With My All – Epilogue – Ahead Of Myself

I should probably tell you that this story has a point.

It does, technically, though I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t notice the point while I was inside the story. I noticed it afterward, which is a very me thing to do – the noticing arriving slightly late, in the calm aftermath, when I was at the farmer’s market buying tomatoes and thinking about nothing in particular and the whole of it arranged itself into a shape I could see.

My name is Kate.

I am twenty-eight years old. I have brown hair that goes red in sunlight and freckles across my face and shoulders and chest and arms, and I am not tall, and I am warm in the specific, full-body way of a person who generates heat as a natural byproduct of existing. People have told me this. Not as a compliment exactly – more as an observation, the way you’d note that someone has a distinctive laugh. You’re just warm, a friend once said. Like a radiator, but with better conversational skills.

I take this as a compliment.

This is a story about a man called Damian, who I met at the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning because of his shoes. I’ll explain about the shoes in a moment.

I want to tell you something before I start, which is: I’m fine. I’m going to be saying that throughout and I need you to believe me rather than assuming I am the kind of person who says I’m fine as a performance of coping. I genuinely am fine. The story does not end with me in a particular condition that requires recovery. It ends with me at a farmer’s market, which is where it started, which I find pleasing in a structural sense.

The thing about me – and I have thought about this, in the calm, tomato-buying aftermath – is that I love easily. I don’t mean carelessly. I mean it just happens, naturally, the way things that are natural happen, without much deliberation or planning. I meet a person and I become interested and I stay interested and I give the interest all the energy I have, which is substantial.

What I have perhaps not always questioned is whether the energy is going somewhere.

I thought it was.

I thought Damian staying was the same as Damian choosing.

These are not the same thing, as it turns out.

But we’ll get there.

I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s the other thing about me – I get ahead of myself. I’m already at the end and I haven’t even told you about the shoes yet.

Let me start with the shoes.