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Let Love Rot: Lessons on heartbreak and resilience from below the soil
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The June Drop
It’s a lovely evening in early July. Bristol’s sky at 9pm is like the inside of a pearl oyster shell. I arrive at the house of some friends in St Werburgh’s, the English city’s red-bricked treasure. It’s a little community nestled between railway embankments, allotment slopes and the M32 motorway. My friends let me in, show me to the room I’ll stay in for a few nights whilst the owner visits family in Spain. Their house is a big, eco-build block with floor to ceiling windows, hardwood floors, and a bridge across to a rambunctious garden which is shared with the three other houses in the block. My room looks over this garden, and a big, old cooking apple tree dominates most of the window frame. The boys are Londoners, friends from my undergraduate years. They catch up with me in their slow, easy drawls. We sit at the top of the garden, look at the sky, and I’m grateful to have landed on my feet again for the 5th or so time in about 3 weeks.
I’ve been itinerant since my partner sat down with me on a park bench not far from here and told me, gently, that he wasn’t invested enough in our relationship for it to work out. A little dog came nosing around my ankles as I…
