Author: Kevlin Henney

This is not love. It was. Once I loved Bryony. Now I love Mary.

I sit across the table from the jar, unsure of what I have reclaimed. Time and self and memory? Less real than a butterfly, more solid than a dream. The meeting of a wish and an enchantment.

Relationships are never over. They may start, they may consume, they may tire and falter and be cast aside. But they can never truly end.

“This isn’t working, Ray,” said Bryony, five years ago, today to the day. There was shouting, there were tears, there was silence. She moved to the spare room and left within a week.

Only with Mary did I understand my time with Bryony — its bitter moods, its unsteady pulse, its broken “I love you”/”I hate you” tick–tock. I moved town, I moved job, I moved in with Mary.

But there is a part of you that is forever someone else’s, the part shared and grown in your time together. Not the fleeting superficial moments that touched your emotions but did not connect them, scratch them, dig deeply into them… Anisa, Dora, Holly, Susan.

But Bryony… with Bryony I shared and I grew; we scratched and we dug and we buried.

Once connected then broken, can you ever be whole? Relationships may recede, but they can never truly disappear.

Until tonight.

“An interesting piece,” the shopkeeper had said. The shop was old but new. Five years walking this high street, how had I never seen it? The curiosities within were varied and timeless, at odds with the uniform, mayfly chain stores outside. Timeless yet filled to overflowing with time.

What might be mere knick-knacks in other stores here took on a suggestion of something more, each piece — whether glass, silver or pewter; dish, ornament or furniture — brimming with more possibility and meaning than could fit on a yellowed label. Some were immaculate, others covered in dust, a comforting blanket of time, a sediment of neglect. Propped in the corner were walking sticks, pokers and spears. Apparent function and expectation had little say in how shelves and tables and cabinets were filled. There was, perhaps, a puzzle-perfect geometry that arranged the shop, but its picture eluded me.

The keeper was old, but not old with the frailty of a fading mind and a failing body; more as if the impression of decades was no more than a high-tide mark, one revisited and repeated, marking ebb and flow, but not the full depth of his years.

He had explained the impossible truth behind what seemed a simple jar but was a more enchanted artefact. I had been drawn to it just as I had been drawn to this shop — which is to say, in truth, I do not know how I came be there with that particular item in my hands and my attention.

“I can refund you,” he said, “should you change your mind and wish to return it.”

Could there be such a thing? This possibility, this solution, this jar that could reclaim and contain that part of me no longer mine. To cast with words, to draw from the aether, to trap the uncatchable and hold like a wish?

And now I have it, like a dream, like a butterfly, caught and fluttering, here on the table. I have her side of my story. Shared memory now unshared and bound in glass and glamour.

But it is Bryony who is free. This possession has me caught and trapped.

Relationships are never over. I reach across the table and push the jar over the edge.