I rationalise in metaphors.
It’s how my brain seems to make sense of things that don’t otherwise make much sense.
I’ve been thinking about K, and I think I’ve finally found the chemistry.
We were salt.
I was sodium. She was chlorine.
Both highly reactive elements. Neither particularly well-behaved in elemental form.
And yet sodium and chlorine have a curious property. Bring them together and something happens. They don’t merely sit alongside one another. They react. They exchange something fundamental and become something entirely different.
Sodium chloride.
Salt.
Stable. Useful. Ordinary, perhaps, but also essential.
K and I were together for about five years, nearly thirty years ago. I was seven years older than her, and even then that felt like a significant difference. I bought my first house and, for a while, it became our house too — except when she was at university, or when we were on one of our “breaks”.
We were tempestuous.
That’s probably the polite word.
We had chemistry. Nobody could reasonably argue otherwise.
But chemistry isn’t the same thing as stability.
We spent an extraordinary amount of time in our elemental forms.
Reactive.
Separate.
Then together.
Then apart.
Then together again.
We knew, I think, that something else was possible. Somewhere beneath the arguments, the breaks, the reconciliations and the inevitable injuries of being young and emotionally ill-equipped, there was an understanding that we could combine.
But we never quite did.
We never became the compound we might have been.
And perhaps that’s the thing I’ve been turning over in my head now.
Because twenty-seven years is a very long time to leave two elements sitting separately.
A lot has happened to both of us.
We’ve lived an entire adult life. Marriage. Children. Responsibility. Failure. Success. Grief.
I’ve become a different man, and she a different woman.
The elements haven’t changed, but they’ve accumulated an extraordinary amount of life around them.
And now, rather unexpectedly, we’re going to put them back in the same room.
We’re meeting next week.
For a weekend.
There is something wonderfully absurd about that.
Two people who last shared a life three decades ago are going to spend a couple of days together and see what happens.
I don’t know whether the chemistry is still there.
Actually, that’s not quite true.
I suspect it is.
The more interesting question is whether the chemistry has changed.
Because perhaps that’s what age gives us.
Not different elements.
Different reactions.
When you’re young, you can have enormous chemistry with someone and still be completely incapable of making a stable compound. Attraction isn’t enough. Love isn’t enough. Even knowing that something could work isn’t enough.
You have to be capable of becoming something different together.
Perhaps we weren’t.
Perhaps we couldn’t be.
Perhaps we simply didn’t know how.
And maybe that’s okay.
I’m not travelling back thirty years next week.
Neither is she.
We’re not going to recreate the people we were.
We’re taking two very different piles of accumulated life and putting them back together for a weekend.
Maybe nothing happens.
Maybe we discover that the chemistry was real but belonged to two younger people who no longer exist.
Maybe we discover that some things survived remarkably intact.
Or maybe, just maybe, the two reactive elements have finally become sufficiently mature to do what they couldn’t do the first time.
To stop being sodium and chlorine.
And become salt.
I’m not sure yet whether that’s a romantic metaphor or a chemical warning.
Knowing us, it could be both.
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