Two roses had given up the ghost overnight, a red one and a coral one, gifts from my love. I was up (too) early, to catch a train. They’d been fine, my roses. Straight and tall, heads up proudly, when I’d turned out the light.

Yet there they were, not six hours later, listless and drooping. Way beyond fresh water. The London sky out the window only barely bright along the edges, little Christmas lights blinking among the plastic (but classy; this hotel has all the stars) spruce needles garlanding the fireplace, giving my roses a twinkly little send-off into nowhere.

*

Death can come so quickly when you’re not looking. Even in a 5-star hotel.

Maybe especially there. Just ask Madeleine, the protagonist of my novel-in-progress. She knows all about death. And she died in a 5-star hotel.

*

By the way, if you’re wondering where Bad, Bad Love and Livia the Badass Chef, and Witchy Wanda and Dramatic Danae, and Aunt Pearl and the shoe avatar all went, they’re taking a vacay until mid-January. Livia hates the holidays, and Wanda just uses them to cast spells. They’ll be back in a few weeks, suntanned and rested up, laughing at you as you play juggle-the-credit-card and wonder why the hell you thought an air-fryer would be just the several-hundred-dollar thing for your Xmas turkey.

*

Back to death in a 5-star hotel in London. I was there for several reasons. To see my love, who has recently lost one of his own loves (W.H. Auden knows, just like Mad Nijinsky did, that we are never the only ones, and if we think we are, we’re fools). Whenever we bedded down, grief was right there with us, en menage à trois—you get used to it after a while, even start to be okay with it, in a melancholy kind of way that can feel weirdly close to happy.

But we don’t actually sleep where we old dogs lie—habit and years of living alone and all that. We toss and turn (neither sleeps as good as we used to—that’s age, too, and maybe grief) por separado, and so I was alone with my drooping roses, on Wednesday, in the dark dawn.

*

The drooping roses were an omen. One I should have heeded as I sipped my room service Café Americano, and headed for the email inbox. (An aside: I will absolutely not apologize for ordering room-service breakfast. There was a time in my life when such extravagance would have been beyond my wildest fantasies, I didn’t even possess a credit card, but that time is no longer. As in, that time has passed, as time does, and death has drawn much nearer, as death does, and so I will order room service breakfast for as long as I shall breathe, as often as I goddam well please.)

*

In my inbox was an email from a neighbor with whom I am friendly–more with his wife, actually, but him too, I like him–announcing the sudden death of another neighbor, with whom I am, or was, equally and pleasantly friendly. Collapsed, said my neighbor’s email, suddenly, beside his car. I think it’s okay if I say that my neighbor’s name was George, and that he was sixty, which isn’t old at all, and looks less old with every passing day. George was a reporter, he was smart, and he was funny. Lots of people liked him. And he loved his dogs.

My first thought, even as I read the email, was, where will the dog go? Though I’m sure she’s gone somewhere nice, my town loves animals, a lot, and the neighbors in the particular part of our town where I live love them especially a lot, I still worry about her, and I want to know where. As I threw my sundry day-trip things into my bag for my excursion—I was going anyway, even though my eyes were full of tears and my hands unsteady, splashing coffee—I hoped the dog had been inside the house, warm, when George collapsed, instead of in the car, maybe, waiting for him to open the door. Or already out, her leash dropping from his hand when it went limp, as his soul left him for somewhere else, wherever it had decided to go.

And then what would she do, poor, sweet dog, and what would happen to her? How terrible, for a dog, to watch her beloved person leave the earth that way, leave her, when nature and the laws of time usually force things to be the other way around, and god knows that’s hard enough, but at least we humans understand the big picture, the what came first and the what will come next, or what can, when we’re ready—George was living a new love with a relatively new dog, after grieving a dear, long-loved one for so long as only a true dog person can. This dog will surely find a new person-love, she’ll make a great match for some lucky person after George loved her up for almost two years, but how can a dog possibly know those things? She can’t, of course, she couldn’t, and that was why I was crying.

*

And also because I won’t see the weird, funny colored lights—never knew what the hell those were—shining from my erstwhile neighbor’s downstairs picture window (he lived only two doors down), late at night (why am I walking around outside late at night? None of your goddamned business), out across the narrow strip of grass that separates us all from the wild, wild wood, but not too far and we like it that way, turning the wintry, bare-naked trees first orange, and then magenta. And what the hell were those lights, who knows, but they were really cool, so who cares what they were, I just know I will miss seeing them.

And I will miss finding his clothes in the communal dryer, and feeling mildly superior as I empty the lint filter and pull out shirts and jeans and socks and towels. Which he didn’t separate into lights and darks, like my mother told me to, and his probably did too, but he couldn’t be bothered, who has time, and they didn’t look the worse for the wear, so who gives a shit, really? Is that an important thing in life, I think to myself, separating your clothes (even as I know I will dutifully separate mine this week, tomorrow probably, soon as I unpack my suitcase)?

But George couldn’t be bothered to separate his clothes and good for him. I’d deposit them, wrinkled as they came, into the waiting basket he always positioned thoughtfully to one side of the dryer, because he knew he would be leaving them there for hours, maybe all night. Because that’s how he was, he didn’t care, but maybe some other, more fidgety neighbor who does care about her clothes, and who separates them—but why, in the great scheme of things, when colored lights in the night are so much more fun, should she give two mouse turds about separating her clothes?—might want to use the dryer.

George also had great-smelling laundry detergent. I will miss that, too.

*

I gave the roses an indecent burial in the trash can, because what else can you do with them, trusting housekeeping to remove them before my return so I wouldn’t cry. I made it down the stairs, into a taxi, and, still wiping tears, to Victoria Station, only to discover that the infallible ticket machine so touted by National Rail on its no-nonsense website was, in fact, all too fallible, refusing, time after time after time, to yield up my prepaid tickets.

And so I missed my train, and the people behind me were getting quite restless, so I gave up on the machine and went to stand in the queue to speak to an actual person about getting some other tickets. Where I fell into conversation with a mildly heavyset, but very pretty, youngish woman traveling alone, weighed down by a giant backpack, on her way first to Istanbul, where she planned to shed two of the three layers of bulky sweaters she wore. It’s cold in Istanbul, she grinned–she was missing a tooth, about halfway back, which made me notice her weathered skin–“but it’s very warm in the part of India where I’ll be spending the winter. I’ll have no need of sweaters.”

And because of George, and also because she was nowhere near as young as I’d first thought her—there’s something unquestionably off about a woman over forty traveling with all her worldly possessions in a pack on her back, alone—it did occur to me that there existed—that there exists—a definite possibility that she, too, could drop dead. Boom, gone, just like that—women’s hearts can give out too. It could happen on a beautiful beach—not Goa, she was very firm about that, Goa is for tourists, she was going somewhere else, she never told me the name, maybe keeping the secret on purpose—in India. After which she wouldn’t need her backpack anymore. Or have to carry it. Which might, initially, as the soul leaves the body behind, seem like a relief. It looked heavy.

*

As we chatted, and the line advanced slowly, the announcements began to come. All the delays that had been stacking up—there had been quite a number, one after the other after the other—were turning into cancellations, because there’d been an incident, on the tracks.

Someone had gone down and not come up. On purpose. I wondered who and how and why. Planned or sudden, long slow slide or things suddenly just Too. Damn. Much. And it didn’t seem fair, or right, that some people got to end it at the time of their own choosing, while others, who undoubtedly wanted to go on, at least for a while, just dropped in their tracks, forced to leave their dogs to grieve. It occurred to me to wonder why some sort of cosmic exchange couldn’t have been worked out beforehand, between the person on the tracks and my neighbor George. His dog would have been in favor.

A jumper, my queue-buddy said, sagely, shrugging her shoulders as well as she was able beneath the weight of the pack. Happens all the time. And always at rush hour. Trains to the airport will be fucked up for hours. She shrugged again, she had time, she said, all the time in the world. She went off to get a coffee, seeming almost to welcome the contretemps, or at least not to be all that bothered by it. She wouldn’t, she said, be going anywhere for hours.

*

My new train, however, though I too was headed in the direction of Gatwick, was somehow allowed to depart, only a (slightly surreal) half-hour after the one I should have caught in the first place, had it not been for the drooping roses and for what came after.

And so off I went.

*

Death, though, was not done with me, not yet, not even for the day. It next flashed its gap-toothed grin in the taxi I caught in the rank at Lewes Station, in the middle of the South Downs, in the form of a frankly macabre conversation in which I engaged with my very droll taxi driver. About rocks and pockets and the depths of rivers at different times of the year, these things varying so widely with the rains, and what it would take to keep someone down—someone slight, say, like Virginia Woolf—long enough to do the trick. A subject to which he had clearly devoted no small amount of thought and systematic speculation.

We were headed, you see, to the Firle-district farmhouse known as Charleston—a bare seven miles, as the crow flies, from Virginia’s rocks and her river—where Virginia’s sister Vanessa lived out decades upon decades of unrequited love, long after her troubled sister had left this earth, in close proximity, oh so close, to the one who didn’t love her back, not that way, or at least not enough. In a house with wild, pretty gardens at the back (that’s one of them, up there in the picture), with whimsical decorative features that he helped her build.

But when have gardens ever, ever been enough?

*

Charleston Love is Love that is oh-so-important to my novel-in-progress, my friends. Oh, so important. Which is why I got up at such an ungodly hour, in order to traipse down and back in the day and be there waiting when my own love came to find me as the sun went down, bent under the weight of his own stones and grief and sorrow.

A load I aimed to help lighten, as I do, if only a little, and for only a little while.

*

And Charleston Love is just my kind of love: Bad, Bad, Bad. Its own sort of death, really, slow and painful and shot through with blinding moments of bright hope that make all the rest of it worse, worse, worse. So you know I had to go down there in search of it, Bad, Bad Lovers. You know.

*

And so I did. My eyes tearing up every few minutes the whole damn day, every time I thought of George and his laundry, and his colored lights and his poor dog. Any my roses, go figure. My poor, drooping roses. Because, contrary to what you probably believe, it doesn’t take much at all to make me cry.

But this is getting too long for a blog post, my friends, the SEO is going to be mightily unhappy avec moi. So we will leave off here, and pick back up there, next week or the next—as the spirit me doth move—down in Charleston.

While Livia the Badass chef enjoys her time off. She tells me she’s been using the kitchen of her Air BnB to make chocolate tarts.

*

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and Instagram, find her book Birds Of Wonder here and learn more about Cynthia here.