What’s the saying, there’s no fool like an old fool? It’s true.
Nearly three months ago, I sat at this keyboard with tears
streaming down my face trying to write something so vague that Joe Public
wouldn’t understand it, yet so obviously cathartic that I’d feel purged
afterwards. It didn’t work. It hasn’t worked. I’m still here, and still crying.
In the interim, I’ve stumbled through every day, struggled to keep my chin off
the floor and wondered what to do next. Well, you know what I did. I handled it
badly; at times spiteful, at times sarcastic, at times lost and confused and
weak and pathetic. Perhaps I’ve never shown you the best of me because there is
no ‘best’, no good, nothing at all; or maybe I’ve never learned how to show it?
Even now, I know that I’m a better person than I was before we met, and that’s
because of you. Maybe that’s why I’m disappointed; I wanted to keep getting
better. Maybe it’s because there’s no one to be a better person for.
I had so many stories to tell you, not of heroic deeds or
success or thrilling adventures, just simple things, but I know that at least
one would have blown your socks off. I regret that I made it impossible for me
to be able to tell you. I wanted us to have some adventures, some shared
experiences; things that, years from now, in a coffee shop or when telling your
children how we met, we could have started off with ‘remember when we…?’. I
wanted to share part of my life with you, because we shared some interests, and
some viewpoints, and because I couldn’t think of anyone better. The first time
I saw you, I knew there was something, and it took me all those years to work
out what it was: I wanted you in my life. I still do.
The last time I saw you, I asked you a question, admittedly
in a rather cack-handed fashion. It had taken me two months to ask and,
although I knew I didn’t have the right to ask, or to hear the answer, it was
something that I felt that I needed to know. I did try to give you ‘headspace’,
and even a month after finally asking you the same question in plain English,
I’ve never pressurised you for an answer. I’ve never even raised the subject
again. I think I know what the answer is, and it doesn’t matter. It’s that you
still haven’t replied, almost four weeks later, and I’m left wondering if you
have any respect for me. I think I asked the wrong question.
On our next meeting after that evening in August, I felt a
distance between us that I’d not noticed before, and that made me nervous. A
week later, it was more obvious. I blame myself for that, and I’m sorry. Maybe
I was looking for fault where there was none, so that if you went away, it wouldn't affect me as much. The last time I saw you it was
better, up until the point that you said something that took the legs from
under me, and since then I’ve never been sure if it was a mistimed tackle or
there was intent. That was the question I should have asked, but maybe the
answer to that one, had it come, would have been more unpalatable, I don’t
know. All I know is that I am here, and you are there, and the gulf appears to
be too big to cross, not least because I blew that billion kilowatt dam to kingdom come last
night. I did that because I’ve become too afraid to see you again, scared that
I can’t make things right.
For the foreseeable future, there’ll be the same old
routine: football matches and concerts, TV and radio, books I’ve got to read.
There’ll be work, paid and unpaid. Night will follow day, just as it’s always
done, but there’ll be no you, no light in my life. You made the sun shine. You
made the birds sing. You made the bells ring for me. Of course, all these
things happened every day, for everyone else, but I never noticed, or cared, or
was never privy to them. When you’re around, I’m dazzled, and I can’t hear
myself think for all these bloody birds and bells, but I don’t want it any
other way. I’ve no idea if that’s love, and I don’t care. I'm too selfish to love anyone. I just don’t like that it’s now in the past tense and I don’t like the
idea of a future, my future, without you in it somewhere. What am I going to do
now?
