It’s Spring finally and I couldn’t care less.
“You’re saying we lack momentum? Like when you see the traffic moving ahead? It’s loosening up there, but you’re in a cab, standing still, and you’re thinking, why aren’t we moving?”
Aashish nods, the downward U of his mouth deepening. He’s carrying only a briefcase. “Where’s your baggage?” It will be years before I receive an answer. If I set him in the corner for a bit, will he stay? Will he begin to look like himself if I water him and give him tea?
“I don’t love you enough,” he says. “I have to think about the big picture.”
“The big picture in which you don’t love me enough?”
A long pause. Ridiculous tears.
“I just don’t know if—"
“--I’m have to go out for a moment.” sniffing
“In your dressing gown?” a stifled sob
Tepid sunlight, brave cold crocuses, the first months of English Spring. My thoughts beat my footsteps I move to a bedsit in Muswell Hill. A long train ride away leaves on the track. Visits sparser than we’d like. Affection unaltered, despite that one odd row. I expected to see Aashish in Canterbury tomorrow. Now he’s in London with nothing but a briefcase and I’m running up and down the High Street.
“Enough? Enough for what?” round and round a conversation chases it’s tail
Aashish is the first man I made love to while laughing. If you ask him where he’s from he says, “Yes, I’m from Canterbury, “ while averting his eyes.
The check marks in my heart’s ledger tally between sorrow and ego. I know he loves me, ergo I get over him too quickly. Had the Jolly Green Giant not hoved into view, we’d have been married and divorced ere now.
Before I meet the Jolly Green Giant (JGG), I read a poem of Byron’s. Premonition in hindsight, it reminds me of JGG. Nothing less than a glamour can explain my susceptibility to a frozen food icon.
Glamour
glăm′ər
noun
A charm affecting the eye
Witchcraft; magic; a spell.
A kind of haze in the air, causing things to appear different from what they really are.
It is his stance: wide long-legged, arms broadly crossed, full lips. And perhaps he wears green a lot?
The JGG is the choreographer and I the centerpiece. We liase at midnight after a far-flung performance. I am coughing up a lung. We spend ourselves like an endless resource. It’s weeks before I’m well. Instead of submitting to sleep of the just, I am submitting against a banister in the fencing master's house where I rent a room. Do I think of Aashish? I have already defined the word glamour, yes?
When the JGG meets my mother he collapses onto my bed, uncharacteristically drunk.
It is then she has a sinking feeling, my mother
His choreographic eye is brilliant. Upon leaving a used condom on the floor of his sister’s guest room after we have sex there, he laughs to be called out. Speaking ill of our director in the most personal terms, he claims she wants for nothing promised and is jealous without cause. He compares my breast size unfavorably to that of his ex-girlfriend.
Somewhere in the midst of this, Aashish takes a train far north to see me perform. He books himself into the same B&B as me. I sit on a bed underneath the extravagantly crenellated ceiling, what was once a drawing room.
“Do you think we made a mistake, breaking up?”
I let pass his straining use of the word ‘we’, saying “Oh no, that was the right thing to do. Definitely.”
what’s good enough for the Queen of the fairies is good enough for me
When the JGG breaks it off, my friend Candice sleeps in my bed with me and keeps her hand on my back all night. The next day I take a shower in the newly tiled bathroom. The shower is the best place to let everything go. In an altered state I bash my hand on a towel rail with unprecedented force, a physical pain so specific I reference it on and off throughout my life. It is months before I eat enough. I become very thin.
In our small, soon to be trendy corner of London it transpires that JGG’s ex-girlfriend, current girlfriend and myself are all clients of the same talented Greek Cypriot hairdresser. What would I not tell Liv? What would they not tell Liv? What would she not repeat to me, prefaced by, “I’m tellin’ you, darlin…’”.
There were two men with secrets and I chose the wrong one.
This is a lovely story! It’s very personal and written in such a manner that every sentence just pushes you to want to read the next!
Currently, I'm reading The Girl on the Train by the English writer, Paula Hawkins and she expresses many of the same thoughts about her ex's that you express. A sort of Jungian moment, and a relief from reading a biography of Noel Coward, which has its Freudian moments, or rather, it's Freudian undertow. It's almost a shame that next week is the last installment, but (the ubiquitious"but) I'm sure that you have stories to come. (no pun intended)