Guilty as charged

So, there isn't much point in me whining about 31 (the ex) dumping me over email anymore as I accidentally dumped 32 (my love) over email. Accidental, of course, as in I had wanted to have "the conversation" with him, but couldn't for the life of me sort out why I was breaking up with him, so how to start that conversations.... there were alternatives

I think it's time we part ways because
a) the thought of you meeting some other woman at that New Year's Party in Paris while I was here didn't bother me
b) I don't think I love you anymore
c) We want different things and I don't want to have to apologise for wanting a nice house full of nice things
d) You want to move to South America with your vintage motorbike and I don't
e) You're much grumpier than I remember
f) You drive like a hooligan

The problem, of course, is that none of the above is really scientific proof of anything. Because with love, science holds little sway.

a) New Year's... well, maybe I did feel indifferent just then but I would have been sad if you met someone you prefered to me... (sad or heartbroken? that is the ten million Euro question, really)
b) I feel like I should love you - you're beautiful and kind and witty and you speak French... but then the other list pops up... you're stubborn and a snob and you can't speak of emotions ever and you don't like your mother (always a Freudian warning sign)
c) I do want a nice hous full of nice things and I did spend thirteen years travelling and working washing underwear in hotel bathroom sinks and scrubbing the grime of my face with fluro green hostel soap.... at the same time I admire your spartan soul and love our mutual love for second hand and vintage objects...
d) it's not South America that bothers me per se, it's that you can't talk of it with me in the mix... is that because you know I am staying put now? for at least a few years? but why can't you move here? I love you (we think) and I want to have a family with you (that's how it felt, whenever I kissed his Gerard Depardieu nose) and you want to drive around the Andes and pretend you're 23 again?
e) You ARE much grumpier than I remember, but I know why, and maybe I am too? And maybe all relationships must pass the in love stage into the grumpy stage and survive it?
f) He does drive like a hooligan. But then, when he visited me last year I did reverse over a small tree and accidentally to a three point turn on a pavement.

Anyway... I just wish it hadn't been over text, then email. I just said I was having doubts... and then we got into an e-banter that spilled into anger.

I've not heard from him since.

I wonder if I was hasty... but I think I know that my love had faded. He saved my life after a really nasty breakup but that was his role and not more. I just do hope he's not too sad. Maybe he doesn't care.

Henri, I know you don't read blogs, and certainly not this one, but thank you for our time together.

Notes on Miss Austen

One of my rattailed possee of international mongrels emailed me to day. Skye, my love, is the mix of an American mother rather in denial about the meagreness of the alimony her Scottish ex-husband flicks her way once a month... Skye just makes do.

Her mum's denial feeds into a rabid determination to make life on a small barren island in an ever smaller stone cottage with illcleaned fireplaces and single glazing into a mental world of scaled back, rural romanticism.

Her father is spawning with, as Skye herself put it, "his inappopriately aged girlfriend." Skye just makes do with having inadequate parents and gets on with her life.

I mention Miss Jane Austen, for a Miss she remained until her stupidy premature death to some unknown and imperial era untreatable ailment, because Skye could so well be her successors. The wit, the perceptiveness, the mix of utter understanding of and gentleness towards the follies of us mere humans and the beauty of it all, the beauty in irony, stereotype... but there is no irony in love.

Skye, like myself, may not feel we've quite understood this thing called love (wasn't it supposed to be somehow linked to happiness?) but we do still regard it with a certain amount of respect. It's like the holy grail. No one is really sure it's out there (or what it is? a wooden cup, a golden chalice, a red haired Mary Magdalene descendent...) but it's around, somewhere, anywhere, and at the very least it's around, very much so, in people's thoughts and desires. Thus it's material description pales into insignificane because a thought kept alive by billions isn't easily erased....

But... to return to Miss Austen.... Skye and I concluded today on a brief Skype chat that Mr Darcy is somewhat of an autistic stalker (staring at Eliza Bennet from afar, skulking among trees, even, at one point!, stealing a glance at her through a mirror (sneaky!)) and we weren't sure if we'd like him ever so much at all if we met him now... (frankly, we'd probably hit him over the head with a dusty copy of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex )

... but we also concluded on conclusively concluding that Miss Austen does allow the entire gamut of love.... fraternal, paternal, sisterly, sexual, romantic, Freudian, daddy issue'y, proud, innocent...

and of course PRACTICAL love.... I'd like to say that that has changed, that, in our day, with somewhat less ridiculous inheritance laws for women, expedience played no part in love. But alas, that would be telling a lie and that I do not on this blog... that was kinda the point of it... honesty, in all its filth.


(I sometimes wonder what Miss Austen'd think of this era's romantic comedies... like Love, Actually or, heaven forbid, Pretty Woman! (marry a courtisan!? mais c'est hors de question!))

The elephant in the bedroom

Now that 32, the man who healed me, is drifting out of my life, I realise it's so quiet and undramatic compared to last time. It is sad. He slept on the couch. When I heard his car start this morning I thought to myself in the dark "I have never felt sadder in my life." But oddly. I know that isn't true. I'll miss 32. But this breakup is sad, not life-altering. Not like the last one.

This morning my thoughts returned to 31 (the ex) and the pain, the very real pain that no one really seemed able to understand.

31 and I, we had a roundabout of post-breakup spats: our fights, then tense moments of artificial cordiality when forced to see each other in public, then me breaking into another episode of mournful sadness when I'd cry even before I opened my eyes in the morning, then amicable dissections of what went wrong, his insistence that we couldn't have fixed it. Then, on one occasion, I got his line "Let's not talk about it". He uttered it when he saw me well up with tears as he finally dropped off the last boxes of my stuff.

Let's not talk about ? Let's not talk about it ?

To this day, that line fills me with fury. Sure, let's not talk about it, sure let's just pretend that it doesn't matter. Like we didn't spend two years doing what I tried to describe as fruitless bickerings stemming from our differences, irreconcilable differences perhaps?, and which 31 persisted, nagged and pleaded and philosophised were us "fine tuning" so we could live together in "bliss" for the rest of our god damn sparkly, shiny, happy lives.

Excuse the many inverted commas, but he was a man wont to use big words, despite the fact that he couldn't spell most of them. So let's not talk about all that energy we spent "fine tuning", and let's not talk about how 31 just threw it all away, pissed on it, and let it rot and fester by pretending that it was so insignificant that it wasn't even worth talking about.

The counter argument to all of this is, of course, that his fury and sadness was so great that pretending that it didn't matter was vital for him to move on... I can understand that. I suppose I can. It takes two to endlessly "fine tune" and then one day realise that the quibble tango was all for nothing. The centre does not hold...

And I had to, even when I found myself painfully drawn into a cocoon of self-pity and sadness even many months after the breakup, acknowledge that he really did have to fight on one level against my obsession with 28 (The Artist).

There was an elephant in the room and I couldn't see it. Couldn't see how the elephant was sitting on my boyfriend's chest and suffocating him .My obsession with a man who wasn't half the man my actual real life boyfriend was. My imaginary lover.

28. Mr I Wish Things Could Have Been Different (But Of Course They Never Were)

I remember, a few weeks before the nuclear meltdown with 31, that my browsing history on my laptop was open. He had obviously been snooping. I remember wondering if he'd done it carelessly as a warning, a "I am watching you." Not necessarily because of malice, but maybe as a pleading, a hint, a "I'm looking please don't let me find what I fear the most".... But of course he had (and it would get worse)

I saw, with a certain amount of embarrassment, that The Artist's Facebook profile was one of my top visited sites in the last week.

But I didn't erase my browsing history, I didn't log off my email. Because I thought my obsession with The Artist was just a bit infantile and easy to explain away. 31, needless to say, didn't see it that way...

I was caught out, big time, when Thirtyone opened my email those few weeks later and read all those things that I said to a girlfriend about our failing relationship, and how I couldn't help but think of The Artist.... dream of him even.

There were things in there that I couldn't erase, words not meant for his eyes, and, I've come much later to realise, words that perhaps just by being formulated, by being written down, by being sent to a third person despite thinking I was among friends, made certain problems concrete. Written down they were unerasable.

I said straight out that I missed The Artist. That I missed making love to him.

That, to this day, remains a mystery to me. I never had a real relationship with The Artist. Two out of the four times I ever saw him before meeting my boyfriend he was a total and utter self-absorbed bastard not only to me but to several of my friends.

But afterwards he represented the road I didn't travel down and I stupidly, at the time of writing that email, thought I didn't travel down that road because of logistics - never in the same city, never in the same.... never in the same god damn whatever. Who cares? It didn't happen. And I should have let go.

But somehow, when my relationship to 31 crumbled around me, I began romanticising the past. First of all the general past, a general sense of freedom, of unpredictability, an idea of a time when I could sleep with whomever I wanted, when I wanted, in whatever city of my chosing. Of course, the bad stupid anxious painful messy empty episodes of sex without love spanning several world cities and umpteen inappropriate "lovers" seem to have escaped my recollections.

I also came to romanticise the specific past, the specific boy, the specific Mr 28, tortured artist and all round demi-intellectual with green green eyes and jet black hair.

And my beautiful 31, my beautiful 31 with his chocolate brown hair and eyes as dark as a koala's, he just didn't seem as exotic to me. I was blind. Sometimes, to this day, when my anger at him lifts, I just want him back so desperately. I know that is nostalgia gone haywire, but there were some parts of him, inside and out, which were just unique and beautiful to me.

I argued, and still argue to some extent, that it was clear by that email, written to a close girlfriend, that despite my hesitations and romanticising of the past, I was still working on a true commitment to my real boyfriend.

The email was in fact a letter to a girlfriend saying 'this is the situation, my relationship is sinking, what do you think I should do?" And she had answered. And I had started putting her advice into practice.

I had proof that the email was asking for advice, because in the span of days after I sent it til the moment 31 read it, I did put advice number one into practice, smoothing over a difficult subject with humour and tenderness which led us to making love in the shower, me with my cheek nestled onto his chest afterwards, purring like a kitten, as the water fell around us.

I had proof, I thought, that despite the harsh words describing the relationship's failings, I was applying the advice given to me, that I was serious about saving us, serious serious serious. I thought it was clear that I though our troubles were stress-related (new city, new apartment, him new job, me between jobs) and we could get out the other side of the tunnel maybe even happier than in the very beginning.

I was quite clearly ever so wrong.

A boy on a motorcycle

I must admit, he has never lied. I can't call him immature because it's not like he's having a mid life crisis and taking it out on his wife and kids. He was a boy on a motorcycle when I met him, and he's still a boy on a motorcycle now.

I overestimated the importance of my presence in his life. Is it love? Some kind of it, certainly, but not my kind, not anymore.

Like is almost always the case, I've known this for a while, that we've reached an end of sorts.

Did I have doubts and now that I see clearly those doubts appear like unerasable proof that I would come to this decision? Well, what if I hadn't come to this decision? What if I would have said, I have doubts but the points where I am sure about him are more in focus, weigh more?

But they weren't and they didn't.

Mindnumbing

Numb of mind, of body. Despite the unseasonally cheerful sunshine outside, flaking the tops of the trees into glowing contours of branch and leaf, I sit in bed. Enjoying the silence, Tiny flies, or maybe midges, hover indecesively in the light air above the muddy garden outside. Yesterday, our neighbour gave us half her pumpkin. A car passes alongside the road, sheltered from view by a moss covered stone wall, which is probably older than both of us, put together.

I have things to do. But not urgent. I have phone calls to make. But not urgent. There are dishes to be cleaned, hills to be walked, texts to be written. But they are not urgent. And not urgent becomes not now. Why not now? Well, why now?

I was slightly scared the silence would bore me, but I feel at ease, numb, not in the aftershock way, but in the steady knowledge that things can wait. For a while longer.

32 (my love) is at work. He'll be back at 4.30. There are dishes to be washed, tables to be wiped down, washing to be washed, but none urgent, not yet. My belly full of food and my hair a snake pit of post-love tendrils, I haste not.

I dreamt of this silence for so long, dreamt of the steady 'honey, I'm home' of just waiting for your man, making sure the fridge is full and the house not a total nuclear disaster site. A marijuana plant grown to reach the height of my waist has been carried into the living room to save it against the November chill. Beside it, a white orchid and a silver bowl filled to the brim with tomatoes.

To not marry

I love the fact that I am not going to marry 32 (my love), it makes me feel like I want to, but knowing I won't allows me to enjoy the feeling of wanting to without worrying about the actual practicalities or emotional boobie traps of actually doing so in actual like real actual life

Back to basics

It was the year Kurt Cobain died. I didn’t even know who he was, who Nirvana were. But somehow gutting your skull with a shotgun was so sad it became cool, turning a rifle onto yourself in a garage I can only imagine to be like most garages are usually – fragrant oilslicks on concrete flooring, the threat of mould and rust clinging to floating dust grains.

I soon had a poster of Cobain above my bed. A black-and-white print where he turns in profile from the body of his guitar cradled on his lap to tug at a cigarette. My father did not approve. Of the cigarette, my mother specified, but really, truthfully, of teenagers and their overwrought emotions in general.

Why did the boy who became number one become number one. He was calm. He was a punk. He represented to me two polar opposites of my father’s fiery temper which was often fuelled by a desperate longing to not offend, to be respectable.

Number one offended. Number one had a leather jacket and a mohawk as tall as his face. I used to pop the whiteheads that formed along it ever time a few days had passed since he’d shaved the sides of his head. After we made out, sugar coated my bedsheets because he coaxed the mohawk into stiffness by dunking his hair in syrup. And it all came undone as we tried to set records on how long we could kiss each other.

But the beautiful thing about number one was that he was no thug despite his exterior. He was mildmannered, shy even. A reticent boy who, like me, already had one foot out of his parents’ home but little idea of where it was taking him.

He would join the merchant navy ever so briefly, before returning to our suburb and falling into addiction, pushing him to the brink of illhealth and to a skinniness which meant that a couple of years later, when I ran into a mutual friend, I didn’t realise that he was the boy standing alongside him.

That visual clings to me. It was an early summer’s day, the kind where the light feels as though it’s not quite fully present, it is tender and transparent. The colour is warm but the temperature isn’t quite. I should have recognised him by the way he was leaning back on the railing. By the cluster of parked bicycles outside the railway station. One foot perched on the mid-railing as his slender elbows kept his torso leaning back and tilted his chest towards the sky, his head at a slight perch.

But I didn’t.

Is it odd that I didn’t recognise this man who I shared a be-home-before-ten teenage bed with for a year and a half. Moving in those last six months to having sex. Maybe. But you see, I cared for him, and cared less about him being the first in the overly mythologised way that some girls cling to both their virginity and the fable of their own princesshood.

I, in contrast, never really cared much about my virginity. I lost it early, at 14, which people seem to think proves something about me – pretention or sexual voraciosness, or even a competitive urge to be first in my school. It only proves, however, that I was bored and that I was with someone I trusted.

Had it not been him I wonder if my boredom would have pushed me to have sex about the same time? in some dark after-party sofa, or with someone older, ”cooler”, probably some boy with a scooter. But I didn’t. I lost it to Daniel. And I have never regretted it.

His calm wasn’t infectious at such. It just provided a canvas to my own uncontrollabe sadness and anger. I once drove one of his leather jacket safety pins halfway to the hilt through his jeans into his thigh because he’d ignored me at the youth club all evening. He yelped, said it hurt, slid off his bar stool and walked away.

There was never any drama. And thus no counter reaction from my side when meted out with punishment for my behaviour. Which meant, in a perverse way, that it was pointless to provoke him. He would not provoke me back. It just didn’t meet with any response. And instead I was left to ponder the effect on the long term, his view of me, my view of me, our love.

It wasn’t puppy love. It was, as I look back fifteen years later, oddly mature love. With a foot out the door on either side – his parents divorced, mine stuck in their careers – we chose to put our remaining feet together for a short while as we were both stuck there for a bit longer, as add-ons to our parents’ lives.