Mhairi McFarlane

Even your wildest nocturnal adventurers might shrink from going out buccaneering when it was this bone-marrow chilling, and saturating-damp.

This is what I never knew about loss—it’s also about what you gain. You carry a weight that you never had before. It’s never behind you. It’s alongside you.

“Forever”: people say it in wedding vows all the time like they understand what it means, but actual forever is fucking huge.

Mark is my ex and my only serious boyfriend. He went off to be successful in journalism in London when we were twenty-nine and I didn’t move with him, we long-distanced. Pretty soon he decided my reluctance to relocate meant I wasn’t sufficiently committed—he was right—and finished it. He now works for Time Out in San Francisco, is married, an American citizen, and a father. Meanwhile, I got a cat.

Regrets, I might have a few. My gut said we were never quite right, but a nagging voice in my head says that it was as right as I’m going to get, and I was an idiot.