residence in the garden shed again, these last six months.