this is on account of my loving him
a silly little secret diary, an extended love letter.
by a girl who writes on reality (pretentiously), and is quite obsessed with honesty.
ps: if you'd like to write me, here are my digits: onlovinghim@gmail.com
You once compared sex to religion. Not in terms of forbidden fruit or of sexuality being synonymous with sin, but in terms of experience, ritual, worship. I remember feeling cynical and teasing you about it - calling you a Lothario, I remarked that being with you would be like sleeping with Russell Brand. We joked about the language of sex: standardised erotic vocabularies and both pornography and Hollywood being equally at home invoking a few “Oh my God” murmurs and screams during R-rated scenes. The conversation morphed into something else entirely and didn’t come up again until month or so later when after making love for the second time and in the middle of the night, I asked you about it. Lying with our legs tangled together and you absentmindedly stroking the fleshy curve of my stomach you made a careful attempt to outline your reasoning. I smiled, told you that it made sense in blurry, post-coital and vague comprehension.
A few weeks ago I read a book on tantra, and despite your scoffing at the themes (some dodgy Western guru named Carl finding the pretty girls “centres” being dangerously close to their pubic bones and a view that sleeping with him would be the path to enlightenment, or dissatisfied suburban housewives dressed up in Ann Summers underwear and thumbing through a step-by-step book of positions inspired by the ramblings of Sting) it made me realise that my experiences with you had a lot more in common with this ideology than I had let myself think. The slow and drawn-out process of our lovemaking, the connection, the breathing, the focus and climaxes and rituals we shared. It was all mirrored in this book and I realised that your scepticism had nothing to do with your own belief systems and everything to do with the stereotypes surrounding them. And I thought, you were right. While sex and religion might be fundamentally different, it’s the hazy lines in the middle which are impossible to separate: spirituality and sensuality, desire, devotion, and the idolisation and worship of our lovers.
At 1am I pace up and down my white-walled bedroom wearing nothing but flesh coloured underwear and a tired and caffeine induced expression. I chucked the necklace across the room about an hour before and the thin gold chain has become too tangled for me to fix. I can’t explain how upset I felt at this, and the more significant the feelings, the more upset, irrational and outraged at myself I become.
I spent the day today tearfully moving from one corner of the city to the other - I couldn’t stand another day of sitting in my white-cube bedroom alternating between working and (inwardly) whining and thought a change of scenery would do me good. It didn’t. I had a lot of scenery changes, one after the other, and none of them made any difference to my mood, none of them really made any difference at all. It felt like moving from one place to the next without really being anywhere, and without having any interest in it either. All I wanted to do was go back to bed, and after lying stretched out on a park bench in the bitter cold for an amount of time somewhere in between cold hands and frostbite, that’s exactly what I ended up going home to do.
It wasn’t a good day. Worse, it was the kind of day where nothing could go right and everything possible could be turned into a wrong. There were one or two moments of silliness - I made myself laugh a few times by deep-breathing loudly in order to control my reflex to sob, which seemed so dramatic that crying might have even be preferable, and during rush hour I became so absorbed in the traffic I forgot to feel useless and distraught.
Since I’ve been home I’ve consumed. Coffee, music, and a book.
Your guilt-trip necklace is sitting on my dresser. I tried it on last night, after a few nights of falling asleep with it wrapped around my fingers. I don’t have reasoning for either of those things, but I thought avoiding it and leaving it boxed would be ignoring the issue, ignoring you. My indifference towards the gift has become absorption, fascination. It’s ridiculous.
I worry you knew what you were doing when you sent it. It would be much easier to presume that you didn’t, that you were just desperate and in love, but I can’t help wondering if you hoped it would change things. Even for a second. Like if you wrote me saying you’d given in, it would have the reverse effect on me.
It hasn’t, and it has.
I realised today that the only way I will ever speak to you again is if I start it, if I make the first move. You won’t any more, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to.
My biggest and most current worry: I’m scared that the necklace and your little note is the last thing, two objects to define the very end.
Almost 4am and still without sleep, I’m much too aware tonight of how self-indulgent this sounds.
I wish it could get easier. I keep waiting for it to happen with bated breath, hot little hands and a funny anxious expression.
If anything, it just gets harder. I go through this process over and over, get further and further down this awful line of losing you, and no matter how far I manage to go, nothing changes.
I miss you and I love you and I want to be with you.
Still.
Side note: I am trying. I got rid of the photographs, the notes, even the song you wrote for me today. I put them somewhere I won’t find, except I know that in a couple of weeks that I will. I am even a member of some ridiculous dating website, and finding that the only men I am interested in are the ones like you: your age or your interests or your religion, even your name. All of those qualities if I can get them, and anything to keep me in some way connected to you. And in some crazy way, I suppose it’s progress, even if at the moment it feels like I am putting on a show.
Today marks a year since I met you.
I know you always used to tell me it was coming up. The big one, this. Twelve months, a year, three hundred and sixty five days of our lives. No matter how you put it, it bears the same significance. For me, at least. I still remember the day we met, all tongue tied and awkward. I remember thinking how lovely you were as I stood by the cookery books and we watched each other from the corners of the store.
And I was such a mess back then, nineteen and heart broken for the first time in my life, trying to work out what I was supposed to do with myself, how on earth people recovered from loving someone.
Turns out it was you that I needed.
I’ll never quite understand why you kept pursuing a relationship when all I could do was cry and avoid your advances for the first few months. Not entirely true - I had good days and we enjoyed them while they lasted, but It took us up until Christmas for your persevering to pan out.
Remember when you kissed me? Christmas Eve in the dark, with us both standing in an empty car park. There are so many things I look back on with an almost passive, objective viewpoint. Like it never quite happened, like it was just too perfect and all I have left are the facts.
Remember when we sat in a country pub all afternoon, our faces golden and lit by a fire and you stroking the arch of my foot and the curve behind my knee? And afterwards, when we kissed in the sand - damp skin and damp bodies and the salty air. I’d left my shoes in the car and you carried me back through the woodland.
Remember when we ate strawberries and picnicked naked in the back of your car, with all those blankets and stacked paper plates? How childish we were? Or the time you bought me flowers to the tax-office car park, and we went to the library and looked up ridiculous titles, sat wrapped up in each other on a bench in the park.
There are more significant moments too, but thinking of those makes me feel small. When we talked about marriage in bed, when you cried and we made love through it, when we spoke about fears, about sex, about losing each other. When you wrote me - lists of my quirks and imperfections, passionate love letters and e-mailed apologies. When the first song you recorded was all about me.
Do you remember that time we went for cream tea and lay in the grass by that castle, and you told me about changing your plans? About staying in the country for me, and how I told you to leave? How you kissed me all over, and you said, never.
Never.
And you lied.
I hate how vulnerable I can be. You are always so open, comfortable and unapologetic with who you are and where you stand. It’s infectious, and I always have been such with you. Unguarded, I can express anger, upset, disappointment. Except I couldn’t, not today. Whatever happened to leaving if you couldn’t have all of me? I am certainly not making it easy for you, I know. But I don’t think you’ve ever intended to go anywhere. The truth is I’m terrified. I am needy, hysterical and completely alone and you can’t fix it. I am so, so sorry for asking. But thank you for trying. For singing, for shushing, for letting me cry.
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