46-47 Years Old

Some things I overheard her saying and could not forget this year.

At seven am, whilst buying a Krispy Kreme doughnut: “This will be my one treat for the day.” before she boarded a train and went to work, knowing there would be no more treats until tomorrow’s doughnut.

"Ha!" In the office, when someone called her a MILF and she had to pretend she did not know what that meant. At home she typed the word MILF into Google and then watched a lot of videos she wished she hadn’t watched.

Once, out loud to an empty kitchen she said: “Oh. I love you Mark Kermode.” Meaning every single word and walking quickly from the window to the sink and back again while she listened to his voice.

When she felt ill and farted so badly she had to leave the room, she said: “fuck it all” and she stood in the hall for six minutes, not even bothering to go upstairs, listening to the television through the door.

Drunk, at a friend’s house, she said into the toilet while she was being sick, and her friends were talking about her round the dinner table: “Mark Kermode, where are you now, when I really need you?”

“Oh what a nice stick” to a dog by itself in the park

“Don’t worry, I’m not a MILF” to one of the teenagers who came to get the football from next to where she was sunbathing.

When she could not remember the name of the actress Faye Dunaway: “Sissy Spacek, only not her. She looks like a bitch.”

“Come out of the station and turn left until you hate yourself, then you’re at my road.” To a blind date who was coming to pick her up. He later asked her eight times to go back to his house and when she finally went, he made reference to her ‘quim’ and she spent £45 on a taxi home.

“I think this little black pebble is my father.” Quietly, behind the backs of everyone she spoke to, with her mouth moving in a way that she could not control, because I was making her do it.