Pt. 25 - Neurons Like Brandy - Chapter 9: Jay

 Neurons Like Brandy is a long running project of mine that I have been trying to finish for about 8 years. It focuses on a house in Brighton after the zombie apocalypse has passed, with flashbacks told by one of the remaining survivors every other chapter.

The chapter numbering is a little confusing so if this is your first time here and you are interested in reading more then I would recommend starting at the index where each of the chapters are ordered in the manner that they are meant to be read.

Below is the recounting of one of the little known members of the household: Jay

 Chapter 9: Jay

This is going to sound terribly cheesy, but with the way things are I say ‘screw that’. Life is too short.

So here it goes: Love is way more complicated than art can ever be prepared to articulate. Love is far more complicated than any of these kids upstairs understand. At least, not with the way they are right now. They are all still too busy making the mistakes you make when you are young; the same mistakes that I made when I was young.

The sleeping around, the drinking, the drug taking; you would think that the world hadn’t ended and instead that it was a particularly long party weekend.

When Maria and I had got here it was a safe haven. It was easy to ignore the mess because for the first time in months we hadn’t been on the move, we weren’t looking over our shoulders, if it wasn’t the Camers then it was just other living people around you who were being selfish, looking out for themselves and trying to get one over on you.

It felt good to be hanging out with people who were younger than us, at first, a bit like recapturing our own youth.

Then it got uneasy, it wasn’t that they were bad people – sure they were self-absorbed but it was nothing like what Maria and I had seen in Plymouth - it is just that we both realised that there was a reason we weren’t kids any more. We were a couple in our mid-thirties. I’d had a job as a barrister and Maria had been the head of her own company before all of this and the idea of partying forever just made us feel so very old.

All the same I feel like we needed that moment to take a step back and assess the situation. I am not saying that we loved each other more than before but we just realised that what we had was what love should be.

You used to see all these dramatisations on TV of love and it always just that: drama. There are back and forths, there are break ups and reconciliations, there are tragedies and jubilations. Most of that is nonsense or at least it is in the way that youngsters think that you can push and push without ever giving back and that some script writer will just fix it for you without any consequence.

Love means that you will say sorry, that you will compromise, that you will let things slide; not because you have to (even though it will certainly feel that way because you can’t imagine the miserable life you had before) but because you want to.

Love is making an effort when you don’t feel like it and pushing yourself beyond tired because you know that they would do the same.

Love is being able to look at things that you knew and see a whole new perspective and to understand that what you thought you knew is only a fragment. It is wanting to then share all those previous moments and all those other things so that you can see them, together, in that new light.

Love is savouring every moment you can. That is something that becomes clearer when something like this occurs.

Love is being willing to kill (which we both have) for the right to still exist and to have those moments to savour. It is also the willingness to die if it means that the person you shared them with will be safe.

Love, for me, is being able to lie next to my pregnant wife in the early morning hours; feel the taut skin of her belly under my fingers and be blown away by the gently kicking coming from within. To know that we made a life, something that we share, that we can show the same beauty in the world that we see (no matter how limited it might be).

Love is getting out of bed, still groggy, with these thoughts in your head, knowing that the person lying ever so still behind you feels the same.

And it is good.