persia.

"How was your little trip, love?" Janet, my co-worker asked as we scanned and stacked the shelves together. Usually this is a one man job, but Janet was getting on a bit now and her arthritis meant she had trouble reaching for things and so I told her I would help.

Out of all the people I worked with, I loved Janet the most. She was dead nice, really motherly, not unlike my own own mum. Funnily enough though, she had no kids of her own, and her husband was dead almost fifteen years now. Janet and I were so close, she invites me round for dinner sometimes, to keep her company. She's like my second mum.

"It was nice, but I'm glad to be back and stacking the shelves at Sainsbury's!" I joke and Janet shakes her head.

She likes to lecture me sometimes about how I should be going out, doing things and getting a real job, not stuck here minding the aisles and manning the tills. She says that when I get to her age, then I can come back to Sainsbury's and preach other young lasses about wasting their precious youth throwing out gone off tins of tuna.

I always laugh at her and tell her she'd definitely miss me far too much if I left, and she doesn't deny it. Funny sort of relationship Janet and I have.

We chat a bit more as we scan and and stack, throwing old tins into a box and putting out new ones from another. Janet, like every other woman over thirty in my life, keeps close tabs on my love life, and most of the time she's disappointed because of the lack of it.

Truth is, I was still cautious about my feeling towards everyone, and so finding love while barely being able to keep up friendships isn't easy. Janet knows I kick myself around for letting someone make me that way, so she tells me that it's ok if I need a while to get myself back together.

She tells me she wouldn't expect an independent lass like me to be so broken up over the fact I let a lad take advantage of me, and tear me to shreds in the process, but the truth is, I was always dumb and naïve I was just very good at hiding it, still am.

So it's been a bit of a dry spell for me, after Jared, the lad who caused all this. All the working at Sainsbury's and dinners at Janet's house and trips around Wales and moving to Cardiff. I had my life all together when we was together. We had moved to Manchester, I worked in a music shop and we had our own little place. And then one day he comes home and says he doesn't want this anymore and that there's someone else. And your whole world falls apart. And he moves out, leaves all his shit behind and you sit on the floor and cry for three days, thinking how did you not see that one coming. Thinking how stupid you were. And your sister comes and helps you burn all his stuff out the back garden and you move away, into her house in Cardiff and you get a job at Sainsbury's until you can get yourself back together. And you think, in a couple of months I'll be back in Manchester, doing great. But it's been more than a year now. And I still work at Sainsbury's, and I still live with my sister. And I'm still trying to fix myself. And my closest friend is a sixty year old widow whose dog takes more tablets a day than her.

And it becomes this blissful numbness, because everything is always the same, and you get used to it. You just exist. You're not happy, you're not sad. You just float from work to home and back to work again. Then your friend Janet tells you that you need a holiday. And you know you do. So you and your sister go off around Wales for four days, looking for god knows what. A new start? A new lad? And before you know it you're back stacking the shelves at Sainsbury's. Same as it was before. Except in the moments of silence between Janet and I, I think about those lads. Van, Bondy, Larry and the other two. And you shake your head cause you know they're not thinking about you. Far too busy doing interesting things with their lives.

I let a sigh slip out my mouth.
"You okay love?" Janet asks.
"Yeah, fine thanks Janet, just missing the cowfields, the fresh manure and all that." I say, I know it's a lie, I sigh at my sad little life.

Janet chuckles and comes right up to me.
"Something different about you today, Persia, something in your eyes. Didn't realise cows could do that to a lass." She says, but she gives me a knowing look. She knows me too well. This is why I don't look people in the eye. The secrets were spilling out of my irises like someone had opened my diary. I thought about the diary under the mattress back in the beach house.

Janet trotted off to another aisle, leaving me stranded in a sea of tuna cans. I hope she didn't see what she think she saw. I thought about a blue- eyed boy. No. I didn't like him. Did i?