A Grocery List Pinned to Blue(smut)(larry)

Part One

the forecast is

we kiss goodbye and never hello

all kisses are then parting kisses

- saul williams

*

Louis reads the New York Times book review on the tube sometimes. He'll never read the books being reviewed, but he always likes to read about them. He always likes to understand, in some small way, the effect something like a piece of fiction can have on even the most cynical.

There was one that stuck with him, years later – a famous American author wrote a memoir, ostensibly about her husband's sudden, catastrophic death, but it was really about their marriage, their life together, how wonderful it was even when it wasn't wonderful, how memories make the bittersweet more sweet with just a hint of the sting. How lives together create fullness, create an entity that makes loss more stark.

The review said essentially that, too, something about how – Louis remembers this in a paraphrase, it was ages ago – her story of loss wove a portrait describing just how much she had lost.

Mourning has become a private, westernised thing. Mourners are congratulated on how well they're coping, how their pain isn't noticeable. Those who have lost are supposed to act as though they haven't, and that accomplishment is a source of pride, in society's eyes.

And Louis is doing fine, just fine, because Louis is not a writer. Louis cannot fill two hundred pages with elegant prose, detailing his loss in a way that comes across beautiful, heartrending. What Louis lost has moved into a flat a short walk away, and what Louis has lost doesn't – shouldn't – compare to forty years of marriage, ended suddenly with a heart attack at the dinner table. This is what Louis reminds himself.

Louis could fill sixteen volume sets with screams, sure, but that's not the western way. Society doesn't like that.

So Louis is just fine.

*

The first time it happens, it's March 22nd. A month and three days later. It's a book, a book Louis would never read, normally, because Louis has to be coaxed into reading books at the best of times and he definitely judges books by their covers and this book is old, old, old in an ugly way. An ugly old paperback with a shitty cheap reprint cover and yellowed pages.

But it's not Louis's book and there's only one other option, so Louis reads it.

There's an old chair in the open living room-slash-dining room-slash-kitchen, and it's from university, back when they barely had enough money to have a tin of beans for tea, much less furniture. Harry had found it outside an old block of flats down the road from the old block of flats they were living in and he'd gotten Liam's help lugging it back to their shitty one room flat. He'd called Louis from the kerb, and he'd said, I've found a chair, it's great, it'll go perfect with our decor, and Louis had laughed, looking up from his textbooks for the first time in what seemed like years, and said, Darling, if it doesn't match the drapes or the Italian tiling, there will be hell to pay.

It's Louis's favourite place to sit, all these years later. He thinks he can still smell the dirty Manchester streets, the chill of that winter, the chill of all the winters, where one or the other or both curled up on this chair and watched shitty panel shows until the leaking faucets and the rattling windows became a hazy, subconscious blur, and they could stumble off to sleep.

Louis remembers in one flat, Harry tied a string around the faucet, so the drip would gracefully slide down into the drain, and they could sleep.

Now this old armchair has seen more than Louis is totally comfortable with, so he covers it with throw blankets and decorative pillows and he laughs at it, it's ugliness, it's ill-fit in their – his – flat. It's still Louis's favourite place to sit, all these years later.