I am not usually one to jump on a bandwagon, but when Farrah Storr published her essay this morning entitled the ‘real’ One Day the shadow that has been following me since the release of this Netflix adaptation of this book caught up with me. We all have our own One Day story. But not all end in love. Some just end. And two years ago mine did.
My very own Dex and I were both knocking on the door of 40. Two years ago we felt the pressure of reigniting our story, feeling that finally, this was our time. Neither of us in relationships, both on the brink of something new. Today, I found myself drafting a message to him, full of profound realisations, notes on how my life had changed since we brutally drew the line on us. It was swiftly deleted. Even writing this now, there has been many a deleted paragraph because this seems to be such a personal story to tell. I wasn’t even sure if it would fit with how I was portraying myself as a writer. But what does that even mean? Its the very nature of humans to be so complex. Ultimately, like all writing, it is a long weaved story of becoming. And Logan was very much in my story of becoming.
“You must know Logan then”.
“No” I replied, “I don’t.”
“Really? He studies Biology at York too. He must be in the year above you then. But when you meet him….” She almost swooned. “……just dreamy.” The flutter of tone and eye roll indicated a well established crush.
This was all coming from my future 30 year old boss at a bar along the Lendal. If I was going to do anything at uni, I was going to become a barmaid. A degree was far down the list of priorities. The idea of working in a bar thrilled me; meeting so many people at one time, the camaraderie of those behind the bar as the place heaved, the joy in actually knowing how to pull a pint. I had already been turned down by some of the larger clubs in town but was determined that this would be my career of choice. In hindsight perhaps it all held an element of serendipity.
We met in his last shift as he was preparing to focus on his final year project. His eyes, a strikingly light blue, staring, taking me in. The silence between us fizzed, yet not a word was spoken. I hadn’t seen eyes like that in some time. Tall, unassuming, quiet. Mystery. A spell had been weaved. I could barely breathe. He seemed enamoured with me also immediately, but I was too busy trying not to make a fool of myself to notice. Judiciously he would return on nights out, I’d feel his presence and his gaze. Never saying much. I wasn’t even sure what this was. Was he interested? He was this quiet presence with his friends at the end of the bar. It felt at times almost comforting, like I had known him before, and here he was in this new life, waiting for me again. I later found out he became infatuated with many women quickly, and they with him. I was part of a long line.
But as that initial feeling subsided, a friendship grew, a comfortable presence in my life. He would often call me in that final year, as he was hiding in bushes, tracking blackbirds as they fed. I had never known I would meet someone like him. I felt an anomaly in my home town, a keen love of nature was always tied at the hip to an assumption that you were some kind of nerd. He would talk so excitedly about the birds as they bobbed in and out of their hiding places. If I am honest, I was blown away by his interest. And as time passed we dipped in and out of moments where something almost happened. There were many a nights sleeping in crowded post party rooms on separate mattresses, mornings of Weetabix and strong teas. Unrequited love flipping between the two of us in equal measure. We never seemed to love each other at the same time.
And as our connection deepened, we followed one another without really meaning to. Research assistants on the same project, moves to London, a love for Somerset. We spent a glorious summer in a house hidden in the mountains surrounding Lake Vyrnwy. Trips to hidden waterfalls, mountains of peat bogs and heather, all remind me of him. He never leaves me, because he was so much of who I was to become. He taught me what it felt like to love someone, feel just from a glance, the fireworks that could travel a room. He taught me to stand in determination of who I was, to love what I loved. I unlearnt this lesson as I passed through my 20’s and became lost, but now, as I near 40, the lesson finds me again. It felt like Logan never lost himself. Sometimes I think that’s what kept us apart, the distance between him knowing himself and me not knowing.
The days were hard up on the mountains when we worked in Wales, but filled with so much joy and laughter. We were still young, I was 21, he 23. It all felt like such an adventure. Tea breaks in the ramshackle shed we affectionately called the badger hut. Falling through mounds of heather. Struggling through to place down cloches and rings for taking gas readings from the soil. Tail spinning in our mini army tanks across the hills, trying our best not to topple off mountain passes in 4x4’s that were far too big for them and evenings spent falling asleep in front of documentaries brought from Logan’s David Attenborough collection.
The night he built the fire and it kept going out, turning to me his face covered in soot still makes smile. We would wake up in our sleeping bags next to one another on mornings where the house was busy with visiting professors and all the research assistants had been relegated to the mezzanine floor, sleeping together like sardines. In those moments he would reach for my hand in the early morning light, under the blankets where no one else could see. Our fingertips touching. When he placed his hand on my back as we queued to pay for the Morrisons shop for the team, I knew something had shifted in our sphere, and that we’d both moved to a place where we were ready to be with one another.
One morning I had to drive back in the truck to the university to pick up more equipment. He waited at the bottom of the mountain as all the scientists made their way to the top. Really he should have been with them; as research assistants, we did all of the lifting, the grunt work, always first up and last to return. But he waited, moved a falling strap from my top back onto my shoulder and brushed the hair away from my face. He looked at me the way he had in the beginning. Staring with those light blue eyes. “Drive safe”. I climbed into the truck, loathe to be apart from him for even one day, and as I turned on the radio the Fray were playing; if I don’t say this now, I will surely break they sang as I am leaving the one I want to take, forgive the urgency but hurry up and wait.
But when I returned something had changed. There was a steeliness to his eyes. Cold. No more rugby shirts, no more teas. I felt him move away from me. A feeling I have often felt from him when we got too close, that the sheer power of what we were would implode the universe if it ever came into fruition. When he told me his plans to move to Falmouth to work on a garden bird project, I mocked him. As naïve as I was then, I felt I’d graduated past this, there were bigger fish to fry. We’d been working deftly on climate change projects, there was so much more out there. But my mocking was also laced with an element of spite. That he was leaving me. That he’d for unknown reasons sent me out into the cold. I knew I had hurt him, and when we ate scones and cream teas at a café in a Yorkshire village just before he left, I felt almost certain that I would never see him again. A year later, I left for Edinburgh.
We stayed in touch. Sometimes in a flurry of daily messages for months on end, other times, a yearly check in. A check to see that we were both still there. Even when we found ourselves in London in our early 30s there were invisible hands keeping us apart, we were in relationships, and our paths had diverged. I had moved away from the research I had once loved, he was still immersed in it, becoming more prominent in his field every day. Even suggestions for coffee fell on deaf ears, empty promises that never came around and a feeling that if we were in the same room together again it would cause a chain reaction we might not be able to stop.
5 years ago we arranged to meet in Cornwall, a hot weekend in June. I was engaged, he had left a relationship the summer before. There was an urgency about him, an urgency that I had never quite felt before. I could feel my own relationship was crumbling at the foundations but I didn’t want to admit it at the time. For all it was, I had put 7 years into it, and we had grown together. It had made me feel like I was an adult, that I had moved away from childish infatuations such as these. However, it was slowly dawning on me that in fact I was moving further away from myself. I still don’t know why I went to see Logan that summer. Maybe my aim was to quicken the demise of my flailing relationship. And without knowing it, it worked.
I had spent all morning walking along the coast, the sun hot, the breeze cool. He messaged me to say he was delayed, and my anxiety grew. When he arrived, he looked different to how I’d remembered, he was certain I had not changed, and looked identical to the day we met, but as I look back on pictures now I know that not to be true. Wrinkles in the corners of my eyes as I smiled, grey hairs making their first appearance, sun spots on the skin.
We sat by the sea, and talked about surface level things, the weather, what he did now, how it would feel to swim. Then we lodged ourselves in a café over looking the sea, drinking tea, sharing chocolate chip cookies, the type that are still melted in the middle. I could barely swallow, as he looked at me once again with those eyes. We talked long into the afternoon, delved into the depths of who we were and what we wanted from life. But soon I started to feel desperately unwell, shaking, it must be the sun I told myself. And when he asked me to go for dinner, I declined, desperate to get back to my rental, where I slept fitfully. My relationship was over I knew it, fate had come knocking. And when I returned to to work the next day, and friends asked me to recall how it was to see an old friend I could barely talk. I vomited in the bin as they held back my hair and rubbed my back, glancing at each other silently communicating “what on earth happened”. Telling them I must have sun stroke, I scooted home, and spent the afternoon firing lavender mist in the air, to help me regain my senses. I could not speak to Logan after that. I had to allow my relationship to play itself out, which it did in October of that year over a teary breakfast with Ray Lamontagne in the background.
As if the fates were telling me something, the lockdowns hit, and none of us were moving, certainly not to Cornwall but in 2022 we met again, in a small cottage in Somerset, this time the urgency coming from me and not him, with something feeling not quite right. Those invisible hands keeping us apart again despite there being no physical barriers to stop us this time. Conversation flowed, but nothing more, and when he left I was keen to keep in touch, in the belief that it just needed time. Because all we had was ready to blossom. But as work trips took him away to Costa Rica, Iceland and the Isles of Scilly it was clear that this could not be maintained, so after a heated conversation we both agreed it was time to go our own separate ways, never to speak again.
So the typed message remains deleted. I have found my way back to the research I always loved, a way of life that allows me to appreciate the garden birds, and turning of the seasons. Logan is not part of my future, and was never meant to be, but instead he formed crucial parts of my becoming. I had the best time falling into love, and will forever carry the memories. Now it is time to move on, to a new version of who we both are.
As One Day surfaced again, it started a domino effect not only in my psyche, but I am sure in many others too. There are mores stories like this, stories of a slightly adjusted One Day, where it does not end in two people finding love however, the story of memory and friendship remains. There are love stories that involve versions of Emma and Dex out there yet to be discovered, and I look forward to reading every single one.
Thank you for writing this essay, Anna. I really enjoyed your wise reflections on your early years and the winding path you and Logan walked.
One Day had a profound effect on me too and I wrote a post about it. I think there’s some kind of magic in that story that invites us to zoom out on our lives, look for patterns, and see things anew.