Part three
The next time I wrote a memoir was two years later. I really crammed a lot of heartache into two years and whilst I look back at photos and feel a shameful pang of envy about how thin I was, they were also quite existentially gruelling. The thinness was a result of more anxiety, less good sleep, girl dinners, and running around Hackney marshes more mornings than I didn’t. When I think about how I used to run then it feels like another me. I was so springy, you know when you see someone run past you and you can tell they could go faster if they wanted, that was me. And I hope one day I’ll have another era of running like that, but it’s not today. As soon as Tom and I interwove our lives I started running less and it became much harder. Partly because I now had a dog so I was going out every morning to walk him, and partly because I couldn’t be bothered for the days to start so intensely. It’s slower and softer and yeah a tiny part of me will miss having that much to chew on.
So I could wear hotpants that fit me when I was 16, but I didn’t really know what I was up to. The birthday party we left off on - well, it’s not like it crashed down, but there was a theme of *something*. Between 29 and 30, I, got pregnant, had an abortion, felt some of my darkest nights of my soul, left him, fell for an irish musician who tricked me under a full moon, tore myself apart for him in actually a retrospectively short space of time, like one short sharp hit of a bad drug, met someone else, decided he was my one true love, started so strong, quickly fell apart just like the Tarot reader told me it would, incredibly bad timing, life bigger than a romance, his grief too big, my desperation, our incompatibility - too big and then woke up on the morning of my 30th birthday with a stye, alone and a bit lost.
Earlier in the year I’d booked a venue suitable for a wedding for my birthday party. There was £600 I never got back because the covid rules changed and no longer were mass gatherings ok and I didn’t want to change the date, and I didn’t even want the wedding party anymore. The badly timed relationship where life got real was ongoing but also non existent in my day to day life and it had done the thing again where my life force was plugging directly into someone else. We all do this and some have more of a proclivity to it than others. I always think my birth chart set me off on a slippery foot for LOVING A MAN TOO MUCH, but so did my hunger to be indispensable.
When I booked the venue, we’d only just met, I was feeling myself, I wanted the kind of party where I would perform a dance routine on stage and everyone’s jaws would drop in wonder. Being single for me had the upside of me being the shiniest version of myself. I could dazzle in any room, I was an open question mark for connection, and god did I mention clothes hung off me in that way we don’t realise until later when we look back at photos and think fuck why did I still inspect my side profile like I did?
But by the time July came I didn’t want the party anymore. My outward projection was now pouring into him. Ironically it was the last thing he wanted, but perhaps on a level he needed it. I like to tell myself it was all for something anyway. That’s what I did all summer. Tell myself there was a higher purpose to this void. I wrestled with it. Boy oh boy did me and the universe have a conversation every single day. I wasn’t writing except in my morning pages which were just more pages of the same loops. I didn’t have a creative spark or a focus for my days except waiting. It was very that Arcade Fire line, I am waiting, till I don’t know when, cause I’m sure, it’s gonna happen then.
The summer passed and I didn’t have much fun. but I hung out with people who I thought would keep me close to him. Nothing changed on my phone even though I willed it to (weird?), he didn’t even follow me on Instagram so every message I wrote to him indirectly via the app landed nowhere and I carried both sides of this ‘relationship’ like my life depended on it. In September I went on holiday with my friend and her friend. She’d experienced deep tragedy and paid for us all to go to Hydra - LEONARD COHEN’S ISLAND in Greece for 10 days via a few nights in Athens. It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been and a mule took me up to our house at the top of the steps when we arrived, which is really a dream come true. We went horse riding to a monastery that was the holiest place I’ve ever felt, we drank watery red wine and danced by the pool, we went on a boat trip and swam in water that could make you cry it was so fucking nice and I felt fraught the whole time. Halfway through the trip he texted me for the first time in weeks so tell me not to wait around for him and the hard exterior I’d been holding together started to crack. The girls I was with knew it was a lost cause but they let me talk myself in loops over cocktails when we got off the day boat trip anyway.
I left the holiday one day early. I booked a new flight from the most beautiful beach in the world so I could get home. I wanted to travel back alone and no one will understand that level of unhingedness except people who really know me. At the airport I called my parents, I can’t remember if I was crying but I think it was a call your mum and cry phonecall.
Anyway don’t worry I still had another year to stay locked into this thing so I needn’t have worried :).
He returned to London not long after that text on the boat, and messaged me like I’d seen him yesterday saying he was back and did I want to come round. I may as well have shown up on his doorstep with a welcome home goody basket and I played my role well. I always wore very slutty underwear that wasn’t of high quality, I always provided some kind of warm meal, and I never asked anything. If the woman I hate-follow on Instagram saw me then she would praise me for my divine feminine attributes. Just submissing to the dark masculine my love. And even though I could look back at me on his doorstep with bated breath for the moment he would open the door and not look me in the eye and feel sad for me, I actually don’t. Call me delusional but I still firmly believe our souls were meant to do that and I will always have love in my heart for him and I will always be grateful I got out when I did.
But still, let’s not ruin the story with earnest passages that will make you dear reader bang your head against your desk. I’m just saying, if there ever was grey area, I was in it. And I will say, he loved me too. He’d tell me only when it was too late but I knew anyway. One quick lesson: LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH.
So anyway another year would battle on. On off, hot cold, flammable amazon package after amazon package, everything not said, everything we couldn’t say, progress that went nowhere, expectations and the pain it must be to never meet them, watching him walk past my window at 8.30 in the morning, what can the way he walks tell me today, endings and starting up and casual now, how about causal now, secret for a bit, Sunday afternoons only, letters never sent, messages never replied to.
In March after another ending that felt really real (even though it wasn’t) I opened a new Google doc. Over the next two months I devoted all my time and energy to writing a memoir that encompassed the four years and many endings that I’d lived through. In hindsight it wasn’t a laugh a minute and I was too in it to shed the light it needed to be what it could of been. Instead ONE FOR SORROW, another name I am buzzed with was a beautiful bleed out. Only a few people have read it. An agent nearly took me on, even gave me revisions before politely declining as previously mentioned a couple of days before I met Tom. But it’s not the point, it never was. Those words, I had to write all those words to sew up the tapestry of my own heart. Just like the same Tarot reader had said I was four years before. Didn’t realise how torn and re-sewn they’d need to be before I could let it all go.