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One of the members of The Cure, the Hall of Fame English goth rock band, has died, aged 65. A group whose music has never once felt congenial to my ears, not even now, but it once mattered profoundly to someone: a woman I last saw close to twenty-five years ago, scarcely remembered for most of that span, and yet whose presence has haunted my consciousness for the past three months with inexplicable insistence.
We worked together in the back room of a long-defunct—and thoroughly deserving-to-be-defunct—retail establishment. She kept The Cure and Morrissey in perpetual rotation, to the slow erosion of my patience; but by then I was keenly aware that life had inflicted crueller torments upon me, so I endured. Without divulging any details about who she was in this realm, for that is not my purpose and is absolutely nobody’s business (nobody I speak to would recognise the name, anyhow), I will say this: it has been impressed upon my psyche—a forceful relevation—that this girl deserved far better from the world, and infinitely better from me.
In those years, I was a ruin masquerading as a young man: erratic, damaged, inattentive to the good that stood before me. An absolute menace that broke everything I came into contact with. I never once considered courting this girl, in spite of her beauty, and never earnestly attempted to show myself to her in a favourable light; I treated her, at best, like an exasperating younger sister, and often less kindly than that. We did frequently annoy one another. Meanwhile, for the bulk of that time, I squandered myself on a grotesque and destructive relationship with a corpulent she-devil that ended up costing me for years after the fact. I lived a life so deranged that, compared with the late ’90s and early ’00s, my present eccentricities may be the picture of stability. And still, I have come to know only very recently that this lady I speak of cared for me far more than she let on. Loved me, in fact, very much in spite of myself, for reasons that only grace could fathom. A spirit, a whisper from beyond reason, and a voice of supreme authority who tells me this repeatedly now, and with such clarity that retrospection rearranges itself into a painful new coherence. (For the record, and if not already apparent, this individual is deceased).
Thus I find myself contemplating the sheer profundity of my own folly. I was wholly unworthy as a suitor—perhaps it is even a mercy that I never presumed to try in those years—yet she, had I not been so catastrophically blind, would have been the one and only soul capable of drawing a better man from the wreckage. She rather wished to; she tried in her small, tentative ways, gestures I now perceive with painful hindsight, though at the time I was too mired in my own brokenness to recognise them for what they were.
Call me mad, delusional, schizophrenic—whatever appellation satisfies your taxonomy of human frailty. There may even be a hint to those charges, but I no longer care. I record these thoughts not for public absolution but for the quiet reckoning of my own spirit. I made every wrong decision imaginable more than a quarter of a century ago and have paid dearly for them, in ways both overt and subterranean. And yet, despite all logic, despite the absence of any physical presence, despite over two decades of nearly forgetting—she has permeated my consciousness with an insistence that defies reason. She reveals, with a strange and sorrowful clarity, the truths I was too stubborn or too wounded to grasp.
And so I do not resist it. I cannot. In an inexplicable yet unmistakable way, it is a final chance to understand what I once squandered, and what it might yet mean for whatever remains of my life.
Spirits are real, and they do strive to communicate with us; it is simply that most of us lack the eyes to see or the ears to discern, and for the longest time I was unquestionably among that number. Yet a measure of mercy hath at last been granted me; may deliverance and redemption, in their appointed hour, follow thereafter. —Arthur Newhook, 28 December 2025.
Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.
