January 07

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There are two suicides to every story…(part 2)

Posted by on 7 January, 2012 in Love and Relationships, Short Stories | 7 Comments


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If you haven’t already, I suggest you read part one linked below so it makes a lil bit more sense

PART 1 here,

PART 2

It’s been seventeen days since I first came across your letter on the family kitchen table. As you may not of noticed, I said my family home table. Since our breakup, I could no longer afford to live on my own.

Fortunately for me, Mr and Mrs Sangeet, the new owners of my house were kind enough to not chuck away my old mail and personally forward it to me at my new corresponding address.

Fortunately for you, my step-dad found it before my mum did. She was off abroad for work. I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t even be receiving anything apart from a good hiding if she had found it. So my step-dad left it on the table in the kitchen and there it has stayed for seventeen long days.

For what may be the longest seventeen days of my life I might add. Of course that is omitting the final week of our relationship that I spend away from you and you spent that in the company of a fucking man of all things. But I will get to that betrayal later.

So I come down one morning late for work, looking for my misplaced car keys. You know, the ones that had that old butterfly magnet keyring on them so I could stick them to the fridge and always know where they were.

You remember that funny morning the magnet that broke waaay back when we first started seeing each other? After an impromptu ‘lie in’, I was rushing for work but forgot them upstairs at your flat, so you threw them off your balcony to me and they went right through my cack hands and splatted on the floor. I remember you kept going, ‘You killed madame butterfly, you KILLED HER’

 Hahahaha, It was so funny. I nearly died driving to work, laughing about it that morning. You were so sweet and offered to replace it  but I kept it, even though it didn’t work, as a memento of more laughs to share. Even if it meant I would never be able to find them ever again.

So I head into the kitchen on my usual for them  and I find this handwritten letter there for me. As much of a nice surprised it is to get something handwritten, this notion was immediately quenched when I saw your trademark ‘C’ when you wrote my name on the envelope.

I had always liked the way you wrote my name despite every other word of yours being illegible, no wonder you wanted to become a teacher, you would have fit right in. But this time seeing your ‘Celia’, sent a long chill down my spine.

Eventually, I went to work and came back and kept going to work and ignoring it and there I would see it and it would see me, every morning as I looked for my misplaced keys, that I always find somewhere around my fridge for some odd reason. That was my life for over two weeks, simply pretending to the exterior world that this entity didn’t exist while the half -torment, half-relief raged on inside me, almost taking up my every thought.

We hadn’t spoken then for give or take 483 days when I saw that letter, not that anyone is counting. You’d expect that I would be fine or indifferent but I wasn’t. I started imagining all the things you could have wrote

About being sorry

About wanting me back

About being a complete and utter bitch about the way we broke up.

About wanting some of the stuff back you left at mine.

About seeing how I am

About wanting to pay respects for my granny Annabelle’s passing away

But then if it was really going to be about any of these, I would have known. For most of these topoics, you would have come and seen me face to face. I know that you are not that much of a coward, regardless of what you did.

The fact that the letter was bulging inside of the envelope was a clear indication of what type of retort was to be expected from you.

You were going to be your usual damning judgmental cold self. I shouldn’t have been surprised, it’s not like I saw any other side of you over the years, we were together, but I thought maybe, just maybe, this time might be… oh fuck it never mind.

Now knowing this, I needed to prepare myself for whatever you had to say and thought I would write as well. And you know what a big deal this is, because I hate writing but I thought I’d put you in the hot seat for once.

God only knows how many times I wrote this and wrote and wrote, and redrafted and added and took it away and started from scratch again and again and again. My left hand spasms just thinking all the writing I put it through.

But I needed to be ready. I needed to be ready for you. I needed to be protected from you. Just this once. For a change.

You see, on the day we broke up, You promised me that after 183 days, we would meet up to see how we were both doing but you never showed up, you never called, never text or never emailed me. You didn’t even facebook message me. But then again, I never unblocked you so I can’t hold you guilty of that one.

Even so, I waited all day for you in the The Rabbit and Fox, the nifty lil old man’s pub where we always went to sort out our shit. I cried for like a solid three days afterwards, just pure tears. I shouldn’t’ even be giving you the satisfaction of hearing this, or knowing that then, I still had feelings for you and wished we could work it out, but alas, I had yet another batch of your trademark coldness.

So on day 190, I promised to never shed a tear for you again and so god help me I didn’t.

Not on day 212 when it was my birthday

Not on day 249when it was valentine’s day

No on day 288 when it was your birthday and I hid at home, all alone in case I bumped into you in town.

Not on days 354 when it was our anniversary

Not on days 361 when it was your birthday

Or day 374 when I saw you in town kissing another girl but you were too besotted to notice me walk straight pass you.

Not on day 468 when one of the last things my grandma Annabelle said to me before she passed away was “I still believe you and Erica are destined to be together, please don’t life wondering ‘what if’ like I have’ Celia”.

That was hard hearing that as her hands went limp in mine. She squeezed them so tightly just before then and stared me right in the eyes. Christ, I was so wrapped up in emotions, I couldn’t even distinguish which tears were for you or for her, so I bit down on my teeth, grimaced and didn’t shed a tear for anyone.

She was my rock throughout my breakup from you, you know. And the only one who I truly confided in (even including Tanya, the sister of mine that you think I reside in her shadow), about all aspects of our break up.

SO you can only imagine what weight her death, compounded with her final words to me, were to carry. But because I didn’t want to potentially shed a tear for you, I couldn’t allow myself to cry one solid tear.

Even to this day, I still haven’t managed to properly grieve her passing. The funny thing is when we split up, I thought you had damaged my confidence beyond repair but it seems you’ve caused me more damage on a fundamental level than I realised.

You’ve made me a little colder like yourself. Personally it makes me feel sick and I catch reflections of my new self and want to throw up in my mouth but I’d happily feel disgusted myself until I am truly over you rather than risking that ‘one more tear’.

 I am that adamant you are just not worth another tear, not after the amount I’ve cried over you, not ever again.

So you can image my utter dismay as to when I Ifinally summed up the courage, the comebacks, the quick one liners and the confidence to open your ‘GCSE’ essay’ in being a complete cold bitch, and came across your line

‘You never really knew me’

I physically lost it.

You horrible person. DO you really hate me that much?

That line had me shaking with total shock, filled with rage and rocked with another dismissive controlling complex to add to the fine collection you left me.

My frozen hands gripped into the table as my fingernails dug into the mohagonny wood and I rocked uncontrollably like a lady possessed. My pupils dilated with fury and I sneered as widely as I could for anywhere between five minutes and five hours. I can’t recall exactly how long, infact I can’t remember any of this as I apparently blacked out and this is how my family found me when they came back from watching The Hangover 2 at the cinema.

As my shuddering body rocked, and as much as I physically tried to hold them back, my body forced and squeezed out the suppressed ‘310 days’ worth of tears out of me. One at a fucking time.

Damn you.

Every fibre in my body is telling me to walk away from this and to take the moral high ground but I think you have actually crossed a line I never thought you would ever plummet below. And you need to know it’s not right. If not for my sake, your beloved ex-fiance, but purely for yours and (God knows) any family you may end up raising.

You need to be humbled.

So you don’t think in all the time I was with you that i didn’t know you?

Ok

That i didn’t hear you waking up in the middle of the night to cry but left you to it because i knew that if you knew i was awake and heard you being vulnerable and weak, you would be more upset.

That in all the time we were together that you never spoke about your relationship with your father and on father’s day I didn’t do anything with mine just so I could help take your mind off it?

That I didn’t already confide in your Mother and Aunties that we were together and secretly got their blessing but decided to keep it from you so I could see whether you believed i was worthy of meeting up with them.

That I knew you were allergic to dogs and tried my best to thoroughly clean the house everynight before you got back from work.

That I didn’t mix with your friends that I knew hated me. All because you are incapable of giving a nice opinion about me in public incase *God forbid* anyone may suspect that your feelings for me are far deeper than you put accross and that would make you look weak.

That the only way to persuade someone to do something was to argue with you to do the exact opposite. And I would have to go through this tedious rigmoral every single time we ever had to agree on anything

That when you said and mentioned your ex’s name when you slept-talked that i had to grin and bear it. This got especially tedious especially when I came home and would hear you upstairs listening to the songs I knew reminded you of her but then would have to sneak back out and in again, only this time louder to give you an opportunity to turn it off and create some ficticious alibi about what you were doing.

That I am a hardcore vegetarian and I used to cook you meat products, and I would succumb to eating of meat when it was your turn to cook, when you would sadistically cut up thin slices of meat and put them in my food, thinking I didn’t know it was in there,  in order to get some sense of superiority over me.

That when I came home and bought that jean skirt from primark, before even putting it on you told me ‘I didn’t have the legs for it’, knowing fully well that I know that is your favourite part of a woman’s body, not only to make me feel small, or because you had been recently made redundant at work (and didn’t tell me) but because you had your own body dysmorphia issues that you projected onto me.

That that night when you didn’t come home and my brother drove past you in the morning, apparently holding hands with another girl, while on his way to work, the deepest cut was the fact that you held hands with her, even though I knew nothing had happened, because you never hold hands with me in public.

But then you have always underestimated me. always saying I wasn’t strong enough to deal with issues, always saying I’m hiding behind someone, always saying I’m a princess and not too easily influenced.

And for some reason i took it. perhaps it was because you were the first woman I had ever been with properly in a relationship. Perhaps it was because you were the first person I had ever loved. and maybe thought I ever would love for the longest time. Certainly until I died and hopefully well long after.

I guess I was naiive. Myabe foolish, who knows, who cares.

And you keep going on about some points. But you know why my dad helped me? It was because I was put in a dire situation by people who made my life miserable at work. I was made a complete slave in that school, operating with class sizes twice as big as I could handle and I was in my training year, with no support in classes or from the other members of staff. The kids all came from rotten homes and the parents didn’t give two hoots. It was a horrible experience.

I don’t even know why I am explaining it to you, typical of you, I had tried to explain this to you over and over again and what did you do, instead of any soft of love or sympathy, you said i was an incompetent teacher.

When I was told i was going to be dismissed from my old job, I was crying on the phone to you and heard what i had to say. I had to ask you to come over and even then you denied. You said true blood was on the TV and you couldn’t be bothered coming over and that I would have to go to yours.

And you know the reason why I never went to yours after i got my own place, it’s because it’s messy and it dirty and it smells. You still lived like a student, with pictures and posters in the walls and you never took your bin out and it was a mess everywhere. it wasn’t homely. Plus because you were so amazingly tight, you would never put the heating on and force me to freeze. Funny thing that when you invited your friends over or your ex or your mom, your heating would always end up being on but you wouldn’t consider it for me.

And do you know why seriously I smoked so regularly. it was because I was so fucking bored of my life routine with you. You never did anything but worked. When I would wake up at seven and get ready for work, you would be just lying there in your own drool. No goodbye or recognition of anything. Then i would call you at work asking how your day was and you would be short and completely dismissive. Then I’d come home to an empty house, cook on my own, eat on my own and wash up on my own. Then I would watch tv on my own and go to bed on my own. Only to have you sneak up into bed well after midnight and fall asleep. I would try and snuggle up to you and you would move away. Except of course if you were horny, then you would wake me up and tell me to ‘do my duty’, followed by you  begrudgingly bringing me to orgasm in the quickest, most clinical way possible.

I smoked to numb the monotony. All my friends were always out having fun, doing stuff together and going on holidays with their partners. I had nothing. And my mind would eat away at that notion and ultimately start attacking the way I thought about you, so I smoked to numb the bored thoughts and to turn my brain off, to keep my feelings for you sincere and to give you the opportunity you needed to concentrate on your work and to step back from us, from me. You know how many potential arguments and sacrifices i made because of you, how many good nights out and fun memories i passed up on. There’s a whole part of the prime of my life i will never see again.

You know what. do you remember the last time you said you loved me? Personally I don’t but I do remember you never said it after we got back together. After admitting that I had slept with someone else. Over two years ago. two years of saying I love you every day to you and never hearing you say it back, I would catch the glimmer in your eye at some form of latent disgust when I said that. It was the slowest death imaginable. Do you know what that does to a person, fundamentally, when the person you’ve decided to spend the rest of your life with looks at you like that, three times a day, every day? It’s just horrible and what makes it worse, is that I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. I suffered this specific temperature of coldness from you all on my own.

Don’t get me wrong, I could have handled parts of it far better. I was a bit of a shit. I had made a mistake and regardless of what you say it was only two times. Two times I was absolutely drunk out of my mind and I went up to random people and said ‘my girlfriend has just told me she doesn’t love me. So In a completely wiped out state, I took them home and thought ‘you know what, I want to make her hurt just a tiny fraction of what I’m feeling’ but i couldn’t go through with it. There’s a good reason I’m a lesbian and it isn’t because I like girls per say but because I liked/love you. Their hands on me felt wrong, The first time I thought it was the girl and stopped and told her to leave, but the second time I knew it’s because it felt wrong. so I pushed her away and I went and slept downstairs on the sofa, which is exactly where you found me the next day.

So you know why I continually told you that I didn’t care that I did it and I would do it again? It’s not because I actually went through with anything other than some drunken snogging, but because in my whole time we were together, this was the only thing i had ever seen affect you. The only remnants of any sort of emotion or reaction to anything I say. I have finally made a blip on your radar, I had finally did something that mattered

But you couldn’t forgive me, could you?

So at your soonest opportunity to wreak any form of revenge, You went and played happy families with a GUY in Cardiff who you only just met for an entire week. Fucked him for the whole week and went to the park with his kids, then came back and told me how great it was and you weren’t sorry about a damn thing. not only that, but you were 2-1 behind on the cheating scorecard and he had a ‘fucking hot body’.

…

I can’t believe how vindictive you can be. To think that this whole time, you have been waiting to hurt me in order to get even. But you didn’t get even, what you did was a complete abomination of a betrayal. So what would happen if I got into a fight would your mom?

Would you let us sort it out?

Pick her side?

Be cold and unsupporting?

Fight one my siblings?

or put together a 6 year plot to burn me and everyone i know alive at a house party?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to say anything, I know the answer to this Rhetorical questoin but I just don’t want to believe it. As much as you’d like to believe, I don’t want to think of you as a monster, because what would that make me? A mrs fritzel, another helpless victim of circumstance and partner abuse, no thanks.

But that was far from the first time you cut me deeply

You will never truly know  the depths of despair I sank to when you first dumped me. for no reason. Infact no one will never know. And i don’t think I will ever really remember. I’ve blocked out alot of it. And it all happened for no reason, because of your own insecurities.

You killed me three times that night

You said didn’t love me

You said you didn’t like me

You said you didn’t respect me.

The one person, the first person I thought to see me truly as I was, the person I felt most comfortable being around, and who i was planning to spend the rest of my  entire life with didn’t even LIKE me and batted me away with absolutely no resmorse or emotion. Three. Fucking. Times.

And what for, all because you thought I couldn’t handle the pressure of being seen as a lesbian in the eyes of your family, the fact that you couldn’t come out to them to say you were gay. You said I wouldn’t be able to handle the pressures and the onslaught from your side of things, as well as keep up with your social circle. But that was just a projection. I told you I went behind your back and outted you to your mom an aunt. And you know what, they still love you and accept me.

Everyone is just waiting around for you, you think you are so clever and I let you continue with this charade but with time, it just made you just seem so scared and pathetic. O you know what kinda damage that does to a person, continually pushing them away from you and calling them weak and not strong? How many years did you force me to wait, six whole years, six years of my life which I could come out of this thinking that I wasted but luckily for you, I don’t look at life that way. Everything does happen for a reason and so god help me, I will find out why I went through this preil with you, it can’t possibly be in vain, not after all I went through,. Just can’t be…

Do you know why I used to scream and shout and attack you at times. it’s because talking to you is like talking to a zombie. First of all, you are so damn arrogant. if  it is not a problem for you, then it is nor a problem. You never wanted to deal with anything that I wanted to try and sort out. Thinking back, I never had any real issues to begin with,  it always came back to your complete and utter disregard for something that escalated it. All problems were either greeted with a ‘it’s been taken on board’ or your classic ‘it doesn’t matter on the grand scale of things’, or the great ‘just plough through’, or the ever reassuring ‘oh well’.

And the worst thing is that you would just completely shut down after awhile and it was soooo frustruating. What’s worse than that is that I would see you thinking and selecting your words carefully around me. You would say that you were thinking of ways to talk and how to put your point across without hurting my feelings but you didn’t realise that you were hurting my feelings by not being completely honest with me. You just kept reinforcing my ‘weak’ stance. I mean everyone is allowed to get angry based on something a person has said about them, it’s in the heat of an argument, it doesn’t mean anything but you can’t use a few examples to make rash blanket generalisations about my own entire way of dealing with things.

Do you remember on our second anniversary when I waited all night for you to finally say you loved me and didn’t, then went on to tell me you were only sharing 30% of yourself with me, and that I would only ever get to see 30% max, do you know how much that hurts when I had integrated you into every single part of my life. You were not just my girlfriend (or partner as you like to clinically dismiss me as), you were effectively my sister and best friend all wrapped up into one. And you pretty much dismissed me as a stranger.

The very worst thing of all is that I know you came from an abusive childhood, even though you never told me, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. But while you trying to supress it all and act fine, you ended up turning into the one person you hate the most. Your father. But instead of lashing out at you and your siblings with a belt, you lash out at me with your words. You still carry the scars of your torment on the outside for all to see (if you so wish it). The torment you give me, leaves no bruises, breaks no bones and the tears you inflict on me don’t corrode my cheeks. They eventually wash away. Instead I just end up dying a lil bit everyday on the inside. A lil bit every single day.

One of the funny things is when you first met me, you said you were attracted to my wild flower side, my sense of freedom and my ability to not be hinged by the world. You didn’t see that I myself was running, running away from stuff, running away from myself. But you initially solved that. You gave me a home and a reason to want to settle, I find solace from within myself through you. You made me happier than I ever thought I could be. And for that, I wanted to spend every waking moment with you, you were my elixir. But I couldn’t express this to you an instead you thought I had changed an it was all and act to ‘trap you’. Nice.

Christ, I suddenly know what you mean about this writing thing, I’ve barely touched the sides of all the things I wanted to say.

Please don’t get it twisted though. Regardless of anything I’ve said, I’m not actually angry at you. I’ve just come to one of the most important revelations of our entire relationship and probably my life.

You know he best thing about this all is that I’m not going to be a chicken and send you a letter with all of this in. That’s right, you will never actually get to read or know any of this as this is the penultimate draft I am writing. I am getting it all out there for my own benefit. I’ve worked out the letter you sent me wasn’t a ‘hatchet burrying’ attempt, rather a cry for help. You need redemption. So the letter I’ll send you will be a short, civil response in order to arrange to give it to you said redemption. In person.

This is not only for you, but for me. I can’t hate you forever.

I’ve finally realised that I don’t need you but more importantly, even though I love you (and probably will in some format forever), I don’t want you. and ultimately that is because I don’t want someone who simply doesn’t like me for being me.

Your misery loves company, no it loves MY company but I no longer desire to house it.

I’m not perfect but I am loved and given time,  I can learn to like and love myself and see myself through my own eyes as a good honest person, instead of through yours, or anyone elses.

 I’m learning and its difficult, I know it will take sometime, especially after all of this but at least now, funnily enough, thanks to you, I know where I need to head.

I just hope you learn where to head. For the first time in forever, I’ve only now realised that instead of moving forward, you cower away from things. You’ll always been that scared lil five year old girl afraid to come to terms with things, afraid to crawl out from under her bed, no matter how well you think you are hiding it.

 But then again, I don’t know you right?

It’s funny throughout our entire relationship, I always looked up to you as the strong one. Heh, who would have guessed it was actually me all along.

It’s finally time to buy a new keyholder

Life certainly is funny shit head, it certainly is…

C