When you are young and in love, you let them weave
stories for you. Of their past, present and future. He loved to weave stories
about her, the smile and art of her until I couldn’t help but see her as half
myth, half nightmare. She was the one before me, the girl he loved despite the odds.
He would tell me how he had tirelessly and selflessly loved
her- to be tossed aside.
How she completely cut him off and surely, everyone involved
knew he had been done wrong.
How he had gone through all the effort of so many little things
only for her to behave so cruelly.
She haunted me. Being the one he told about all this past
misery and desperately wanting to make things better. He kept photos of her up
and referred to them as a symbol of how he was on the moral high ground (anyone
lesser would have deleted those memories and surely, she would see he was a
good guy, right?). I didn’t think much of the truth behind the mythical woman
before me… Until I wanted to be like her: free from him.
He likes to tell stories (after a year or two the stories
start to repeat and by year four you start to tune out… He hates not being
listened to but when you’ve heard the story on the same stretch of road four times
now, you start looking at your phone). It’s how he humanises himself and the obscurity that surrounds him. It
used to be charming when I was young and for a while he seemed quite spectacular
compared to the weak conversationalists I encountered.
Then again when you are
sixteen, anyone who can talk to you about books and politics seems
sophisticated. He is always the victim, the one who the world had turned their
back on. How I needed to make it better and be a reminder that not everything
was so dark. He did not know love or friendship and so I was responsible to be
those things.
The snag with silver linings is that you have to believe in
them. After a while I didn’t and couldn’t.
I was in my first year of university and desperately anxious
and unsure about why. He explained it away, like he explained away the friend
who told me he was bad news. I once whispered my fear that the dark cloud I had
was tied to him and he never let me forget that it was the last possible thing
to be true. And yet the second he was gone my insides untangled themselves and my
shattered nerves became whole.
He would not let me detach and the first pull away was met
with a grand gesture of flowers and a mug printed with buttons. Then I was in
my second year and most of it was spent home on the couch because I was
convinced by him that I would hate to go out dancing (though I brought it up
now and again). Then I was in my third year and at a party in April. He was
prone to moods and that evening he seemed annoyed to find me at home in a
strange environment, laughing with my friends. His moods were things that I needed
to attend to every time. As they sang happy birthday, I looked at him sitting
and refusing to try- I knew it was not how I could spend my life. And then it was
January and I cried at an airport to see him off.
I was not brave when I needed to be. I waited until February,
after I had sent him across an ocean and discovered what it was like to breathe
again. I had to send him a message explaining why I was leaving. Because it could never have been a phone call
or something face to face because those had failed. I waited for him to settle
into that flat he was excited about and I waited for a quiet evening.
I felt responsible. He made me responsible for him the way
he made the woman before me responsible when she didn’t want to be. I had written a letter once when I first wanted
to run far away and I remember saying that I knew he would turn me into her, to
whoever came after. We would both be women who ruined his life. I did not send
it but it was saved somewhere. I never saw myself as a life-ruiner but here we
are, I am unrepentant for any actions I took.
He told me that there were ways to die. To jump off
buildings or in front of the red busses that whizzed around his city and that
if he did, it would be my fault. I was
responsible for him. To talk someone down from that, at the expense of your
soul is unbearable. So I waited for two days and removed myself from his life,
digitally erasing every memory. He so loved being preserved in ways that could
be referred to later on.
After he could let me go, we stayed friends for a month or
so… In the same way you run a burnt hand under cold water before the reality of
the pain and damaged flesh sets in, eventually it started to sink in. It was
the weekend that would be five years for us and what I got was a drunken text aimed
at hurting me- it just annoyed me. Because men like him don’t understand that we
want to move on. They are certain of how well they gaslit and convinced us of
the need we had to keep them.
Then it was July and yet again I found an unwelcome email-
to meet, to exchange the remnants we had. A ruse. He needed me to admit wrongdoing,
mea culpa. He received instead those
things left behind. He could only offer me useless student cards from two years
ago and a remark that the scarf I spent weeks knitting him for Christmas was thrust
into the hands of a homeless man. It got under his skin to see me unaffected.
He loved leaving some kind of lesson or impact and this last time, he could not
hurt me anymore. There was no message to be left because I could see him for
what he was and it was dismal. It was pathetic.
I spoke to her today. The one before me. Because her place in my life was one of myth
and legend, eventually hope. All I needed to know was that every woman before
me, the pantheon of mystical and cruel women- we all did the same thing in the
end. You cut off the head of the viper and run.
No doubt we are stories now. If he is the one holding your hand and telling you a story about me, at least you know my side of it too.
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