At prom one boy asked me to dance and everybody else in that room spent three hours not looking at me. Thirty years later he mopped up my spilled coffee in a hospital cafe in worn scrubs, counted the last coins in his pocket to buy me another, and did not recognise me at all.
Ten minutes. For ten minutes I was not the girl in the corner. I was a girl at a dance.
I never saw him again after we graduated.
There are two things about that ten minutes that I did not understand until I was about forty.
The first is that he did not ask me whether I minded. He did not crouch down and check in the voice people use. He came over and asked me to dance the same way he would have asked anybody in that room, and when I said I couldn’t he did not agree with me.
The second is what happened afterward.
Nothing happened afterward. He did not stay with me for the rest of the evening and he did not come back and check on me, and for about fifteen years I held that against him slightly without ever admitting it.
I was wrong. He went back to his friends and left me alone in exactly the way you leave somebody alone after you have danced with them, and that was the whole point, and it took me until my thirties to see it.
The girl who had been sat in that corner for three hours got ten minutes of being ordinary and then got left alone like everybody else.
Nobody else in that gym gave me that, before or after, and four hundred people were in there.
Thirty years.
I was at Corwen General on a Tuesday in the October to meet a clinical team, and I came out of a lift and went into the cafe on the ground floor and slipped on a wet patch by the counter, and a full coffee went over both my hands.
