It was hot when I met him. He took my hand in an official handshake. This was a gesture that should have been normal to anyone else, but to us, normal did not apply. His palm touching mine, another life flashes before my eyes. It was my life, and yet in some other time, some other place. It was so calm and familiar and so much like home, soft and downy and so full of joy. Then his hand left mine and the vision was gone from my eyes, but never from my mind. I knew then, that life as I knew it would now cease to exist, and funnily, so did he. Another woman would have seen it for all it was. Another woman would have remained aloof, restrained and unaffected. Another woman would have been the mistress and kept it just as it should be – an affair. Another woman would have kept things simple – but me, I fell in love. I fell in love with someone else’s husband, and he fell in love with me.
I didn’t seek him out. I didn’t go looking for him so I could use my eyes to show him a world where we could co-exist. I didn’t want him to be a part of my life, for I knew how infectious the relationship would be. I knew that he would invade my body like cancer, engulfing everything that I was, that I am, until he was all I could ever see but somewhere along the way I stopped fighting it and I let him in. I let him tell me how strong and tough I thought I was but how soft and vulnerable he saw me as. He saw me like the scared little girl who was hiding inside me. And he lent her a hand for guidance, like a friend. It was only later that we became lovers.
Weeks merged into months, and I would sit in meetings and listen to the words pour from his mouth. They were so intelligent and made so much sense. He was smart, well educated and interesting, how could I turn away? How could I not listen when he stared only at me and directed the whole meeting towards me? His eyes burned my soul into a million pieces and I was so scared the whole room knew exactly what I was thinking, what it was that I wanted in that exact moment. I felt like a school girl with a crush on her teacher, because that’s what he was in the beginning, my teacher, my mentor, my friend. I never imagined that he ever felt the same way. It wasn’t until we were working together on a project that I knew he felt it too. His hand would brush mine in way that seemed so innocent and yet it would always linger longer than was necessary. His eyes would whisper suggestion and flicker like a raging fire but it was when I rushed into his office with a problem, and opened my mouth to speak, that no words came out that I knew I was in trouble. Me, the girl with so many words, the girl who always had something to say, was for once, without words. I was so embarrassed I had to leave. I had to go back to my desk, my face flushed with embarrassment and humiliation, I call him to apologise as I must have appeared like such a scatter brain. So I call him to apologise for being so scatty and all he said was “scatty is cute”.
He brought his wife to the Christmas party and I was shocked she wasn’t as pretty as I thought she might be but perhaps she was, perhaps I was just being fickle because she was his and I wasn’t. I was certain that he would know how I felt before the night was over. Fuelled by alcohol, my glazed eyes saw him saying his goodbyes so I wander over to his table and my eyes beckon him away from the others but I do not need to say a word, my eyes say everything he needed to know. He told me he would see me soon and I held onto that like some sort of promise. Like a prize I would get if I was a good girl.
It wasn’t until Christmas Eve that I actually plucked up the courage to ask him if what I felt happening was actually happening. I stood in his doorway, all small and fragile, like I was standing in the palm of his hand and at any moment I could be crushed simply by the closing of his fingers around me. I asked him straight out if he felt it too. He could only nod, and then the words, “It’s so damn mutual it isn’t funny” fell from his lips like a prayer finally answered. We were interrupted by the phone. Who calls now? Who ruins this moment, I wonder but I answer the phone and his hand rests in the small of my back. I put the phone down, how can I concentrate now? Here in this moment he has claimed me and I am his. As he leans down and kisses my cheek he tells me he will call me in January for a coffee. We need to talk he says, we have something to talk about now.
January comes and I am waiting outside the coffee shop nervous and giddy. I’m like a kid eager to unwrap her Christmas presents but Christmas has passed and a part of me feels overwhelmed by the aftermath of so much promise. Then I see him, coming up the elevator, moving towards me, he bends and kisses me on the cheek. I’m fresh, radiant from being touched by the sun for the past month of holidays and he looks at me for what seems eternity, like he is drinking me in and then he says I look good. I think he is more nervous than I am now. We go inside, and there it is again, his hand in the small of my back. Yes, I’m yours I think. His lips move and he says how much he loves his wife and that he can’t sit here and plan to have an affair with me. I nod, I understand. I understand he is married, that he loves her and that he is confused about these new found feelings that have become to flutter in his belly like a butterfly. I understand, because I have been trying to tell myself it can not happen. Since Christmas Eve I have been urging myself to get over it, to realise this is just a crush and like everything else, it too shall pass. He tells me if it’s going to happen it just will, unaided and unplanned by either of us. I tell him I am disappointed, this wasn’t what I had wanted to hear today and I look at him, my face slightly tilted down but my eyes wide and looking up at him but he tells me not to look at him that way. There is nothing else to talk about now, it’s all been said.
- I suppose we should go, I say.
He nods. We stand to leave and as we are walking out, again he puts his hand in the small of my back.
We say our goodbyes in a busy shopping centre, and I expect he will kiss me on the cheek, but he doesn’t. He leans down and his lips brush mine, and then they stop, they linger gently on my lips and it’s the first time I ever actually believe in “fireworks”. Everyone else in the centre ceased to exist when his lips touched mine. I look up at him, my eyes wide with astonishment and pleasure. His eyes have merged from some shining blue to a soft subtle grey.
I look up at him, and I know my eyes were filled with something that resembled love and this time his lips find mine with more urgency, more passion and his tongue slips past my lips and I feel myself melting into him. He could tell me anything now and I would believe. He pulls away.
- This is dangerous, you’re dangerous.
I lost my car that day, somewhere in the car park. I was somewhere else. Somewhere with him and it was perfect. I’d never been kissed that way before. I belonged to him, in that one moment I knew.
I was still on holidays when he called me from Brisbane a few weeks later. He was up there for work and he was alone. We talked for hours and it became clear that we had so much more in common than anything purely physical. Music, books, movies, even our views on God or the lack there of was similar. He had been brought up in a large Catholic family, and although he had always been a bit of rebel, the fundamentals of marriage and commitment remained the same. I knew he was struggling with what was happening and yet, nothing had really happened apart from a kiss. I must have been just as infectious to him as he was to me, because there were so many times he questioned the affair and questioned his actions, and yet he never stopped. He never turned away from me. He talked about consummating our relationship, and in the beginning we decided it would only happen once. It would happen and then it would be over with. We would get each other out of our systems and move on. He would go back to being a devoted husband and father, and I would find a man who would treat me the way I deserved. I would find a man who could give me so much more than he ever could.
It was something that he wanted to do right, something that was never going to be cheap. It had to mean something he said. It had to be special.
It was February now; I am waiting in the hotel room and he was late as usual. I was petrified. He may have touched my body over the passing months, but he had never seen me naked. I had such huge body issues, and being naked with someone for the first time was a thought that froze me. I was smoking a cigarette and drinking a scotch and dry when he opened the door and said, “Honey, I’m home.” It was so inappropriate that I laughed out loud. He was wearing chinos and a red shirt and I don’t like the shirt and I tell him I don’t like it. That was how our relationship was, open and honest and sometimes so very blunt, but it had never been angry or hostile. He sits with me and we talk about our day. I had been out on the road all day seeing clients and he listens as I tell him how I wooed them all. It seems odd to be here in this hotel room and not ripping each other’s clothes off in some frenzied urgency. We are instead sitting and talking as though we have all the time in the world. I suppose at the time it felt like we did but then he is kissing me and his hands are in my in my hair and we stand and move towards the bed. I’m petrified so I don’t let him undress me, even though I know how much he wants to. We knew the first time would be fast. We had joked about it several times; he was after all, old. I was like a flower, fresh and blooming into spring, and he, like the old leaves on a liquid amber tree losing its colour and drying out, to eventually fall dead on the ground. It was something we had wanted to do since meeting five months ago, and now, here we were. It was happening, and I liked it. I liked being with him. For the first time in my life, I finally understood the difference between having sex with someone and making love to another human being. I was a person who had used sex as a tool for self harm and to devalue myself, it was simple for me to tune out the act and be completely detached from what was happening, but this, this was something I could not detach from. More to the point it was something I did not want to detach from. In one moment I felt more connected to another human being than I had ever been in my entire life and suddenly things made sense and parts of life that never seemed to fit before, finally did. At dinner he ordered my wine for me. I liked that. He let me try his meal. It was the first time I’d eaten duck. To this day I love it, and every time I order it, I think of him.
He takes my hand as we leave the restaurant. It feels nice almost like we are normal. We should be more careful, but we’ve thrown caution to the wind. We don’t think we will run into anyone we know, and luckily we don’t. We get back to our room or “home” as he calls it. He decides to get his laptop and some music from the car. I wash my face and undress. I lie face down on the bed naked waiting in anticipation for him to return. I’d had a few glasses of wine and I feel better about allowing him to see me completely naked for the first time. We never listened to music that night. We made love, over and over again until we both hurt. I never slept that night instead I listened to his breathing, the undulating breaths and imagining the rise and fall of his chest as he drifted further and further into dreams.
The morning comes and I rise to get ready for work. He tells me he likes me better when I’m naked, without makeup and my hair all messy and wet from a shower. I think he is lying so I blow dry my hair and get dressed. I sit on his lap in one of those horribly uncomfortable chairs they have in hotels. He tells me I move him, and I think we both realised there was no turning back now. I don’t want to go to work, I wanted to stay there in his arms where I am safe and warm and feel loved but I leave him there. Sitting alone, contemplating what he has done, for me, he was like cancer, but I imagine to him, I was like heroin. Hooked on the first taste of something that takes you into a realm where things appear the way you want them to. I assume in the beginning, I was something he enjoyed and thought he could stop at anytime, but as time passed, when he wanted to stop he couldn’t, the addiction was too strong. He calls me at work and we arrange to get a sandwich together. It’s only been a few hours but it has already become like cancer and it is invading every inch of us. We thought we would do it once and then it would be over. It would be out of our systems, but it only made it worse. I wanted more, I know he wanted more.
We steal moments when we can and where ever we can. Abandoned buildings, empty office space, cars, coffee shops, it doesn’t matter where all that matters is fulfilling the addiction, the need that is overpowering caution and rationale. We meet after work and kiss and touch, and every time I never want him to leave. His hands know me so well and the softness of their calloused palms have come to own me in stolen moments and forbidden lust. He knows every inch of me and he tells me I’m infectious and that I am smart, and funny and cute and slightly unpredictable. We talk about life, about our lives away from one another. I’m never jealous of his wife in the beginning and I actually think it is noble that he still loves her. I’m the only person who knows that he has fallen in love with a woman who is not his wife, and I am the only person who knows the impact this is having on his conscious. He tells me how hard this is for him and how it is the emotional connection that haunts him so deeply. He tells me it would be easier if it was just sex, but he struggles with the fact that he likes me so much. I suppose it is almost like how I used to disassociate myself from the act of sex, but the emotional connection and the emotional side is something that is impossible to remove yourself from. We talk about a dream I had. About a villa in Tuscany and he finds himself able to describe the house. I tell him about the pots boiling over on the stove and he acknowledges the flour all over the floor, the wooden bench tops and the floral dress I am wearing whilst dancing in the kitchen. He tells me I looked different then, but it was still me, he says he would have known my soul anywhere and I know then that the man in my dream, the man in my villa in my Tuscany, is him. The man in my dream might look different, but the soul was unmistakably his. I would know him anywhere. Our souls have lived before and they have lived together. The villa becomes our villa, and Tuscany too becomes ours. It’s where we want to go when we can’t decipher the relationship anymore. It is where no one knows us. It is where we began and it is the life I saw, when he took my hand that one day in September.
It gets harder to stop what is happening. I think I may have fallen in love with him. I know I don’t want to give him back. He slipped up one day and asked me to marry him. I said yes, but we both know he didn’t really mean it, he has no intention of leaving his wife, so instead we talk about the children we would never have. He tells me how intelligent and how beautiful they would be but most importantly how loved they would be. For my birthday he brought me a Waterford crystal wine glass, he chose it just for me, knowing my love of both crystals and wine. Everything meant something and appeared deeper than it would have if it were another man. My car became our haven; it was where hours of conversation began and ended. We made love in my car and I became like gymnast. I was able to contort my limbs so we were able to make love but every time would end the same; me scratching at his arms, not wanting them to leave me. I felt safe inside them. Everything else disappeared when I was with him. Nothing else mattered when I was wrapped up in the safety of him. He had covered me like a thick fog and for the first time in my life I wasn’t afraid of the person I was.
I was supposed to have him on ANZAC Day. He was supposed to stay over and I had been looking forward to it for months but he didn’t, his wife got sick with pneumonia and she was hospitalised. He says he can’t spend the night with me when she is in hospital, he says it would be wrong, and that she needs him now more than ever. What about me I wonder? What about what I need? I drink myself into an abyss of vodka and I cry, really cry, big heaving sobs that wrack my body with loss and an aching that takes control. I realise that this is how it will always be. I will always be an after thought. I will never come first. I hate him in that moment. I hate her and I wanted her to die. I wanted her to be punished because he loved her more than he would ever love me and I knew then that I would never be enough, I wasn’t the sort of girl that you leave your wife and family for. I was simply not enough. I knew then that I will never be enough and I lose control and end up self harming for the first time in four years. This was when he became damaging, he may not have picked up that knife but he gave me a reason to. This was my sacrifice and I was lost in the stark reality of the mistress where I would never be enough or more than an inconvenience, but in his usual way, he knows that I am in distress. I don’t even have to tell him, and he calls me, just to make sure I am alright, but he already knew I wasn’t. So for the rest of time she is in hospital, we talk on the phone every night for hours. I realise then, that he may not be here physically, but emotionally he was with me and not his wife. This was when he told me how much turmoil he was in. This is when he tells me that if he were single, we would be together and nothing else would matter. This is when he acknowledges how I am pushing all his boundaries, and it doesn’t matter how much he knows he should stop, he simply can’t. He needs me. He loves me.
The awards night was supposed to be the end. It was now May and we had agreed this would be the last time, but somewhere in the night we decided to take things to another level and it became impossible to ever go back. I was angry at him because he was in a meeting and we were running late. He forgot to bring the tie I had brought him for his birthday, and instead would wear the one she packed for him. This made me angry, because I had come to believe, that the city was our time and when we were in the city she should cease to exist. When he was home, in the mountains, I ceased to exist in his life with her, and I wanted her to have nothing to do with the life we had together, but it never worked out that way, she was always in the back of his mind. I had brought fancy underwear for the occasion. It was appropriate that on the outside, I was demure and sophisticated in my black dress, but underneath I wore lacy red underwear. It was symbolic of the woman that I was now becoming. I was blossoming into this small womb of womanhood. We were the only two people who knew what was under my dress and it was like our own private little joke, it was reminiscent of our relationship. He kissed me and left the hotel, leaving me waiting for a taxi. I wanted to go with him but I knew it was impossible. I was the invisible mistress but the fact that he loved me made the lines so unclear.
We slipped away from the Awards night early, we could have stayed for hours, drinking with the others, but we slink off into the darkness of the night, back to our hotel. We wanted to share a drink before retiring to our room, so we sat in the hotel bar and sipped our drinks feeling as though we were the only two people in the room. He kissed me on the mouth in that bar and I was his. We finished our drinks and went straight back to our room, where we fell into some sort of slumber of passion and love. That was the night he told me he was so in love with me he couldn’t comprehend it. It was the night he admitted he was in love with me, rather than just loving me like he did his wife. It was the night when he muttered in his sleep he wanted me forever. It was the night we grieved for something that could never be more than what it was at this moment. That was when I knew I didn’t ever want this to end. He was it for me. He encompassed every inch of the girl-like dreams I’d ever had about the man I would marry. He was love, soft and willowy and so damn comforting I always felt at home. He was my home. My home was him.
Morning comes and echoed in its light I know we’ve sinned. We have opened Pandora’s Box and there is never any way of closing it now. The guilt escapes from the pores of his skin like some gas that suffocates every living thing it touches, but it is our sin I want again, and I fear I will not be able to walk away. We stand in the silence of the room, starring at each other. We know that too much was said last night, and we know there is no going back. In his head, I know he is wishing he had never admitted he was in love with me. I know he wishes he never compared our love to the love he has for her. I know that he is looking at me wondering if there could ever be a way out now and I know that he has just realised he needs to make a decision now. He can’t keep doing this and the tables have turned. This is the first time we leave together, but emotionally I’ve still walked away first as he is already lost in the guilt of his pleasures and love. He will drive the hour and a half home wracked with guilt and self loathing and for me, the loneliness is like some swirling hallow void that is chewing me up from the inside out. My car was never silent after we met. It was filled with conversations, playing over and over in my head like some merry-go-round that haunts a child. I can’t escape him, he is everywhere now. He has invaded every cell of my body, my mind. Everything is about him. He is everything.
He made the decision, on the drive home that day. I already knew what was happening before he told me. He tried to end it and he tried to walk away, but I wasn’t able to give him back. It was the first time he saw me in so much pain. My car is the silent witness to my tears, to my trauma and to his inevitable guilt. He wanted to comfort me, to tell me everything would be alright. He tried to tell me we would move into some sort of friendship where everything would be easy. It was a ridiculous assumption and one I may have agreed to out loud, but in the raging of my head, I vowed I would not let him go, and of course, he could never really leave. I had already won the game because he drove down to Sydney to talk to me. He wanted to make sure I was alright and he had just had some cancers burnt of his face, but he left her. He left the safety of his soft family home and he came to me. I had won and it was now that his two lives were not so separate. He was invading my life like cancer, and I had become his addiction.
Another month passes and we are right back to where we started, but the rules have changed and he has vowed to never again tell me he is in love with me. I have promised not to ask. We arrange another night away as stolen moments are few and far between and kissing is not something that will suffice our appetites for long. I become increasingly frustrated with the relationship. He wants me to be young and go out and experience life and other men but I refuse to go out and meet someone else. I feel as though I would be cheating on him. He is my one, I am certain of this. We are still on the same merry-go-round where he is unable to control his emotions about what he is doing, but it is getting increasingly worse, because as our relationship blossoms, he wants me more and more and has come to the conclusion he is not only cheating on his wife with me, but he is cheating on me with his wife. He is suffocating by guilt from all angles, but still he won’t stop. He instead will punish me for the way he feels and although I know he doesn’t do this intentionally, I just can’t bear to hear him pine over the love he has for his wife; he does not understand the effect these words have on me.
So here we are again, in one of our many rotating homes. It is now July and it’s starting to get chilly at night. We leave work at noon and go for lunch. It amazes me the risks we take, and I wonder how we ever thought it would go unnoticed. But we sit together and eat, and from afar we would appear like any other work colleagues having a sandwich together. Yet there is this air of familiarity between us which is unmistakable and something that could never be mistaken for friendship alone. We are like two people existing in our own world. We think the rules don’t apply to us and we instead make our own. At the hotel, we become tangled in sheets of love and despair. Our world does not exist without order and chaos together. In our bed I am queen, unobtainable me. A sexual being, so different to the girl I used to be. I make myself his queen and go to extremes to be the only dream he wishes to dream. Stockings replace pantyhose while lace becomes more common than cotton. I am his own living doll and I am able to lose myself in the depth of his eyes. I get lost in the nearness of him. Close is never close enough and there is something almost angry about our love making, I am frightened he may break his only doll. We are decadent for the rest of the afternoon, wrapped up in the sheets of our ambient love.
He takes me to dinner, and again we make our own rules. He chooses the wine and we sit in the quiet warmth of the Italian restaurant. We joke about the consequence if someone we knew walked in, but it seems so far from reality we never believe it will happen. He pours the wine not letting my glass empty. We converse freely about our own world and how it would be if we were together like an ordinary couple. But we aren’t ordinary are we? We will never be ordinary.
He walks me home, holding my hand. I want to run so we get back to the hotel quicker, I want to cherish every moment that I am able to be close to him. Every moment he is only mine and I don’t have to share him with another, but I don’t run. We have stopped caring about first impressions and we crawl into bed covered by the softness of flannelette pyjamas. It’s a normality he shares every night with her, but for me, this moment is one I will always remember. We drink wine and talk until the small hours of morning. Breaking only to make love, to tangle our limbs and touch places we’ve never before found. I fall asleep at dawn. I know the sun is coming. The morning is drawing near and I again have to face the loneliness. I have to give him back again and face the light of truth. He does not belong to me, but I am so much his.
I’m changing. I’ve become this woman wracked with pain and I ache constantly. I’m clutching to him like he is the breath I need and yet my lungs can’t take. I’m falling and I can no longer bury nightmares from my childhood. I can not separate where the pain from being abused ends and where the pain of losing him begins they have meshed so well together that there does not seem to be a divide. I can’t cope anymore. There is this pit of anger that resides in me and I am confusing so many types of anger that I can no longer keep up. I feel sick constantly as the anger eats at me. It is a swirling ball of turmoil that nothing will calm, not even alcohol. I pick fights with him, and I want to hurt him. I want him to feel this relationship from my side. I want him to feel the loss, the hollowness, the abyss of eternal love that falls constantly short of being enough for him.
Our customer service teams were supposed to merge. I was supposed to head them up. I was going to take the next step. I was going to be brilliant, but the plan fell through. I needed to be closer to him. If I was closer to him I would be OK. If I could get closer to him the pain would not be so great. The abuse would not occupy my thoughts every second of everyday. I would not be sick and want to vomit the anger and hate from within myself. I would not feel like a snow globe that has been broken and shattered into one million pieces and can never be restored. I would not be in love. I demote myself. I’m angry at everyone. I want to die. I want to stop living. I want to be as invisible as I feel. I want the world to keep on spinning without me in it. I want to find safety in the warmth of my own imaginary acorn shell. I want to curl up into a ball and become invisible. I don’t want to be someone anymore; I don’t want to be anyone. I demote myself and move to his team but he sits me right outside his office and it is worse. I have to look at him every day. I can hear his conversations to his wife, and I know when he is talking to her, because he turns away and faces the wall behind him. I can not concentrate. He is all I see. He is the first person I speak to everyday, it is his face that haunts me all day long and he is the last person I speak to before I go to sleep. There is not even a reprieve in sleep. I’ve taught him the art of astral travel. He is everywhere. He has consumed all of this. I am no longer human. I send him angry emails all day. I don’t want to work; I want him to want me the way I need him to. I want him to leave her and the demand sits on the tip of my tongue like poison, waiting for the right moment to spit it at him. I want him to marry me. I want to be his forever, but he does not want me enough.
He tries to end it again. This time though, he takes me somewhere public, a coffee shop. The same coffee shop we went to that very first day when he told me he would not plan an affair with me. He knows I won’t scream or cry in public and I sit there. I don’t want to listen anymore. He tells me everything would be OK if we stopped the sex. It’s now come 360 degrees. Now he can’t cope with the sex anymore. He can’t cope because it is no longer sex. It’s become something more. It has connected me to him in a way he can never undo. I’m sick. I have a cold and I don’t want to listen to this. I get up to leave but he follows and walks me to my car. I had brought a present for him, some cuff links, and I now feel so angry and hurt I throw them at him while I yell about his inability to love me the way I deserve. I throw words at him like arrows and he stands there numb by my display. I get in my car, and so does he. He says he wants to work this out, that he can’t bare to see me drive away angry. What’s to work out I wonder? I want too much, he doesn’t want enough. If he doesn’t want me anymore I’m not sure I want to go on living. He has ruined me for love. I don’t go to work the next day. I’m sick and my heart is broken. He comes over to see me at lunch time and we make love. Nothing has changed. He gets back on the merry-go-round and we begin again.
I go to breathwork; a process in which you are able to access and heal aspects of yourself that have been suppressed for a long time. It allows you to explore those things that you have hidden in the darkest place inside yourself that no one can touch. It is suppose to help with the grief and trauma of sexual abuse of children. But every time I go under all I see is our old life together. When we were married and when he loved me only when our villa, in our Tuscany was not only a dream. The sexual abuse only comes forward when she really pushes me. I’d rather float in something that is good and pure and wholesome than something so damaging and angry and covered with whiskey. It takes me weeks to speak the words I was raped. And then it comes over me, like a wave of rage and I am inconsolable. My body, wracked with grief curls into a ball and I want to be blown away into the wind. It gets so much darker before it gets lighter.
I became so vacant and I know he worried about me. I could see it in his eyes, in the lines of his face. I look at him with my eyes so vacant and distant, but I can still see the colour drained from his face. He has turned a sort of greyish colour. His addiction is now sucking the life from him. I have embedded myself as much in his cells as he has mine. I want to hurt him and so I push him away. I want to be so severe that he walks away. I want this to be like every other relationship in my life, where I am left, alone. They always leave. Men, they always leave me when it gets too much, when I become too hard to maintain. I want another reason to hurt myself. I sit at my desk bored by life, and I at scratch my arm until I bleed. Sometimes I will unravel a paper clip and drag it over my arm for some release. It’s amusing I can do this and still be on my game at work. I can cease to exist and yet I still top the invoice count. I am still the star.
People whisper, like mice. I hear them squeaking about us. They think I am deaf and blind, but I know they know. I hear them, I hear the muffled voices and I see the sniggers they try to hide behind their hands. I want someone to ask me about it. I want to scream, but I am so disconnected that I want to scream at anything. I’m so lost inside myself I do not know what it is I am even angry at anymore. I’m angry at so many things. I’m angry at the man who abused me as a child. I am angry at my parents. It was their job to keep me safe. This was not meant to happen to me. I am angry at the people who talk behind my back. I’m so damn tired of having to pretend I don’t hear them. I’m angry at him for not loving me enough to leave her. I am like a painting frozen in time. A girl screaming blackened with abuse and self hate. On the outside, I appear normal to those who don’t know the depths of my hate and anger and self loathing, but on the inside I am just a child screaming in silence for all she could not stop with her small hands. I want to go now. I tell him I can not do this anymore. I tell him I need to end life. I need to stop because I can’t cope anymore. I don’t want to have to cope. Coping is not living and I feel dead already. I love you, I say. I walk out of work. I fantasise about driving my car into a pile-on on the high way. I am so dead inside it will not harm me. I swerve at the last moment, breaks smoking, horns blasting as I pull back into the lanes of traffic.
He calls over and over again but I do not answer. I can not face him. I can not hear him utter words of love and regret without any follow through. I am secretly happy I have finally made him feel something. I know that my death would kill him. I know my death would wrack him with guilt for ruining something that was already so broken to begin with. He was damaging every inch of me and I needed to end it with finality. I knew that being dead would be the only way I would never want to go back. I am driving so erratically I hope I have an accident. I have decided I will go to the Gap. I do not even know how to get there, but I will go somewhere. And then my phone rings again, this time it is not him, it is my mother, and I stop. I hear her voice and I know that my death would kill her more than it would affect him. She would blame herself. She would blame herself for leaving me in the house that stole my soul and my innocence. I go home and I curl up on her lap and cry. Shaking uncontrollably, she thinks this is because of the abuse, I know it is because of him too.
Months pass and I do not need him to be my lover anymore. I am too sick to be able to cope with anything more than comfort and care. I’m sick mentally. I’ve hit the bottom. I’ve broken down into just a shell of the person I once was. I’m a shell of the laughing, sunny girl I used to be. I go to breathwork weekly and it’s hard. It hurts to go over and over the abuse and to give it a voice and words and sometimes I just want to find that place in the misty mornings where we were married, but I know that this not why I am here. I’m allowed to scream in breathwork. I’m allowed to kick and punch and yell for a loss so massive it is beyond words. I am allowed to rage and become the chaos that has nestled inside me. I am chaos in human form and it is dark and grotesque.
It happens slowly, but I am beginning to remerge as a girl whose smile lights up her whole face. I am calmer now. I have seen that there was not a thing she was able to do. I have realised my parents did not leave me there with the intention of harm. They did not know what happened inside that house. They did not know that that night would be his daughter’s reprieve. They did the best they could with what they knew at the time. I have come to see that perhaps he doesn’t have to be damaging anymore and that over, does not have to mean done, final, complete. I begin to see that he loves unconditionally. He never walked away. He never left me. One thousand other men would have. He has seen every dark and ugly twisted part of who I am, and still he loves me. He loves every part of me. He does not love me for everything that I am not; he loves me for everything that I am.
It is November and he takes me to dinner. I pick the restaurant, and he is blown away at the views of the harbour. He holds my hand. We talk. This is the first time in months that it appears our love is returning to the way it used to be. He tells me how much he loves me, how he will always love me. He tells me how happy he is that I have been a part of his life. He tells me he has not only felt as though he has been cheating on his wife, but that he has felt he has been cheating on me with her. He tells me when he met me, he believed in love at first sight. He tells me it was not like that with his wife. He tells me he wanted to leave but that he could not find the courage. We walk to our cars and we kiss. This is not over.
A few weeks later, we have our own Christmas. We have fallen back to lovers again and we know that this relationship is something that will never be over. He has brought me a necklace. Diamonds and a pearl. I am his pearl, he tells me. He explains to me that the person I am on the inside is like the surprise of finding a pearl in an oyster. I have brought him a Parker Pen and had it engraved with the word Tuscany. We make love over and over again. I fall so far into his soul I feel as though I may drown. Our love is overwhelming. It is still like cancer. In the morning, I know this will be the last time we ever do this. I will never be like this with him ever again. I make him leave first.
I let myself fall apart again. The realisation that this has to be over now is too much. The manic in me resurfaces and I pick fights with him. The demand that was sitting on my tongue like a lioness’ prey is now used, and I spit the words at him, I demand he leave his wife. I threaten to tell. I tell him I will kill myself and it will be his fault. I tell him that he has damaged me. I tell him he has ruined me for love and I will never be able to love again. I tell him how gutless he is, how he has always had exactly what he wanted and when. I walk out of work again, but my departing message to him is that his love has killed an innocent girl. He knew my intention. He knew I would hurt myself or worse and he calls over and over again. I don’t answer.
At home, my mother tries to comfort me while I bawl on my bed. I’m ranting and raving that I don’t want to exist. I am manic. I am unreachable. She does not know what to do, so she leaves me lying there paralysed with hurt. I call him after seven knowing he will be at home. I am testing his love for me. If he answers, he loves me more. If he doesn’t, I was never anything more than something cheap and inconvenient. I am pushing the boundaries and he does not answer, so I yell some message down the phone, calling him names. He calls me back and I hear him whispering and I am so filled with hate for him that I utter the words I promised I never would. Are you going to tell her or am I? He panics. I can hear it in his voice. He wants to know why I am doing this to him. I retort back with why are you doing this to me? And I hang up.
I pace about my bedroom, I want to hit something so hard. I want to hurt something so I won’t feel so bad. I am so agitated it feels as though I have insects crawling inside my body. I’m flinching and climbing the walls. I’m done now, I can’t do this anymore. I walk out to the living room. I tell my mum I am going to leave my job. I tell her I can’t cope. She comes into my room with me and she asks me why. I tell her she knows why, but she makes me tell her. She makes me say it out loud. She wants me to make it real. If the words are spoken it becomes reality, it is outside my body and outside my mind so I tell her. She tells me we will tell my father that I can not cope at work because of the abuse (which is in part contributing to my manic behaviour). She tells me I need to get help. I need to go someplace where they know how to deal with grief and breakdowns. I agree. I tell her I will go to hospital if that is what they need.
I call him in the morning, on my way to work and I am still angry. I know that he would not have slept. He would instead, have lay there, wondering why he chose to be so indulgent. Wondering why he was not strong enough to keep an affair with a younger woman a fantasy and nothing more. I know he would have been cursing himself for being so stupid to believe that this would go on with out consequences or without hurting someone. I tell him there is nothing he needs to do. I am short and curt and I speak the words as though they are steps I have to take. There is nothing emotional in my voice, I want to disconnect myself again, but I want to make him feel that I have given up my life because he was too gutless to give up his. I have made the decision for us both I say. I tell him I will be resigning today. I can not work with him any longer. I can not see him every day. I can not look at him every day knowing he will never love me enough. This is not fair and I deserve more, and I need to be away from him. I can not begin to fall out of love with him whist he is everywhere. I will not be able to move on whilst he is still there with concern on his face and in his eyes. He tells me; once again I have come through making the right choice. He tells me he is moved by my sacrifice. I hang up thinking “fuck you”.
When I get to work, he calls me into his office. I look at him, I’m still vacant and aloof and then he starts to cry and I do not know what to do. I can not walk away. I now realise, perhaps, this has been just as hard for him as it has been for me. I realise, I am stronger. I have been the one able to make the hard decisions he simply could not. We were supposed to take a customer to lunch together that day, but I can not go and I know he won’t be able to face people outside of our bubble. We decide to have lunch together. We need to, he says. Lunch was perfect and it was as though the huge planet of grief and regret that was hanging over us had lifted. “We” didn’t seem to be as toxic. “We” didn’t seem to need the other so much. “We” were letting go. It was time, enough now. I walk back into office and throw my resignation letter on my boss’ desk. I feel triumphant in more ways than I ever would have known possible.
I would be finishing up on the 5th January 2007 and it occurs to me that this is exactly one year to the day that he first kissed me. I will work over the Christmas and New Year period without him as he will be on holidays. Then we will have a few days working together before I finish. Things begin to change almost immediately. I have made the decision now. I know what I must do. I must move on. I know it will be easier. And I know if I can get over him, I can get over anything. We become soft and gentle with one another again and our relationship is no longer based on anger and anxiety and need. Our relationship is no longer a merry-go-round of emotions and games where we try to hurt one another by loving too little or too much. I begin to let him go and he in turn lets me walk, step by step out of his life.
It is nice being at work without him. It is nice to look up and not see his face filled with guilt, turmoil and constant worry about whether or not today would be the last day I lived. To not see his hurt and concern was freeing. It is nice to be free of him. I’m softer, kinder and calmer and I’m even more open with my parents. I know I need them now; I need their support and their love. He sends me a text on Christmas Day, I do not reply. He sends me a text on New Years Eve. I do not reply I need to be away from him. I feel as though I’m energetically leaving him. I feel the connection getting weaker and weaker, and I feel myself regaining some power over myself again. If I feel his spirit astral travelling to me at night, I ask him to leave and he listens and then, he comes back to work, and when he walks in, I realise this is still not over. This will never be over between us. We will always be connected.
I walk away on my last day, feeling loss, sadness, joy. It has been twelve months to the day and so much has transpired it almost seems like a dream. We go to the pub for one last beer and one last private goodbye. He has written me a letter, but he won’t let me read it while he is sitting there, so he goes to the bar to get us beers. I read the letter, and thank God I am wearing sunglasses as silent tears fall from my eyes. He writes everything he could never say. He writes everything I needed to hear. It was now finally over. I exhale and it feels like the first time I have breathed in a year.
When I am away from him, I fell like I am grieving. I feel a loss that is incomprehensible. I feel as though I have lost a limb or a part of my soul, and in the beginning, he is always in my thoughts. I never got a farewell, as it was during the holidays, so he plans one for me in February. I arrive, and it is the first time I have seen him in a month. I’m medicated now and calmer. He sits next to me and I still feel drawn to him, and I know he feels it too, but now, now is not a time for me to be in love with him. He drives me home, and he stops outside my parents’ house.
- Thank you
He kisses me on the cheek, he looks at me and as I am getting out of the car he says,
- I still love you, you know.
I turn and look at him,
- I know.
I shut the door and walk away.
Over the years, we have kept in contact. Our relationship has changed from something that was so damaging and obsessive into something that resembles friendship. I remember the first time I realised I no longer loved him. We had met for dinner and I was waiting for him and as usual, he was late. When he walked up the stairs, I thought to myself “What am I doing?” I looked at him, and then the words fell from my mouth without warning, “My God, you’re like really old! What was I ever thinking?” He looks at me with hurt in his eyes, and it was in that moment that I got it. I had always thought there was a lesson or something that was important to my growth that I had to learn from him and I had learnt it, and now, he appeared to me, as he appeared to everyone else, a man who is twice my age.
He taught me the importance of love. He allowed me to be loved whole and not in parts, and yet it was in an environment that was safe for me. I had always run away from relationships, but this was one relationship I didn’t need to run from, as it was never going to be more than what it was. He has shown me, the strength of my character, the beauty that I behold and he taught me how to see this for myself. Being apart from him was just as important as being with him, but it was always me who was going to leave first. It had to be that way for me to learn.
Now, as someone who is distant from the needs and wants of our relationship, I am so grateful that he never left his wife. I have changed, and I am more now. I would have felt trapped, and I would have resented him. His life is coming to a close, and mine is just beginning and in the end, it would have been me who wanted more. It would have been me who did not love enough. I know I want more than he could have ever given me. I deserve more than he could have ever given me and so now, the way we were, is just a distant memory. It’s something I allow myself to think of from time to time, but it is not the reason I live each day. It is a reminder of a year of my life in which I died and was again, reborn.
