Tag: relationships

I’m sat at the desk in the kitchen and he’s behind me, leaning into a corner. I’ve been thinking for a while about how we do this.

When I started it was a dumb fly-on-the-wall style thing. Look:

She sits at the kitchen table with a typewriter. Outside the sun is bleaching. A half-drunk coffee cools on the side. Some crumbs next to her hand. She is looking out through the window, but not at anything.

In the light and in the coffee and the mid morning daze…

The doorbell rings.

I…

She stops typing. She opens the door and an alsatian pushes past her leg into the house. A man is standing in front of her. Hairy, with wraparound sunglasses. Hands in his pockets. He probably has a leather jacket on, made of plants rather than leather.

His face doesn’t move, his eyes are hidden behind the glasses. She steps aside and motions for him to come in.

He leans on the kitchen wall. The dog pads its way back into the kitchen and sniffs her. She tickles his head and scratches his belly, then sits down.

I’m working, she says, just so you know.

She pulls the paper out of the typewriter and inserts a clean page.

But that felt all twee and weird. More like a short story than this live-in arrangement we have now. And anyway, since he’s arrived I’ve been so busy. We’ve had a lot of discussions. Acted out many scenes. I like his dog a lot. I have a cat, but she does her own thing. She knows my moods and respects my blind devotion to these people I sometimes show up with. She has her own loves to love.

In one of the scenes we tried, a woman turns up in an ambulance. Driving the ambulance, that is. I leave the door open and she walks in, bringing another dog.

After we chat all together for a while, maybe a couple of days, they get knives from the kitchen and stab me many times. I don’t die, and they don’t care whether I’m dead or not when they leave. I just bleed and hurt and crawl into the shower, where I wash away too much blood. In the morning, he comes back and finds me in the kitchen, on the floor again, acts like he wasn’t one of the people who stabbed me. Acts like he cares about the red staining my top. I don’t know where the ambulance went, but he says he’ll call one. I say not to.

But anyway… haha. Enough about scenes. I reckon we’ll get to that stuff later.

Hey, I say to him. Hey, so I’ve realised we can’t start here. We can’t start at the end, we have to go back and show them the nice times, make them live through the good so they can see how fucked up the bad is.

He looks in my direction, arms folded.

“That’s not exactly fair on me though is it?”

His dog, a big, scary, infinitely caring and friendly thing, sniffs my hand. He’s probably looking for the tennis ball.

What do you mean not fair on you? You enjoyed the past as well. You said.

“You already know my decision. There’s no point digging up the past and making things feel worse for both of us.”

Yeah but it wasn’t my decision. And it wasn’t our decision, was it?

I pet the dog.

“You ended any sense of us when you did what you did.”

Would you please stop being so much like him, it’s actually hurting me.

“How am I supposed to act?”

Like a figment of my imagination I’ve hired to portray him. Obviously. Have you ever looked behind your glasses? His eyes didn’t look like that.

“What have you done to my eyes?”

Don’t pretend to be freaked out by this.

He slowly kneels down, relaxing or retreating, and starts to feel behind the glasses at his eyes. The dog leaves my hand and pads over to him, looks up, maybe concerned, maybe curious.

You’re not going to be able to feel them that way, silly. Stop making the readers think I’m doing weird stuff to you. It’s you who’s a big part of the problem here.

“If we go back to the nice times, do I get my eyes back?”

They’re not your eyes, they’re his. And no.

He stops fussing with his eyes. Pets the dog, who relaxes and lies next to him on the floor. Pensive.

“If I don’t have his eyes, I don’t have his mind either.”

Yeah.

“Whose mind do I have then?”

You’ve got everything I know and believe about him, even a bunch of contradictory, confused and unfinished stuff, crammed into your skull and body.

“Oh.”

I did say you’re literally a figment of my imagination.

“Why are you acting like this is normal?”

Why are you not? Stop stalling for time, we have places to be.

I haven’t written here for a long time. I write, but it doesn’t go here. That’s maybe going to change.

But before that, I need a ramble. And I’m going to throw you in at the deep end.

I love him. You know the love I mean. The bad kind. Obsessive. I think a lot about how I was raised to think of this as ‘romance’, as love. My emotional self still seems to think it is, but whatever rational self-awareness I have is fucking tired, people. It’s like stop this. Girl, you are better than this.

I’m at the broken end of my latest obsession. I get one maybe every two years. It takes a year or more to get over the rejection, and then about six months of relative stability before I stumble, clear-eyed and purposeful in my awkwardness, into another one. This is the routine.

My men always have some redeeming traits, things I see as divine connection between us. They’re also always selfish, anxious, they usually drink a lot, they usually don’t want people like me. They have a personality that makes them – under certain circumstances – abusive. And they are almost always friends first. In many ways this is a typical male profile, for men who drink anyway.

I’m summarising them this way because it’s hard not to see them as the beautiful, maybe perfect individuals I still love. Some of whom have continued to be, or who have become, lifelong friends. But I’m not talking about that part right now, I’m not talking about the good part.

Because I love him – and he is the most perfect one so far, and he has done what no-one else has done – cut me out of his life and burned some of my very important friendships in the process. That’s nothing, I know. There are people losing life and limb in Gaza or Ukraine or anywhere I guess when you think hard enough, and there are people in long-term abusive partnerships, there are people dealing with mountains much bigger than I have to move here. Okay. But I’m not them. I’m me. And I have to actively deal with this. This thing is inside me, it’s not inside them. We don’t have to play the hand we’re dealt, but we do have to play our own hand. At least a little.

I want to say I loved him, past tense. The love has been dulled. More than that. The love is entombed now, like a vampire. Waiting for a drop of blood to grace its lips so it can swing back into fully-fledged demonry. It has been entombed for some time. He made sure of this. I tried so hard to stop him, but I couldn’t. You can’t make someone love you, and you can’t stop someone from nailing your love into a coffin and burying it 18feet below your feet.

There were times when he loved me back, but they don’t matter here. I either imagined them or he’s given them up – the result is the same.

So… what?

Well, I can still hear my love screaming down there, in its coffin. You know like in that recent Nosferatu movie – it can be asleep and very awake and alive in your dreams at the same time. In my dreams it’s also buried, but it’s wide awake. It’s thrashing and screaming.

And I needed an excuse to write.

This site was always supposed to be the stories of me, in my bungalow, in a dreamlike Hollywood or LA adjacent place that doesn’t really exist.

I was sitting in my bungalow, and he knocked on the door.

He wears sunglasses to protect himself from my love.

I opened the door and his dog padded into my home as I tried to find his eyes. The lines in his face and the fall of his hair told me things, but the eyes sat behind those laughing, sadistic glasses.

This is the version of him I imagine, when I’m in the bungalow, okay. He’s not ‘real’. Over a year ago, he was the first character I imagined in the bungalow – I think. Apart from the little visitors coming to drink coffee or buy potions and hear stories. He came in a fog, like a character from Silent Hill. He never really wants to talk to me.

And as I write, he’s standing here, looking over me, or maybe not looking. It used to make my heart race just to think that I might see him, walking along the street, getting a coffee, in a meeting. I remember once he was walking down the stairs into the room and the seconds he took started filling out into an infinity of bliss. It was like an angel walking down from heaven. And as he stands here now I can hear the throb of my love’s heart below our feet. Distant, but persistent.

I’m going to talk to him, maybe show him some rooms here. And I’m going to pretend that this is a remotely healthy way of dealing with either breakup or rejection.