Rescue me

A story about the most important relationship in my life

It’s a bright, breezy day. The wind rustles the leaves like a duvet being laid out on a freshly made bed. The sounds of neighbourhood kids echo in the distance. There’s a certain smell in the air that makes my nose twitch. I savour it for a moment, wondering why she hasn’t noticed. She’s sitting over there at the table like she usually does. I’m sitting on the sofa across from her, watching. She’s staring at her screen again rather than staring at me. I don’t know how she stands it. Why isn’t she compelled to look at me the way I need to look at her?

She’s talking to the screen now and the screen is talking back. Suddenly she stops, looks at me - joy! “What do you need?” she asks accusingly. “Can you not just give me a minute? What could possibly be wrong? Why must you always do this?” In that moment I hear myself almost humming with tension, making small distressed sounds because I am so devastated she is choosing to share her attention with someone other than me.

The first time we met was like a Bumble match, she had all the power, she got to choose whether we were compatible. I’ll be the first to admit my social skills are limited. I was angry, damaged and confused. I felt like a caged animal. Truthfully I’d spent most of my life up until that point being rejected, over and over again. It was probably my last chance at a relationship. I didn’t make a good first impression. I had no idea how to talk to her, I was consumed with fear that I’d be discarded again. It was painful to have her come close to me. I couldn’t make eye contact. I couldn’t eat anything. I’m not sure why but she persevered. She was patient. She did what she always does and talked a lot of nonsense, sounds that make no sense. There was something quiet in those sounds though, they were undemanding. She made me feel safe. By the end of our time together I had decided that she was the one.

I moved in with her a week later. It seems fast, I know. I struggled to live up to the promises of my online profile. Some people who didn’t know me that well encouraged me to write it. “Put yourself out there!” "How will you ever change your life by cowering away in the dark?” They thought I should lead with the positives, my youth, my vitality, my enthusiasm. Having an enigmatic background is a classic when it comes to attraction. I was lucky that I could rely on my good looks to grab clicks. Whilst not exactly tall, I was certainly dark and mysterious.

I moved to a new city to be with her. I didn’t know anyone there, I didn’t have any friends. At first I tried to be what I thought she needed - the fun girl, the girl who wants to go on adventures, the girl who gamely agrees to wear novelty jumpers she buys me as a joke. We attracted a lot of attention back then. We spent almost all of our time together. I was so close to her it was as if we were forever tethered to each other. I know what I sound like, but haven’t we all seen two people so utterly consumed with each other that they radiate it out into the world? Of course we weren’t in fact the only people in love. We came across others like us, pairings of all shapes and sizes. In those early days we spent a lot of time with other couples and I began to notice something sinister, something that kept happening, something that no one really talks about. Being female in the world you come to expect a certain amount of commentary and unwanted attention, but this was different, it wasn’t happening to her the same way it happened to me.

For a start, there was a lot of staring. Strange people we walked past would motion to their companion and point at me. Others would linger with a facile grin on their face. Paranoid as I am, I could have perhaps coped with this, if that’s all it was. Others were, unfortunately, bolder. How do I put this delicately? It’s as if open opening our door each day, instead of stepping out into the street, we went back in time to the 1970’s. At best, as I mentioned, there was the looking. Then there was the spontaneous commentary. “Isn’t she beautiful?” they would ask her, motioning to me, as I stood right in front of them. “That’s not very nice, is it?” they would utter, if I lurched back in response to their closeness or reacted in a way they didn’t consider adequately enthusiastic. The worst offenders were the unsolicited touchers. Sometimes you could sense it coming, a glint in the eye, an arm beginning to move. Sometimes it was completely unpredictable. We’d be standing in a queue or walking down the street in our own little world and suddenly I was being patted on the bum. If she or I objected, and trust me, we did, the offender would scoff, claim that we were overreacting and tell us that we shouldn’t go to public spaces if we couldn’t cope with the attention. Truly extraordinary!

I haven’t ever really been able to find the words to tell her, but I’d been badly hurt in past relationships. She now knows this and even if she doesn’t exactly have the details she’s gleaned enough from living with me to know that these relationships were abusive: physically, verbally, emotionally. It’s left me with a lot of trust issues to this day. That’s part of the enigmatic baggage I come with, the part I didn’t mention in my online profile when we met. When I was no longer able to pretend I didn’t have that baggage, I had a bit of a breakdown. In such a short period of time, she had become my entire world and I was in danger of fucking it up because it was too painful for me to actually be around anyone other than her.

I’m sure you’re passing judgment now, wondering why anyone in their right mind would put up with such an intense, obsessive, broken individual. It takes two to tango though. She’s always been the one in control. Almost every decision made about my life is one she has chosen. She compulsively makes me work out, several times a day. She chooses what I eat, she tells me if I need to go on a diet. Despite her general nose blindness, she becomes irrationally annoyed if I wear a scent she doesn’t approve of and demands that it be washed off. Worse still, she lies to me. I can’t tell you how often she tells me one thing and then laughs it off as if it was all a big joke. Then there are the days when she’ll lie to me and then just suddenly disappear. I never know if she’s actually going to come back. At times it feels like we’re both speaking to each other in a different language. She’s infuriatingly difficult to work out. She feels the same way about me. Given all this, you might be able to understand why I need to observe, monitor, study her behaviour, anticipate any move she may make. Watching her feels like my full time job.

This is all probably beginning to sound a little toxic, a little co-dependent. We’ve both made mistakes along the way, that’s for sure. Our love languages are very different. She desperately needs to touch me, to cuddle me, to kiss me. I find that challenging because of the trauma I hold. We’ve taken steps to improve our understanding of each other. We’ve been to therapy where we learned how to communicate our boundaries. She’s helped me make friends. My world has become larger. I’m now able to allow her to protect me and I try my best not to assume that I need to protect both of us first.

The wind is picking up again. She looks up, sighs and then looks at me. She closes her screen and gets up to shut the door. I keep watching. The flat fills with light as she grabs her coat, her keys, her phone. I know what this means. I get off the sofa expectantly. We make our way down the hall, I can barely contain myself. She pauses by the door, turns to the side and asks, “Molly, are you coming?”.

I wag my tail and wait for her to clip us together. I never want to be apart from her. I’ve come a long way since that first day, where I was trapped in a cage, waiting for someone like her to come along and rescue me.

We head out into the world, tethered together, just as it should be.