There was a national day of mourning the day I had to email my ex.
The queen had just died in Scotland, I was in London and I needed her signature on our divorce papers.
The British public were either glued to the news on their English Rose sofa sets or tucked inside pubs paying for pints with silver handfuls of a dead grandmother’s side profile.
I thought a lot about her face that day. The queen’s, not my ex’s. That’s all but been broken down and dissolved by my memory, as if new love and hindsight were a particularly potent acid. Our heads have such capacity for kindness.
I thought about the love story that exists between a monarch and the national mint. Their dedication to sketching the ageing process as delicately and handsomely as possible. Their attention to her lines.
How she must have been 70, maybe 65, in the portrait that loomed between us when we were wed at the British Consulate, which is just a bleak office in a tower in the CBD, because gay marriage wasn’t yet legal in Australia.
I should have paid more attention to her expression. Maybe it would have told me to run. In any case, I was more than making up for it now.
M.M serving face at the funeral.
If there’s any way of measuring, I’m 85% sure I would have been the only fast-moving thing in England on the day the queen died.
The mood in EC1A 1HQ was that everything was poised to pass away. Like if it wasn’t nailed to the ground, it was being questioned about its commitment by some intangible questioning god (another name for death) and was bound to slip your grip at any time. And I had to send this fucking email.
Maintaining a brisk homosexual walk through Piccadilly, in between stilted minutes of silence and BBC Radio announcements, I exactly 4 minutes to get back to my hotel before my revealed itself to be a monarchist and died in solidarity with Elizabeth Regina.
And the email I’d hovered over for the past three hours with it.
So, I walked for England.
Hi,
Hello,
Hey Fucker,
No. Come on. Be mature but severe.
So, I’m filing for
Quite literally the last thing I want to do is write
Yo, you owe me seven years of life and fuck you for taking the good couch.
The body does wonderful tricks. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve woken up in a circus after a head injury and I’m watching my hands juggle expertly or my legs twist around a trapeze. I don’t remember ever learning the skills but there I am, performing the impossible in a crowd.
That sounds a lot like living, doesn’t it? I say to nobody but the pool of silver queen heads swimming in my palm.
Last month, when I tripped on gravel in Kansas and took the first four layers of skin off the palm of my right hand, I watched as skin recruited from nowhere to seal the wound back to its starting point. The body is the best show on Broadway. It can be also be a total cunt.
And of course, as I sailed across Trafalgar Square on 1%, it started. I began to shake. The email was right there, pruned, preened, corsaged, scented, lit, cursed and ready to go and my fingers were earthquaking around the button.
I don’t know how many times I accidentally mashed the attachment button whilst trying to land on send, draining precious battery and threatening to send the last photo in my camera roll along with the application for divorce.
Hi, please have this signed, witnessed and sent back to me. Attached is a photo of my Pret egg salad sandwich from 11am.
Earlier that morning, I had bought myself a little treat from Primark (5-pack of g-strings because the last laundromat melted my other ones) that were packed in a paper bag. Now, if there’s any takeaway that you can have from this story, let it be to never invest in any paper products on days when performing large or significant tasks.
Shaking + flimsy paper bag = sounding like you’re sanding back your dining table while begging your phone to “stay with you” and walking at the pace of a thousand twinks.
A man who was fixing a pipe in the ground asked if I needed a hand. He must have heard me coming, seen my face and expected I was experiencing some kind of shopping trauma. I, in my panic, thought he was a homeless man and dropped him three pounds before apologising and yelling KEEP IT, IT’S FINE, JUST KEEP IT THANK YOU. THANK YOU? YEP!
This email had now officially cost me three pounds. Three pounds, 60GB of Maps data, the cold and flu medication I would inevitably have to buy because I took my jumper off and stuffed it in the paper bag hoping padding would muffle the shaking, and the calf muscles in both legs.
The rage stopped the shaking. And so, with the last 0.3% of battery, I sent the fucking email. The instant I heard the Gmail ‘woosh’, as if it finally felt okay to pass over, my phone died.
And I stopped in the middle of SoHo, letting my bag collapse around my ankles like a tired flag. I cried. Because I was free. And somewhere, a confused plumber was three whole pounds richer.
I stayed standing there as a slow trickle of conservatives nodded in solidarity, thinking I was weeping for their queen. I wasn’t. I was becoming my own.
I know this because, with the last ounce phone battery, I had added a royal tax to her filing fee.
The final document now states that we will be splitting the amount evenly, aside from three pounds exactly which were added to her half, for services rendered.
To be paid out in coins.
Best of luck.
And please don’t ever contact me again.
X TN
Funny, raw and realness. Thank you