Rewritten

TW: abuse

That must have been very hard for you, he offers. He looks at me with kind eyes and I notice a stray hair on his navy jumper. Wait, that’s wrong. In my mind’s eye I change him into a grey sweater instead. That’s better. In this version, the version with the grey sweater, I’ll be truthful, I’ll make the right choices.

I’d just finished telling him what had happened in the last week. We had a fight, I begin. It’s three, or maybe four years in at this point. He appeared online as this pretty, visual, angsty dreamer, all Sylvia Plath poems and big eyes. But in person he was something else. He was brash and silent and stupid and nothing at all like his carefully constructed online profile. At first, speaking to him in person, I thought it was some kind of trick. Who was this fool with the “wahey!” who constantly winked at me and bombarded me with banal chattering? 

I was utterly befuddled. I invited my best friend around, to see if she could make any more sense of him. I listened to his mix tape and it seemed more like that person I was looking for, the one in the online profile. I didn’t really like him in company but I desperately needed to believe that someone, anyone, wanted me.

He liked me to take him on car trips, drives out where he gets to look through the window and I get to look ahead. He had to convince me that this was what driving was for, to use the freedom, to go and see places I otherwise couldn’t before. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was any more than a means of picking up my groceries more easily. I tried to impress him. I did what he suggested. I took him on drives, I tried to prove how good I was. I drove too fast, one time nearly overturning the car on a hairpin bend. That was early on so he hadn’t started to blame me yet. We exhaled with relief after it had just happened and then laughed when Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car came on.

He encouraged me to do things, at the start, patiently teaching me how normal people should aspire to be in their life. The first time he came round to my flat he stopped, wondering, where are all your things? I didn’t understand. He meant my style, my direction, kitchen utensils and bath mats and lights for the front room. He taught me how to line my nest. Maybe because he was considering how it would soon be his nest and he wanted it a little more habitable.

I foolishly spent years trying to uncover the real him. Foolish, yes, because I had thought he would eventually reveal the original online version I’d been drawn to. With hindsight, he’d been teasing the real him for quite some time. We met in the Autumn. By Christmas I was driving him to his family’s house for the celebrations because by this point he had a key to my flat and was living there, despite it only being a 20 minute car journey. I don’t remember actually agreeing to it. He showered me with praise, bought me expensive gifts, informed me of how our connection was unique and that I was his forever. My input on this was not necessary. He told me how it was and so it went. Then gradually, ever so gradually, he began to tell me different things. You’re not wearing that, are you? he would ask me, when I emerged, having spent time on choosing a look I liked. You shouldn’t be spending money on that, he would declare from the body shaped mould in my sofa he had formed due to spending so much of his unemployed time sitting in it.

My world started to become smaller. At first he made this seem like a good thing - we were so in love, why did we need anyone else? Your family don’t get it. You don’t really want to go out with them, I’m the only one that really understands you. He knows that the words he uses to tell the story of us doesn’t line up with reality. He can sense my struggle with this feeling of wrongness. He starts to address my questions, my feelings, with doubt. When I wonder aloud, is it meant to be like this, he pretends not to hear. Our conversation starts to become a well worn script. I say one thing simply and clearly over and over to which he perfectly and completely responds to its exact opposite. We continue this game of chess, watching his repeated mistake as he attempts to move my pieces in place of his.

Despite all this, or maybe because of this, life starts to become a very slippery and odd thing. I never quite know whether my feelings can be trusted. It’s like I’ve woken up from a long sleep to find that I can no longer speak and he is the only one who can translate things for me, even though I somehow recognise he’s using the wrong dictionary.

One day I decide to give in to one of his half-baked suggestions. It will be, if nothing else, a chance to experience the sun from the right side of the window; the one that I see normal people walking about in, looking up at me from, while I stare out at them, wondering. But first, there are the inevitable series of indecisive preludes to the front door. I change three times as I struggle to select something that will pass without comment. We finally make it to the beyond to find that out there is filled with things I am unaccustomed to. My grip on the car’s steering wheel is as sharp and uncomfortable as hot sand. The air being blown out of the conditioning system is warm and tickly. It makes me think of the musical word for hot desert air, sirocco; the kind that wrapped around me like a moving blanket as I let myself be driven, a world ago, through a South African game reserve in an open top Jeep. Despite the already afternoon sun, we manage shop bought sandwiches, cold bottles of juice, and only one return to the flat to retrieve a suitable holdall for our provisions.

Then suddenly, as if by magic, I find myself in charge of another means of speed; soaring along concrete paths fringed with brilliant blue depths, to a soundtrack of wind through my hair. He lags behind. He wants to be like the other “couples”; side-by-side, slow, wearing Macleans’ smiles and sickly co-dependence. I have other ideas, like the dream of 12 miles in my head. I am eager to aim for the target of the far shore’s pier; a point that the bicycle hirer told us would take double the time of our agreed rental period.

Unconcerned by other people’s dimensions, I surge ahead, the wheels of my bike propelling me backwards in time. Suddenly I am 12 again, racing MBR, scaring my mum and dad with my insistent need to keep going until I am just a speck in the distance and the search party must be sent to retrieve me. The wind in my hair spurs me on. I am free, weightless, slightly thrilled by the thought of falling off and scraping my knees, marking my skin; proof that I am alive.

At one point, I overtake three tourists. I catch their leader’s affronted gaze, a man with a red shirt, as I soldier solidly past. Later, he catches me and returns a superior look, tortoise like to my hare, told you so. So I let him get ahead, follow him close on the horizon, lull him into a sense of comfortable certainty; certainty that makes the second and final time I take him all the sweeter. As I pass, clattering flamboyantly, deliberately loud, he shakes his head. His exasperation is such an unexpected bonus that I can’t help but laugh out with glee; the sound trailing behind me like the echo of a bell. 

Later, I find him. He has hand picked flowers, recriminations and talk of tandems, to keep me within reach. I tell him of my race, my too fast flights down hills, the view of the other side’s pier. I fail to move him. Our difference takes shape, large between us, holding a hand on each side, keeping us separate. But even across the divide I can’t help but notice his hopeful eyes, the carefully plucked flowers. Still, I am too weak to turn it down. So instead I choose to stare right through the thing between us, fix on a smile and try and play along.

We had a fight. It’s early evening and we’re in my flat. He’s sitting in his sofa mould with his laptop on his knee. The big jar of water on the table in between the two sofas sparkles in the dying light. I’m jumped up and bored. I’ve not been out all day and the only thing he’s said to me is to leave him alone and don’t leave the flat. By now I have grown used to these contradictory proclamations. He tells me how it is and I am supposed to twist myself like a Rubik’s cube until it fits the pattern he has chosen.

On this day I am tired of contortion. I do not want to be rearranged. I decide to write my own script. He does not take it well. Undeterred, unable to push down my irritation, I persist. I can feel myself becoming dangerous, sped up, words flowing out of me from the secret places I’ve hidden them, utterances like bullets flying in his direction. When he moves his laptop, gets up, red in the face, I have a moment to sense the shift. He grabs the jug and in one perfectly choregraphed movement, arcs the water towards me, the fire that must be extinguished. It doesn’t work. Shocked by its impact it ignites me further, sparks yet more rage. And then suddenly, he is chasing me, we are playing musical sofas as we go round and round as he tries to grab me. As I break free, I run to the bedroom making the same mistake as every victim in a horror film, trapping myself further. He doesn’t need to run. I have time to regret my decision as he pushes past my futile attempt at barricading the door with my body. The next push on my body is when he has shoved me back on to the bed. He pins me down as I struggle to get away. Somehow I end up on the floor trapped between the bed and the wardrobe. Calmly, without noise he approaches me, hovers and stamps his leg down on my side. I remain crumpled and defeated as he leaves the room.

That must have been very hard for you. The hair on his red sweater does a Mexican wave as he shifts the chair in his counselling office. No wait, it was grey wasn’t it? I suppose the colour doesn’t really matter. That conversation never happened. Not because I didn’t have a therapist but because I was too ashamed to ever tell him. It may not even have happened that way, not exactly. I remember the water, the stamping, the bedroom but it’s a silent film and the details are sketchy.

There were so many more fights. I told myself after that one that I would split up with him. I was never any good at it. I think I’d been trying to split up with him ever since we reached the six month mark. I don’t love him. I am not even sure I know what love is, I’m no longer sure of anything but I know it’s not supposed to be this.

You’d have thought I’d have got the hang of it now. After all, all it involves is saying, “leave” and somehow making it stick. Actually, I am quite good at the leave bit. I have an air of authority about me when I am listing my disappointments that I seldom have otherwise. Regret makes me stalwart; a life long stutterer suddenly in possession of golden syrup articulation.

But he never acknowledges my grievances. He waits. And waits. And the silence mocks me into becoming a wild banshee of provocation and hysteria and imbalance. Suddenly I am no longer pronouncing words, I am waving fists and firing shots with dangerously gleaming glares that suggest I am capable of anything. And with it, I become a bomb that must be defused, my purpose negated. I quickly recognise the shift in control. I become cowed and shamed. Weak. I no longer know how to live without his version of who I am. So, as if on autopilot, I find myself desperately reversing, seeking to undo my embarrassment. I tell him to go and then run after him, begging him to stay.

Years on, it’s now 2012 and I stay off work for 3 days.

On the first day, having been forced into blank awareness at half 3 that morning, the decision, although deliberate and inevitable, is a small act of kindness in an otherwise vast expanse of indifference to myself. Zombie like, although not officially “unwell” I spend the day in bed watching episode after episode of Fringe. At one point he emails. My reply is the only thing connected to an emotion despite the hours of drama I have been absorbing. Finally the outside turns to black and I allow myself to surrender to it.

On the second day, feeling returns. My head is a limb bent out of position and compressed, a pincushion prickling with a constant spiky hum, a pair of spectacles magically transforming my emotional detachment into physical form. I persist with my absorption of drama. After some time I begin to believe in my ability to act. I prepare myself for tomorrow’s role and set out my costume.

I begin the third day by turning off the alarm and remaining definitively horizontal. When I wake for the second time feeling guilt and dismay I realise that other things, external things, have returned to compete for my attention. Somehow I find myself vertical and outside my front door. Feeling at once transparent and visible I try to avoid the looks of strangers. Strangers who, if focussed on too long can suck emotion out of me against my will. My stony exterior betrays my fluid insides. Despite the danger, I successfully return the two bottomless pools of my gaze safely back inside. Later, he calls. He pretends nothing has happened, that everything is the same. I sit through denial, acceptance, cajoling, provocation and anger and marvel at my lack of emotion in comparison.

On the fourth day I return to work and find the world exactly unchanged. I struggle with this fact and eventually replace the absence with alcohol.

My empty soul brings me to life in the middle of the night, louder than any alarm. I entertain fantasises of not going to work as I wait down the hours for the real wake up call. This time, work brings no pleading email as the day before. Instead I am forced to collect public ‘take me back’ flowers and smile like it could be my birthday. I do a good job, I’ve lived in a version of life so apart from reality for so long.

I head home to my empty flat. I busy myself ahead of my next test and spend an hour repositioning the computer in an attempt to capture the angle that displays what I used to be. I become agitated when I have no success. I think about retreat, camouflage, distraction, but can’t commit to anything. Suddenly time runs out and it’s out of my hands. I am scared to be seen but need desperately for someone to confirm that I am not ok. How has your week been? my therapist asks. This is it. In this version, I tell him the truth. As I speak I regain my ability to make sense of the world. My words have the power to wipe through the years of obfuscation and gloom, tricking me, telling me that I deserved it, it was my fault. Now I can see it’s not me. This is not how it’s supposed to be. I sit with that, absorb it and it sticks. I end it and I am free.

Of course that’s not how it actually went. Even so, telling stories, reframing my world, writing my own version became powerful tools allowing me eventually, when it came to it, to choose myself and leave once and for all.

My stories remain. One by one, I’m going to use them to rewrite my version, make sense of the past and find myself in the process.