Dear diary,
I haven’t drunk a drop of lemon sparkling water in more than ten years.
I avoid it. The way you avoid an old wound. The way you don’t go back to the restaurant where a ring was offered and then taken away. The way you don’t watch the films you once saw together.
Lemon water became a symbol of loss. Of someone who isn’t coming back. Of someone you don’t actually want back.
I remember it all as if it were yesterday. Every detail.
Spain.
We flew into Málaga at the end of May. She said, “This will be the best holiday of your life.”
I was twenty-eight. She was thirty-two. We’d been together eight months. She had a toothbrush at my flat. I knew all her friends. Everyone assumed a wedding was on the cards.
The Hotel Miramar wasn’t the most expensive, but it was cosy. White walls, blue pool, palm trees looked after by a gardener with sad eyes. A room on the third floor with a sea view.
Though, to be honest, the tap ran rusty water, the air conditioning worked only now and then, and the neighbours upstairs made a racket at night.
Still, we were happy. That’s what I thought, anyway.
On the first day she ordered sparkling water with lemon.
“Have you tried this?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“No.”
“It’s the taste of love.”
I laughed.
She wasn’t joking.
She genuinely believed in signs, in omens, in the idea that if you drank this water at sunset, love would last forever.
And so we drank. Straight from the bottle, sharing one between us.
Sour, sweet, bubbles tickling the tongue.
She looked at me with adoring eyes. I drowned in them.
“Let’s always drink lemon water,” she said dreamily.
“Let’s,” I said, never suspecting the taste would become my curse.
Back home in Manchester, things unravelled quickly. She grew colder. She cancelled one meeting, then another, then she stopped calling, then answered only every other time.
I put up with it. I told myself: work trouble, a crisis, depression.
After a month, she said: “I need to be alone, to think.”
After two months: “Don’t ring me anymore.”
After three, she vanished without a word.
My phone stayed silent. Her friends said they didn’t know where she was. Her mother spoke through gritted teeth: “She doesn’t want to talk to you. Don’t ring again. Don’t torture her or yourself.”
I didn’t ring. I waited. A year.
Then I married someone else. A good, reliable, utterly ordinary woman.
She didn’t drink lemon water. She didn’t gaze at me with adoring eyes. She didn’t say, “You’re my life.” She was just there—brought home a salary, did things around the flat when I asked.
And I decided that was love. Calm, everyday, grown-up.
Neither one thing nor the other.
We had a little girl. My wife was pleased, but in a detached way, as if a child were a new piece of furniture from Argos.
Five years later, we divorced.
I could no longer live in the swamp. That’s how I put it.
Not because of the lemon water. Not because of Spain. Not because of the memories.
I simply realised: a boring marriage is a cage.
I wasn’t a bird. I was just a man. And I wanted to live, not merely exist.
So I ended up alone. With my daughter, a cat called Tilly, and the feeling that life had somehow passed me by.
I worked as an accountant at a small firm. There was a flat on a mortgage, a car that kept breaking down. Friends had scattered. My mother had died, and I’d never known my father. There was my daughter. And the cat.
I didn’t drink lemon water. I avoided anything that carried the faintest echo of that cursed flavour.
In restaurants I ordered Coke, orange juice, still water. I told everyone I had an allergy to lemons, even to the smell.
“Since when?”
“A long time.”
Nobody knew the truth. The truth seemed too ridiculous for a man of forty.
The real truth: I was afraid of the water. The lemon. The bubbles.
And the memories.
One day I caught myself realising I couldn’t remember her face.
I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, staring out of the window. My daughter was doing her homework, the cat asleep on the windowsill.
And I thought: what was her nose like? Straight, or with a slight bump? Her eyes—brown or green? Her hair—dark or fair?
I couldn’t remember.
I could only remember the lemon water.
One evening I popped into Tesco. Bread, milk, eggs, cat food. And then, on the drinks shelf, I saw it. Lemon sparkling water. The same as we’d drunk in Spain. The same yellow label, a lemon cut in half. The same bubbles dancing inside.
I picked up the bottle. Held it. Put it back. Walked away. Came back. Picked it up again.
“You taking that, mate?” asked a young man in uniform, unloading crates.
“No,” I said, and walked out.
All the way home I thought about the water. About her. About Spain. About how stupid it was to be afraid of something that had been gone for years.
That night I didn’t sleep. I lay on the sofa, stared at the ceiling, listened to my daughter moving in her room. Tilly came and lay on my chest, purring. Silence.
Then I got up, threw on a jacket, shoved my feet into slippers, grabbed my keys and ran out of the door.
At Tesco I bought that same lemon water. One bottle. Nothing else.
Back home, I went into the kitchen and took out a glass. The most ordinary one—a plain tumbler, no pattern. I took a deep breath. Opened the bottle. It hissed as the bubbles escaped.
I poured half a glass. Smelled it. It smelled of Spain. The sea. Youth. Pain. That sunset when she said, “It’s the taste of love.”
I drank.
And… nothing happened.
No memories came flooding back. No tears rose. No ache gripped my chest. It was just… lemon fizzy water. Utterly ordinary.
I finished it, threw the bottle in the bin, washed the glass and put it in the draining rack. Then I went to bed and, for the first time in years, fell asleep without sleeping pills.
In the morning I woke with a smile on my face.
“Dad, are you all right?” my daughter noticed the change in me.
“Nothing.”
“You’re acting odd.”
“I’m fine. Just slept well…”
All day I felt good. Not my usual self—heavy in the morning, tired by the afternoon, sick of people by the evening.
Today I felt light. Free. As if I had put down a backpack I’d been carrying for more than ten years.
That evening I bought another familiar bottle. Drank it. Smiled.
“Silly me,” I told myself. “What were you afraid of?”
I understood: the lemon water had never been my enemy. The enemy was in my head, whispering: “Don’t drink it, or you’ll remember everything, you’ll never forget, and you’ll suffer again.”
And look at me now: I drank it and came out in one piece. More than that—perfectly calm. Happy.
Forgotten.
A week later I met up with a friend from university—Poppy Mitchell. We’d been friends since our student days.
“Poppy, I’m drinking lemon water again,” I said.
“What?” She choked on her drink.
“Almost every day.”
“What about your allergy?”
“There was never any allergy.”
“And now what?”
“Now I’m free.”
“Don’t you want to write to her?”
“Why?”
“Maybe she still remembers you. Maybe she still loves you.”
“Let her remember. I’ve forgotten.”
I chose to forget. Now the lemon water isn’t about the past. It’s about life carrying on. In spite of everything. Or perhaps because of it.
I suppose that’s the lesson, isn’t it? The ghosts we run from are the ones we keep feeding. You can carry a taste in your mouth for ten years, turn it into a monster, wrap it in memories and pain. Then one night you drink it, and it’s just water with lemon. The monster was never in the glass. It was in the story you kept telling yourself. Somewhere along the way, I stopped telling that story. That’s when I got free.
