A Tale of Two Ladies

I’m at a bit of a loss where to start with this one. Would you like a happy ending or a sad one? Let’s have a happy(er) one, as that means I don’t need to fuck with the chronological order of things, I’m too tired right now to pretend I’m Tarantino. It’s the Ex first. It’s a biggie, so there’s a wee fancy jump button, go click it.

This story starts a long long time ago, back when I was still in school, and sorely lacking the big dollop of hindsight I could’ve really done with. We met through another girl I was going with at the time, I walked into my then girlfriend’s house the morning after she’d had a party to see Ex lying on her couch, looking quite cute as she was sleeping. Nothing happened there and then, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. A few months later I split up with that girl after learning she’d cheated on me with more than the acceptable number of guys that someone is allowed to cheat on you with, and after a few hedonistic months of making up for lost time, I started talking to Ex again. The news that she was the one largely responsible for the cheater being bottled (that is, smacked in the face with a glass bottle of Buckfast wine. Hey, it’s Scotland) didn’t put a dampener on how I felt about her in my youthful ignorance. We started going out, I was hot for her, she was hot for me, we enjoyed each other’s company, things were awesome. So naturally I shit myself, put a sell-by date on our romance and decided not to let it drag on and end as badly as things had with the other girl. So after about three months I broke up with her, and felt immature and awful, but stuck to my guns. She still wanted me back. Another couple of months passed.

Then she was attacked. I wasn’t there, I’ve never met the guy who did it, and to this day I’ve never found out where he lives. I was the one she told first, over MSN, because that was how you told people serious news in those days, over a fucking IM chat. The police were called, and what little faith I ever had in them died when eventually it was decided the case against him was going to be dropped due to lack of evidence. My opportunity to deal with it without any blowback long since gone after relying on a useless justice system for the first and last time. She was in a state, but I couldn’t turn her away, right then if she needed someone to talk to then it might as well have been me, because she sure as shit needed someone. I took on part of the blame, we weren’t together because I decided to end things without any real reason, she almost certainly wouldn’t have been where it happened if we were. I still really liked her, more than I had anyone else for a long time, and things between us started up again. If I had been sensible, if I’d done the rational thing, I wouldn’t have went back out with her, but I did. For a few months things were rocky, but the shock of what had happened began to dissipate and the sparkle came back into her eyes. In that time I fell properly in love with her like I haven’t with anyone before or since. We were with friends in a park (“the” park, to us) and she was on my lap, and we kissed. It wasn’t the first, I was totally sober, there was no big build-up to it, but it was perfect, and right there and then I fell in love.

For a while we were both really happy, up until our first christmas. She told me that it was always a hard time for her because one of her family died at that time, but coupled with what had happened earlier in the year she went back into a downward spiral. At the end of January I was due to go into hospital for minor surgery, nothing major, I ended up only spending one night there. I couldn’t decide whether or not to tell her, or just have it done then let her know once I was back home. Didn’t want to burden her with one more thing, but eventually thought it was for the best. It was surgery after all, they might have kept me in for a week and it wouldn’t have been fair for me to phone her with a casual “Hey hun, I’ve just been cut open.” So I told her a few days beforehand, I wasn’t worried and she didn’t need to be either. The day before I was due to go in she cut her wrists deep enough that it counted as a real attempt on her life. She was taken into hospital less than 24 hours before I was meant to be and kept in a locked ward room with a nurse giving her round the clock supervision to make sure she didn’t do it again. I can’t help but laugh as I write this, it’s the first time I’ve ever written our entire history together, just makes it all the more clear that I should’ve gotten the fuck out long long before I actually did. I got to visit her once that night after she’d been stitched and cleaned up, most of her possessions had been taken off of her, anything that she could possibly use to hurt herself with was confiscated, and the only time the nurse was out of the room was during visiting hours. That was the last time I would see her for around a month until she got out. I had my operation in a different hospital, and had to spend most of the day lying down to let the wound heal as best it could, so I wasn’t able to go up and see her.

That would’ve been enough for most people to call it quits, end it there and get the fuck out of Dodge. But again, I was young, stupid, and in love. What little thought I did put into it reminded me that I couldn’t leave her right now, that it’d be cruel to do something like that at such a low time. Besides, she’d gotten better once, this was just a downer that went too far, right? Part of it was also that I knew I’d be spending at least three or four months in confinement, and she was the only one I could properly rely on to keep me company. When you’re a teenager, what’re you going to choose? Drink, drugs, and sex, or keeping your rapidly drifting mate company? She was there for me, without her there’d have been nobody. Sure I could walk, move around fine, and I couldn’t feel any pain, but that meant my wound would take even longer to heal, so I had to make a conscious effort to spend as much time as possible lying in bed. I missed the last three months of my final year in high school, got well enough just in time to fail all my exams and hear everyone make their plans for the summer holidays, which I would be spending deliberately doing as little as possible. Ex was there through it all though. Most girls would have made their excuses and called an end to it, but she stayed with me.

In the end it took around a year and a half for my wound to fully heal. I could manage the walk to her house most days and other, uh, duties, well enough but going out to pubs and clubs or getting a job was out of the question. As a result I drifted away from the majority of my friends from school, and spent nearly all my time with Ex, which I didn’t mind one bit, but I can see the folly in letting friendships slip irreversibly away now. Her stint in hospital got a lot of shit out of her system, and she gradually improved as time went on. There was the occasional bump in the road, but it was manageable. I started living life in this little bubble which consisted of her, her sisters, and her sister’s boyfriends. The six of us had all been with our respective partners for a fairly long time, so it was a relatively stable group, and we got on well enough, sisterly arguments notwithstanding. For the next few years things were good, we didn’t really argue, were both really happy and any bad patch she had we went through it together. It was like an extended honeymoon period, she had her problems like everyone, but they weren’t crippling. Not to say it was perfect, but for a few years I came the closest I ever have to contentment.

Our last year or so together was when things became irreparably damaged. It was triggered by her seeing her attacker at college, she burst into tears and he started laughing. She found out he was doing a course there and this meant the chances of seeing him again were fairly high, obviously she didn’t want to go back. I convinced her to make a complaint, and she did. To the college’s credit they dealt with it quickly and quietly, he was gone within the day and barred from ever attending there again. Not that he should have been able to attend in the first place, it transpired that he had been kicked out from another course for his behaviour towards women but let back in. But you take what victories you can I suppose. I knew that this was a real shock to Ex, it was the first time she had seen him since it happened, but I thought/hoped that it would be a passing thing. Unfortunately it wasn’t, it was the little nudge that got the ball rolling that would culminate in our split.

She used to have infrequent nightmares and flashbacks of what had happened, these became constant after seeing him. Every single night when she closed her eyes she would relive it, making her scared to go to sleep and creating a vicious cycle: lack of sleep made her barely able to function and lowered her mood, but she was terrified because of what she seen every time she closed her eyes. Paranoia set in, she convinced herself that he was going to come after her and punish her for getting him thrown out of college. I managed to convince her that that wasn’t true. Getting her to think logically helped her more than appealing to her emotions. Rationalising things, making them physical, meant they could be controlled. Instead of simply trying to convince her to be happy, it would be about thinking about the odds of something happening and seeing that it wasn’t likely to happen, or picturing how she felt as part of the grand scheme of things, that so much of it was happy, and some short event shouldn’t be allowed to override everything else, like a small dot on a long timeline. This method helped to calm her down when she got bad, cheered her up and meant that for the rest of the day she’d usually be fine, but she had no control over what came to mind at night, and all I could do was try to help her react to it when she woke up terrified. She began to rely on me more and more as time went on, any change to a plan, any hint that she’d be anywhere near the edge of her comfort zone set her off.

You might have noticed that during this time I haven’t mentioned anything about psychiatric help, this is because what little times it was available it proved to be useless. Private help was unaffordable, and the waiting lists on the NHS were stupidly long. Between fuck-ups such as trying to tell her being in a small room alone with a male psychologist was acceptable despite knowing what her problems were and having to cancel and change appointments fairly regularly, things never got off to a very good start. When she eventually did get seen, she would always come out in a far worse state than when she went in. Their preferred method of treatment being repeating in detail everything that happened multiple times each session. She would sleep even worse than usual every night after she’d been, and eventually couldn’t bear to go, despite being desperate for any kind of help at all. Doctors were reluctant to provide her antidepressants given their apparently addictive nature and her age, and to be honest I wasn’t too keen on having my girlfriend under a chemical cosh.

She continued to go downhill during our last summer together. The job I was doing had me working with a small group of guys covering most of central Scotland. We were left pretty much to our own devices provided the work was done so breaks were at irregular times. This meant that Ex would phone me constantly, time after time until I picked up, not understanding or refusing to accept that I did have work to do and that I would text her when I was on my break. Around this time was when I began to grow tired, and slowly more and more numb and pissed off. Arguments turned into fights over me just turning my phone off while working. Telling her any details of what went on at work would immediately make her think the worst. I told her once that we had managed to finish our work early enough one day that we bought a crate of beers and sat around the back of the castle we were working at and enjoyed a skive in the sun in the afternoon. In her mind I seemed to have washed down the bottle of beer with some heroin then shagged the strippers we’d hired to entertain us at the end of our shift. She became clingy, and as much as I tried to help her, her flashbacks were constant now. We’d spend nearly every day in her house and the times we did go out it would be to the cinema and the one restaurant that we’d always go to. Those were the only places she felt comfortable in, I couldn’t even get her to come to my family parties as she couldn’t handle being around any guys she didn’t know. As she became more entrenched and possessive I wanted to break free and find new experiences, and though I wanted more than anything for her to do it with me, it just wasn’t for happening.

In the september of last year I started going to college to resit the exams that I had failed in my last year at school. It was the same college she was attending, but it was nearby and would save me time and money getting there and back. In the beginning I spent my breaks with Ex as nobody knew each other yet and it was a better alternative to wandering around by myself. It was around this time that I met Marsha.

She was in three out of four of my classes, and was in the year below me in high school, though we had never talked and moved in different circles. When I first saw her I had only the vaguest notion of who she was, I didn’t even know her name until she told me. Our first proper conversation was when we were both early to a class and we were the only ones there. I was determined that I was going to be Mr Anti-Social: keep my head down, do the work, don’t get distracted. That didn’t last long after she started talking. We talked easily, had a lot in common, the same kind of sense of humour, and knew the same people so we were never short of things to say, old stories and whatnot. She was like a hotter, female version of me. Both eldest kids, her sister and my brother are in a few of the same classes at school, Christ, our mothers even have the same painting in their houses. She had even been going with her boyfriend roughly the same length of time I’d been with Ex. Suffice to say we hit it off, and soon became good friends.

Obviously this didn’t go unnoticed by Ex, it caused friction, and I accept that it would worry most people if their partners suddenly became such good friends with someone of the opposite sex who they didn’t know. I tried my best to allay her fears. I was always open with Ex, and tried to get her to meet the people who were on my course. I would be spending a year with them, and I decided that I wasn’t going to be one of those people who disappeared to spend every waking moment with the person they were going out with. I wanted to be sociable, because I fucking needed it. Things at “home” had only been getting worse. She would break down into tears when I picked her up to go to college, I would be kept late trying to calm her down enough to go in, and the same thing happened every break and at lunch. When I gave her a lift home it would be tears again, and arguments about me leaving to go home. At that point I needed my own space, I was too tired to deal with her shit 24/7 and be the sole person she relied upon for everything. She would text me in the middle of classes constantly, if I didn’t reply quickly enough she would then text Marsha (they had exchanged numbers while trying to broker an unspoken peace treaty) the exact same message with “tell Johny” at the start of it. Outside of the bubble I had lived in for years and around “normal” people I came to realise just how damaged and socially awkward she was. There was never going to be the “we” as part of a larger group that I wanted, at best it was going to be “Johny with his girlfriend.”

I had started having serious considerations about splitting up with her at this point. The light at the end of the tunnel that I could always see during her bad times was smaller and dimmer than it had ever been, and it became more obvious by the day that I would never be able to have a proper level of freedom or a social life that didn’t have a large sense of awkwardness standing right beside me. Marsha suggested we have a picnic in the park that was close for all of us, I’d get to meet her boyfriend for the first time, and Ex would too, hopefully making her a bit less paranoid. Sure, it was early October, but we Scots are hardy folk. In the run-up to it I had hours of trying to convince Ex that I wasn’t going to just ignore her and talk to Marsha all the time or leave her out of the conversation, stuff that I shouldn’t have needed to say and that I didn’t deserve being accused of. Marsha didn’t know what had happened to Ex, not because I didn’t trust her, but because our friendship was still only a few months old and it felt like something too heavy to let her know. I wouldn’t have told her in either case. I didn’t tell anyone, it was none of their business, and it was the sort of thing that could define a person before you’d gotten to know them. I didn’t want that to happen with Ex, who she is shouldn’t have revolved around one event, so I always let her choose who should know.

That however, didn’t mean I expected her to tell Marsha all about it in the time it took me to get something out of the car with Marsha’s boyfriend and his pal. What little common sense I thought she once might have had was completely gone in the space of about twenty minutes. She seemed to think that getting to know someone meant laying all your problems on them straight away, and for the next few weeks lay them on she did. Ex wasn’t stupid, and part of me still wonders whether she did it deliberately, but all it did was push me closer to making my final choice. That finally came a few days later.

It’d been yet another bad night, I hadn’t even wanted to go down to her house in the first place, preferring to stay at mine and vegetate. Where before I had been level headed, cool, and in control because I had a job to do and a role to perform, now I was just numb. I didn’t feel much of anything other than a dull grind and knowing exactly what was going to happen every day and every second because it had all happened a million times before. I had run out of fucks to give, and I think she knew it. I’d been so good at being unemotional that now there was no way to bring it back. I was out of ideas, and earlier that day as I had sat in my car alone listening to her coming through the hands-free from the phone I couldn’t even be bothered to lift off of the dashboard, hearing how she couldn’t go on and life was unbearable, I said something I never had before: that maybe she should just try and check herself in somewhere then, or take the strongest antidepressants she could get her hands on. I wanted the responsibility away from me, I wanted someone else to look after her, to give me peace at long last, though that desire obviously went unsaid, but was no doubt loud and clear between the lines. I had relented and told her I’d come down that night. I walked in the door past her clueless mother who had the most annoying habit of repeating everything she said a hundred times when there was the slightest bit of stressed placed upon her, and who could become stressed at the most insignificant of things. I sat on Ex’s bed and listened to her cry, it was obvious she was in pain but I didn’t know what to do anymore, it’d all become white noise. I closed my eyes and hoped she’d just tire herself out. By the time she got close it was past midnight, and I couldn’t bear to spend the night there, predictably telling her I had to go caused her to break down again. She handed me the notebook I had given her a few weeks previously to write down what was on her mind. It had helped her for a short while, giving her something to pour her heart into. I told her never to show it to anyone, not even me, because she could never write as honestly as she had to if it was always in the back of her mind that someone was going to read it at some point. Nonetheless, she was giving it to me to read and try to understand as if I wasn’t perfectly clear on the situation already. I was too tired to argue, so I accepted it and said I’d read if I got the chance, and if she still wanted me to.

When I got home I phoned her to tell her I was in alright and say goodnight, as was the custom. I listened to music for a while and decided to write down some stuff in my journal to get things off my chest. I say journal as it’s the most serious and least feminine sounding word I know to describe a notebook full of mental overflow. I leafed through the pages to get to the most recent when one entry caught my eye. I’d written it a couple of months earlier when things, though still fucked, weren’t anywhere near the level of chaos they were then. It was probably one of the last entries I’d made that still had a note of concern to them. It was about her crying, there was something different about it that night. When she cried it used to sound simply as though she were sad, but that night she was worse than I had ever seen her at that point, it was if she was being physically tortured, like she was being cut and burned and couldn’t find a way to stop it. I had written that day that if I ever became desensitised to that sound then things between us were beyond repair, and that there was no hope for me left as a person. I realised that I’d been hearing it for months and hadn’t even noticed it. It was the first of two hits of the night that caused me to end things with her. I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but reading through her notebook cemented the idea.

Most of it was predictable stuff that I’d heard already a millions times before. A lot of it was hastily scrawled from when she had woken up during the night after a flashback, some of it told of how much she loved me, it gave me a rush of affection and threw up all the doubts about breaking up with her, but those were thrown aside when I came to the last entry. It was longer and neater than the rest, I had a strong suspicion that this was written with the idea of me reading it in mind, but not quite a direct letter. It told how she was desperate for help, she wanted to spend even more time with me, knew that I had my own feelings and hoped that I was alright. And hoped when I came down that night I was happy, because when I wasn’t my deep voice reminded her of the cunt who attacked her.

And that was that. My mind was made up. I couldn’t stay with her any longer after reading that, it was impossible. I didn’t growl, I never shouted, but what could I do when my very fucking voice reminded her of him? It was over, she just had to find out.

This is the point where my lack of emotion/ numbness/ practicality/ heartlessness came into play. I had a limited window of opportunity to do it, because there are certain times of the year where you just can’t break up with someone. I had a few weeks, or it would be too close to her birthday, which was in December, so I would have had to hold on until after Christmas. The beginning of the new year was a no-go because of the usual shit, and January also held our anniversary, a couple of weeks after that was Valentine’s Day. If I didn’t act fast, I’d could have been stuck with her for months more. Hanging over all of this was her terminally ill grandfather. No-one was certain how long he had left, but I had to make sure the split happened before he died. I was supposed to have been left some money in his will, I didn’t want it and if I got out quickly enough then there would have perhaps been time for him to change the will so I wasn’t a part of it, I didn’t want to be seen as someone taking the money and running, breaking up with her was bad enough.

Like a coward I couldn’t sit her down in her house, getting out would have been literally going through an assault course. I wanted it as quick and clean as possible. My opportunity came around a week or so later. Things between her and Marsha had become frosty again, or maybe it was just that something unexpected happened and she didn’t like it, fuck knows. I had offered to give Marsha and another of our friends a lift home after college so they didn’t have to wait on the bus in the pouring rain. They stayed about ten minutes away, and I needed a couple of cheerful faces in the car. Ex got in the car with her friend, her face tripping her. She was in a mood with no good reason, made things really awkward and it had taken me about three minutes to decide that now was the time. Marsha had already offered that it might be better if they got the bus, and I wasn’t going to subject them to any more time in the car with Ex no matter how short the journey was. I ended up dropping them off at the bus stop they’d have been waiting at anyway, then told Ex that I was sick of all the shit, and it was done.

She asked me angrily if I meant that me and her were done, I said yes, and it hit her. She went quiet for a few minutes, I was still on the road back to her house, then she said to me “Could you not have waited until we were alone?”I had totally forgotten that her friend was sitting directly behind me. It wasn’t the time for backtracking, and I told her no. She burst into tears, when I pulled up outside her house I hoped but didn’t expect that she’da get out of the car. She refused, begged for me to just go and talk. I thought at least some explanation was due to her, even if it was going to be, if not a lie, then not the entire truth. I didn’t want to be with her anymore, but I didn’t want to hurt her, I never had at any point through it all. We drove to a quiet spot and she asked for us to stay together, I said I couldn’t, that I was sorry, but it was finished. She cried, she screamed, she stamped her feet and clawed at herself, and I was tired. As bad as it was, it was only slightly more extreme than I was well accustomed to. I tried to console her, the jist of it being the “it’s not you, it’s me” routine. I couldn’t tell her I was tired of all her shit, that being around her was killing me and I just plain old couldn’t fucking care anymore. I wanted to go home, have my dinner, have a shower, and read a book or play the Playstation. I drove her back to hers, I wasn’t angry, but I had to shout to get her out the car, told her I’d talk to her later. She wanted one last hug, I got out and gave her one. She grabbed the door and wouldn’t let me close it, took another ten minutes to convince her to let me drive away.

I turned my mobile off and pulled the landline out of the wall, sat in my room and felt like shit. I knew that I had to break off all contact with her, and do it bit by bit. “Being friends” never works for anyone, and it would have only caused her confusion and pain. She came round to my door on a couple of occasions not long after, I held firm, told her she couldn’t come to my house anymore, and if she did again I’d block all contact. She did as I asked, and we avoided any fights, things never became dirty. She’d talk a lot on facebook, as time went on my answers became shorter and shorter, until “kk” was the entirety of my half of the conversation. Her Grandad died a couple of days before Christmas, cancer had spread throughout his body and to his liver. Her uncle had phoned to tell me, when I got to his flat he was still lying in his bed, slumped over and a matte shade of yellow I hope I never have to see again. There was a rift between me and everyone else there, nothing said, but obvious. I was no longer part of the family, I was a single person coming to pay his respects. It was a strange thing to feel after spending essentially a quarter of my life with them, but it was to be expected. I didn’t see her again until the funeral, I stayed at the back, and only saw her on the way out. We didn’t speak until a few weeks later, when Marsha and I were walking our dogs together and she phoned unexpectedly. Her auntie and uncle had both been killed by a lorry as they were trying to cross the road, I didn’t know them, just gave my condolences. Then, in a day God must have been in the mood for some black humour, Ex phoned again not long after, saying another of her aunties had been found dead in her house. One day, three deaths. Her Granddad barely three weeks beforehand. To say it was fucked up was an understatement. I didn’t go to the double funeral, but I was rather fond of her auntie, and went to her’s. That day was the last time I seen Ex in person, soon after she no longer sent any messages either.

That was around seven months ago, there’s been no contact in all that time. On one or two occasions I had been tempted to send her a message, ask her how things were getting on, decided against it though. It could open up a whole can or worms that I’d rather leave sealed. I did check her facebook now and again for the first few months, as much to be forewarned of any trouble I might end up hearing about as anything else. She seems better now than she had been in a long long time. I think that for all I tried to help, and for all she relied upon me, I probably wasn’t good for her in the end. An anchor of safety to rely on when things got tough, rather than learning to cope on her own. It was undoubtedly a dark time for her, she was either going to sink or swim, but she dealt with it and seems to have come out on top. From what I’ve been told she goes out now, has her circle of friends, does all the normal things I’d always wanted her to be able to do. She’s even got a new boyfriend. I’m not bitter at how things have turned out, but I don’t regret splitting up with her either, it’s just sad to when you think back at something that was once great turn to complete shite.

As for me and Marsha? There wasn’t the clichéd bubbling tension and sudden realisation that we were both head over heels about each other, we just became close friends. After the split she did more for me than I think she realises, just by being there and making me laugh. Though I was the one to end it, I’d lost someone close to me, lost a little girl I called my niece, lost a whole load of people who I could honestly call my family. Marsha helped me through that, and I’ll always owe her for it. She means a lot to me, and is the first woman I’ve met who I wouldn’t even consider doing anything with in the off-chance it created hassle further down the road. Maybe years from now if/when we’ve drifted apart I’ll regret not bothering to get that particular notch in my belt, but right now she’s my consigliere slash wingman slash about the only person that gets how my mind works, and I wouldn’t take the chance.

So that’s the story of shit that no longer concerns me. Why did I spend a week on and off writing it? Fuck knows, guess I’d never written our story before, and we were together for five years, so it’s a sizeable amount of my life. And I suppose I did mention I’d give a history of people in my life, mainly I was thinking of Marsha as that’s who I still spend time with, but the two kind of went together. In all likelihood I’ll not mention Ex again for a good long while, mainly because she isn’t in my life anymore, and I hadn’t thought of her much until I made this blog. If you’ve made it this far, I owe you a sexual favour of your choice, well done.

TL;DR: I went out with a girl, she was lovely and things were awesome, she became rather bonkers and things turned to shit. I went to college, saw what I was missing out on and what I faced staying with Ex, and we split up. I met a girl there who is like me except you’d get all up in dem guts, we get on great and are still friends. The end.