We were strangers tumbling through our lives on separate trajectories when we crashed into each other in a grimy bar in Luton. It was 1976 and I was in my second year doing physics at the College of Technology. A girl had just broken up with me and I’d spent three days skipping lectures and drowning my sorrows, though I wasn’t sure how sorry I really was. I was alone and he sat down opposite me and grinned, regarding me with bright, dilated eyes across empty pint glasses. He asked if I wanted another, as if asking that question of a man you didn’t know was totally normal. I said no and then I said yes and he laughed.

I’d found men attractive before, but buried those thoughts deep inside my brain where all the impossible dreams were interred. The idea of a man was like those huge motorbikes that sometimes roared through the hillside town where I grew up, making my bicycle wobble in their tailwinds. Exciting but dangerous, and not for someone like me. My parents had spent my whole life indoctrinating me with a fear of disasters, both physical and social, and I was not a defiant child. I followed rules, and any rebellions were small and secret.

Yet here he was, talking in a way I’d never known anyone speak. He made me think of a radio DJ, his mouth a non-stop torrent of bright, fluid, confident words. By the end of the first hour, I knew all about David’s disappearing Dad and his adoring Mum, his two wildcat sisters and their inappropriate boyfriends, the first men he’d fumbled with age 15 under a railway bridge, about his hopes to be an actor and the TV commercial he’d appeared in. By the end of the second hour he’d prised my own life story out of me, such as it was, dug those impossible dreams out of my head. When he asked me to come to his place for another drink I nodded and followed. If this was disaster it was also life, and the thumping of my heart told me that I did want to live, I really did.

For half a year we slowed each other’s velocities. The memories are fragmentary but sharp, like the pieces of a smashed mirror. I remember hungry kissing in a dark pub corner with “Young Americans” squalling from the jukebox. I remember him calling me pretty, how embarrassed I was to be described in a way meant for girls, and how secretly happy. I remember silly scribbled notes, morning drinking, my stupefied love for him. He was carefree and careless. We had the latter in common.

One winter morning, I woke in David’s bed, shivering without his warm body to hold onto. He was standing at his window, telling me to get up. I wondered if he’d been awake all night. He took speed at weekends and I mostly stuck to beer, so we often fell asleep at different hours.

“What’s the time?” I croaked, a hangover’s tiny hard fists beating on the inside of my skull.

“It’s morning time, sunshine. Get up, get up! It snowed last night. We have to go out.”

“We absolutely don’t.” I dragged the duvet over my head.

“We do. It’ll all melt and turn to mush soon. Come out with me before it’s ruined.”

I remembered he’d grown up in southern cities, where snow never settled for long. I was a northern country boy, used to white fields that stayed that way for months.

I let him pull me out of bed and drag last night’s t-shirt over my head. We stumbled outside, cold wind whipping my hangover away and making my ears throb. He lost his footing on an ice patch, snatched at my arm, and we both fell, laughing. When we reached the nearest park, his grey blue eyes reflected the sunlit snow. Two nearly perfect red circles had formed on his pale cheeks. I told him he looked like a clown, a handsome clown, and he kissed me. An old man walking his dog nearby muttered in our direction, so we laughed and kissed more. The universe sang.

Newton’s law of universal gravity asserts that all matter attracts all matter, with a force varying according to mass and distance. Our attraction was so strong it didn’t even occur to me it could weaken, but then the distance crept between us, inch by inch. I don’t remember exactly how - by then, alcohol was blurring everything – but we fell out of each other’s lives almost by accident, as if helpless against invisible forces. Time sped up and got messier as the distance grew. Time dilation, Einstein calls that. We were both late. All the time, sometimes so late we missed each other altogether. Once I was late enough to find him playing pool with a man I didn’t know, arm slung over his shoulder. I’d heard rumours of other guys. Someone smashed a glass against a wall. He told me I needed help and I knew he wasn’t offering. I don’t remember our last conversation or even where it took place.

Somewhere in the chaos, I got kicked out of university. I retreated to my parents’ semi in the Peak District and tried to breathe again in that atmosphere of silent, sour disappointment. I’d drink smuggled beer cans in my childhood bedroom and sometimes join village pub crawls with old schoolfriends. On one binge, I lost my diary. His telephone number was inside, but I didn’t try to track it down. Such concentrated effort was beyond me by then. Months later, a mutual acquaintance told me he’d moved to LA. I remembered him mentioning a cousin who lived there, though the details were smudged. I wanted to feel happy for him, but just felt left behind.

I continued falling, gravity’s heavy hands on my ankles. I left my parents for a bar job in Leeds. They watched me leave with sad, relieved eyes. 

Over the years there were a few women and one other man, but nothing worked so I drank so nothing worked so I drank. I found catering jobs, and even held a couple down for a while. They terminated in uncomfortable conversations in depressing rooms, just like my relationships. The same phrases cropped up, too, about what a nice guy I was underneath everything, and how many chances I’d been given. 

I racked up three trips to A&E and two arrests over two decades. It says everything about the life and friends I’d chosen that this wasn’t considered excessive in our small, shrinking circle. I never quite buried my dreams again, but they slowly died anyway, and life became a slow, hard swim against tides of disappointment and diminishment.

In 1999, my fall ended when I crash-landed into an AA meeting in London. An old, reformed drinking friend took me. I was a shivering, nicotine-yellow ghost by then, but I heard words inside which eventually returned me to life. 

David’s fall had ended in 1985, in a Chicago hospital ward people were afraid to visit. I learnt this a year into sobriety, once I’d mastered the internet and spent days searching his name. His obituary was short, written 16 years before in a gay magazine I’d never heard of by someone I’d never met. Someone who’d loved him, I hoped. I took an HIV test but wasn’t surprised when it came back negative. It was all so long ago. I might have told my parents I’d avoided that disaster, at least, but they were both dead. I barely remembered either funeral. 

I try to stay as still as I can now, to live calmly and with care. I go to AA meetings, work in a charity shop, and spend every other weekend fishing with two sobriety friends. It’s a quiet life. A nice life, one I’m grateful for. My parents might finally approve of me. I live slowly as if that might in turn slow time down, having squandered so much of it. It doesn’t work, of course. The years still tumble by, pulling me with them. 

My memory is ragged and full of holes, a common complaint among us drunks. It’s probably a kindness, overall. “For an addict, happiness is good health and a bad memory,” one of my friends said once while we were fishing.

Yet sometimes I see those snow-dazzled eyes as if they were right in front of me, as if I could reach out and touch that beautiful face again. Those few memories I held onto are still vivid, still sharp. I did live, I did.

When I let myself think of David, I wish I’d been a more substantial person when we met, possessed greater mass. If I had, maybe I could have held onto him, somehow arrested both our falls. I had dreams for us, dreams I never told him. But dreams are weightless, and gravity pays them no mind.