Reading over 'The Rosegarden', and remembering the process of writing it, it seems I needed around 17 years to get it to come together.
The genesis was an evening I spent with my first love. We don't often have the opportunity to see each other, as we have lived in different countries for decades. Nevertheless, when we meet, it's as if no time has passed. Unfortunately, the times I've seen him have often coincided with one or both of us suffering a bereavement. The first glimmering I had for this story was after spending a night talking to My First Love after a family member of mine had died, and a friend of his had committed suicide. I also remember meeting him soon after my grandmother died. I had broken off an engagement, and he was single for the first time since secondary school, and I wondered if we would finally have the chance to be together. However, our lives on separate continents were serious impediments to this dream working out.
Not long after the broken engagement, I went for a walk in west London with a friend of mine. We were so busy chatting that we didn't notice the passage of time, got locked into a park, and had to scramble over a wall to escape. Later, we reflected that if we'd been romantically involved, this would have been a beautiful setting for a night of passion - a locked rose garden.
These ideas swirled in my head for another few years. One day, I was talking to a colleague at the language school I worked for in Berlin. He told me about a short story he'd read, which had won a competition. The theme had to be short stories about a red and white striped air mattress. The author had mentioned such an object in one sentence, likening the feeling he had to being at sea on a red and white striped air mattress. My colleague and I talked about writing, and he said he'd be interested in reading anything I'd written. I wrote the story up until the moment when James embarrasses himself in the rose garden, and gave it to my colleague to read. He urged me to finish it, and wrote a version of his own, involving an air mattress.
I was really happy to have written this story, but there was something about it that didn't 'work'. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. Finally, it came to me in spring of 2021. I was at my friend Eva's flat, recovering from my first Covid-19 vaccination. As I soaked my aching joints in her bathtub, it occurred to me that the reason the narrative didn't seem believable to me was that the character of James wasn't nice enough. I'd written him as a Jack-the-Lad type, and I wondered why the main character would spend the night with someone who was so annoying. I thought about a lover from my past who, for better or worse, still sometimes appears in my dreams. You know that person who touches your soul but with whom you never really have a chance to make the relationship fly? Well, him. I thought about his personality, and sweetness, and re-wrote the story accordingly, on Eva's balcony. The change of cast made the story ring true, finally, after so many years.
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