User Unknown

Chapter 7: Boxes

If this were a Netflix series, you'd see a video montage of seven blissful mornings in a row right now. I'd wake up, reach for my phone, see that he'd already text me first and grin like a Cheshire cat. Then, we'd have the Weetabix-breakfast conversation as I made tea, followed by his preference of the outfits that I'd photographed and sent to him. Perfume of the day came next. Makeup after that. More often than not, he'd choose a red lip shade, but there had been a couple of mornings he'd surprised me and gone for a refreshing pink pop, or a coral shade I hadn't worn since I bought it three months prior.

He'd chosen red lips on day fourteen. But not just any red: my favourite Yves Saint Laurent red lipstick. It was my go-to shade for date nights and everything sexy; the kind of red lipstick that makes you feel a thousand times sexier the second you start applying it.

anon~girl: You have a thing for red lipstick, don't you?

unknown*user: I do love it, yes.

anon~girl: Why do you love it?

My message was delivered and read immediately, but it took a few minutes for the typing dots to indicate that he was responding. I wondered if the question had taken him by surprise in the same way that so many of his questions had done to me. He had a habit of asking really interesting ones that you actually had to think about in order to reply — lots of questions about the way things made me feel, for example. No one else had ever asked me the stuff that he'd asked me. Not a single soul.

unknown*user: I think it's just very classically sexy.

anon~girl: You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye. And I got that red lip, classic thing that you like.

unknown*user: What is that? A line from a film?

anon~girl: No, it's a lyric from a Taylor Swift song.

unknown*user: We're allowed to talk about music that we like, right? That's not too much information, surely?

anon~girl: I think music truth is okay. Movies, too. And books. The important stuff.

And that stuff was important to me. I listened to music all the time, from the moment I got up in the morning until I closed my eyes at the end of the day — all sorts of music, from heavy metal to chart music and every other type in-between. The genre wasn't important as long as it had a decent beat, or I could sing along to it. Not that I sang well, of course; I'm what you might call completely tone-deaf. But in my head, Beyonce's voice would come belting out of my lungs every time I bopped along to my newest favourite tune.

And I would devour books like they were going out of fashion, picking a new one up before I'd even put the old one down. I was on a first-name basis with all of the people who worked in my local library, just a few minutes down the street from my front door, and there was always a stash of books on my bedside table patiently waiting for me to pick them up. Just as with my music taste, my reading preferences were wide and varied, my bookshelves stacked with biographies and romance novels standing right alongside nature hardbacks and Stephen King horrors.

I might not have known exactly what I wanted from a significant other in my life, but I did at least know that they needed to be someone who could understand those things about me — the music, book, film-things about me.

I'd already dated the man who hated music like some sort of monster, constantly demanding that I turn the radio down/switch the music channels over/turn the radio off in the car.

And I'd dated the girl who couldn't stand it when I had the lamp on as we laid in bed at night, my pre-sleep reading ritual disturbing her oh-so-precious beauty slumber.