Page 125 of Proof By Contradiction
His emails first. Not the professional ones, those are stillDear Mr Carrick, please find attached the revised problem set, and I still get a specific thrill from theDear Mr Carrickthat belongs in a therapist’s office. The other ones. Sent from his personal address to mine at odd hours. A link to a paper on prime distribution:Thought you’d find this interesting.A photo of the canal at dusk, no caption, the light on the water, and the specific angle that saysI was here and I thought of you, so here’s a canal.
Then: a book. Left on the kitchen table. Erdos biography, second-hand, spine cracked. Inside the front cover, his handwriting.
I stare at the inscription for a long time. The pen pressure. The way theEcurves, not the precise print of his board work, but the looser script of a man writing quickly, before he can talk himself out of it.For E.NotFor Ewan,notFor Carrick.Just the letter. The smallest version of my name that still means me.
I lay in his bed once at three in the morning, running the count.Zero dedications.Notoneornot yet.Zero.The universal claim. The empty set.
Now, on a Tuesday in whatever week this is, a book with five words written inside the cover.For E. Because you remind me of why I started.
One inscription, one counter-example, the universal claim falls.
He’d call this proof by contradiction. Assume the opposite of what you want to prove. Follow the logic till it refutes itself. I assumed I was unlovable. Filed it in the dark like a theorem.
He disproved me in blue ink.
I put the book in my bag. Don’t mention it. Can’t. We both know.
His flat has changed. Or I’ve changed in it. There’s a drawer. Second one down in the bedroom chest, the one with the wobbly handle. My drawer.
It starts with the trousers. I leave them at his place one night, dropped over the back of the chair because I’m too tired to be civilised about it. When I come back, they’re washed and folded in the drawer. Not on the chair. Not on the bed. In the drawer, perfectly squared, with the rest of the space empty around them. Cleared. Waiting.
I don’t ask. He doesn’t say anything.
After that, it happens by degrees. Joggers, a t-shirt, boxers, the charger I kept forgetting. A pair of socks I pretend not to notice I’ve left behind. One night I stay over, and the next time I come, there’s a little more of me in the second drawer down, and neither of us has had the conversation where that becomes allowed. My things migrate into it like they’ve found the drawer themselves.
Toothbrush in the bathroom, mine. Green. Next to his blue one. The domesticity of that image. Two toothbrushes in a glass on a shelf in Chorlton. It does more damage than anything else.
Trainers under the bed, my side. I leave them there.
And the gestures. Fingers through my hair while I’m reading on his sofa—not thinking about it. Warmth on my skin because my skin is there, and his touch wants to trace it. The want is so ordinary it frightens me.
The dark, I understand. This is daylight. Tenderness at eleven PM while I’m half-asleep and his thumb is tracing the ridge of my ear, and the gentleness is so-it’s so?—
The vocabulary doesn’t exist. I have four letters. I admitted to a ceiling stain at three in the morning. Men are harder than ceilings to speak to.
Thursday, late. His bed. I’m half-asleep, and the streetlamp comes through the curtain gap, turning everything amber. His arm across me, heavy.
‘I miss you when you’re not here.’
Said under the breath. Lancashire. The vowels are soft, slurred by sleep. He might not even know he’s said it—might be talking to the version of me that exists in his flat when I’m not in it.
I miss you when you’re not here. He doesn’t declare. States it like a fact of the universe, something already proven.
I want to sayme too.The two syllables are right there, queued in my throat. Simple. True.
So I kiss him instead. Below his ear. The soft skin where the stubble gives way. He makes a sound, stifled.
I hope the kiss says it. I hope.
He tightens his arm around me. His mouth against my hair, the answer in the grip.
Two AM. My phone vibrates on the bedside table. I’m in halls, not Chorlton—one of the nights I force myself to sleep in my own bed because the alternative is never leaving his flat and losing the last thread of whatever independence I’m still.
Femi.
‘Is this what relationships are?’ His voice is wrong. Thick, wet at the edges. ‘This pain?’
I sit up. ‘What happened?’
