Bereavement

In Hannah Bett’s column “Things you only know if you’re single” in the Times Magazine yesterday she wrote:

… that one never stops believing in fairytales.

When you meet the One, you will be at your chubbiest. Your nails will be raged. There will be something on your sweater. Your hair will be doing that weird, flat thing that it does. You won’t be wearing your favourite clothes. You are likely to be spitting as you talk. Alcohol will probably be involved. There will be chewing gum stuck to your shoe.

It took less than a minute of speaking to Dale when we first met to realise that I was about to fall head over heels for him. We didn’t spend an incredible amount of time together that evening, but the second time we met was the next day, and as I read Hannah’s article I immediately thought of the encounter. It was a Sunday evening and I had been sitting in college trying to finish an essay that was due that day, but which I knew I probably wouldn’t finish before three in the morning. Like the responsible and upstanding student that I am, I had stopped by the college bar to imbibe some wine (read: about three glasses … small glasses …) around eight o’clock before getting to work. I then proceeded to set up camp in a small, quiet room often reserved for functions in college, opened my laptop, began reading one of the primary sources, and fell asleep. Until 11:45 in the evening. I pressed a button on the laptop and a nearly empty document filled the screen. Five-hundred and thirty-seven words. I needed twenty-five hundred words for the essay.

‘Fuck.’ I exhaled. I picked up the book which had slid from my lap, and unfolded the resulting flap in the page it had landed on. I got up and went to the JCR to get anything with caffeine in it before the bar closed. I trudged my way through the corridor, my pontytail askew, dragging my feet which were in an old pair of Uggs which complimented my outfit of a sweater dress, tights, and an oversized hoodie. I rubbed my eyes, and looked at my fingers which then had the residue of any makeup which hadn’t come off throughout the day. I wiped under my eyes in case I had just smudged them with mascara and walked into the bar, squinting after accidentally poking myself in the eye. I opened both eyes to see the last five people I wanted to run into in such a state.

Their conversation ceased as I entered the room and as I blinked away the rest of the makeup which had fallen in my eye I focused to see Dale, sitting directly across from me with a goofy grin on his face, Rugby/Rebound Guy directly to his left (my post-Grey fling), Al directly to his right (my post-Rebound Guy fling), and two other mutual male friends. 

RG laughed. ‘Where did you just come from?’

I walked up to their circle and one of them pulled up a bar stool for me to sit on. I climbed onto it, trying to keep my balance as I did so. ‘I just woke up.’ And then I told them where I woke up.

They laughed. ‘What were you doing there?’ Dale asked. He hadn’t shifted his gaze from me since I had walked in and he still had the same goofy smile on his face.

‘Trying to write an essay. Then I just passed out.’

They laughed some more. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Dale asked, eagerly.

‘Um, a diet Coke would be good.’

RG frowned. ‘No beer?’

‘No way. This essay has to be in about six hours ago.’

‘Perfect time for a kip.’ Al chimed in.

I sat and talked with all of them for far longer than I should have, mostly to talk to Dale though. We all walked out of the bar together and I went back to my study place of doom as they all went to bed. I tried to read some more and then remembered something funny that Dale had said. I then felt obliged to text him and tell him what I was thinking about. He wrote back immediately.

Essay going well then! I don’t know why but I’m wide awake. If you’re not too committed to that assignment I could always come back and keep you company – though I’d probably be quite the distraction x

At that point I still wasn’t sure how I was going to go about things with Dale, so partially because I didn’t want to lead him on, but mostly because I really had to commit to that essay, I replied with:

Ha, as great as having company sounds, I’m pretty sure we would just talk about random things as opposed to [what my essay was on]. But maybe tomorrow? x

Sounds good, and if you get really bored you could just look at pictures of Alex. See you tomorrow x

I laughed. I had imposed an impromptu slideshow of every picture I had of Alex on my phone onto the boys in the bar. Dale was the only one who showed any interest, feigned or otherwise.

We continued to text each other nonsense for another hour until I put the phone away and continued working, not until three in the morning as planned, but until seven thanks to the highly distracting, but very necessary for my sanity, distractions from Dale. I texted him the next morning and we made plans for that evening, which was subsequently our first date.

Hannah Betts continued her column with:

There will be that curious sensation that is at once ease and exhilaration – a leg buckling plus a general breathing out. They may not look as you imagined, but a voice in your head will say, “Oh, it’s you. What took you so long? That stuff with all the others was rather exhausting.”

It was refreshing to meet Dale. It was as if I had found my best friend. Our first hours together were mainly filled with discovering that we were perhaps personality doppelgangers of each other. The kind of realisations that make you say, ‘What? You like that too? I’ve never met anyone who likes that band/movie/book/restaurant/etc …’ And it wasn’t just the superficial things, we had eerily identical childhoods and experiences as well. There was an unexplained comfort and intimacy between us from the start.

Betts continued:

And the first time you wake and they’re not there, your hand will already be reaching for them. You won’t have to think about them for them to be in your head – they’ll be with you like a Ready brek glow. And you will trust them despite your life experience to the contrary. You will know you are making yourself vulnerable, but somehow this will feel like a strength. They’ll see past the flaws and instead see you.

The first week I was with Dale happened very much as Hannah describes it. I was scared of all those things, of trusting anyone again, of liking someone too much, but as she said, you wake up and they’re with you. Not physically, I did literally wake up alone, trying to play the long waiting game with Dale when it came to a physical relationship, but I woke up and everything I had to do seemed like an obstacle in they way of my plans with him in the evening. We would walk through the city centre, go to dinner, go to his to watch telly and then he’d walk me back to my room from his, which took all of two minutes usually, but back then it took ten for us as we tried to squeeze every moment we could out of the walk together.

The first month I was with Dale it seemed as if he only saw me. If I weren’t talking to him, I’d catch him watching me, but mostly we’d sit together in a crowded room, oblivious to anything but each other.

Betts:

And it will be shocking how rapidly this individual becomes loved. You will spend weeks holding back from uttering it for propriety’s sake. Where once there was only cynicism, there will be a facial softness that people remark upon. It will be the sort of thing that is impossible to disguise.

My bliss, much like my subsequent misery, was impossible to disguise. Our mutual happiness and infatuation with each other was impossible to disguise, just as the strain our degrees were having on our relationship eventually was. Running through town together in the morning to get to the department, stopping to get a coffee to take away before briefly kissing each other goodbye at nine in the morning, reconvening in the college bar at eleven in the evening to have a quick drink before heading back to one of our rooms together. This cycle lasted quite briefly before I began to notice the physical toll it was taking on myself. I have a notebook full of lecture notes, which fade into a line scrawled across the page where I had clearly fallen asleep momentarily. The one scrawled line turned into one line of notes and then an empty page, sometimes with a dribble mark, when I had slept through the majority of a lecture. Then it all just began falling to pieces. We decided to sleep at each other’s less to avoid narcolepsy throughout the week, but I look back on it now and it’s like watching a slow-motion, self-destructing disaster that keeps having after shocks.

Hannah Betts concludes her column with:

And the same thing applies to the next One, obviously.

I don’t want a next One. I want that One. He may not be the One, but all that malarkey about “And it will be shocking how rapidly this individual becomes loved. You will spend weeks holding back from uttering it for propriety’s sake …” is true, only I’m now holding back everything for both of our sakes. Neither of us are perfect, and if anything we have handled this breakup in quite identical fashion, aka completely avoiding any kind of confrontation whatsoever. We unfortunately have many flaws in common as well. We’re stubborn as goats (are goats stubborn? I don’t know where I got that from, but it came to mind), we’re spoiled and usually get our own way, and we are extremely driven people. That last one isn’t so much a flaw, except when it’s to the detriment of others, and I have had my share of situations where I have chosen paths that essentially isolated myself from family and friends, and sometimes boyfriends, but which ultimately were to my benefit. It’s rare that I’m on the ‘left behind’ side of the fence, but I also know how hard it is to be the leaver.

I may harp on about how hard this is and how frustratingly miserable I am, but it’s mostly because the only person I can’t say it to is Dale. In truth, I could very easily get up right now and go knock on his door and tell him all of this, but I won’t. Time hasn’t healed anything. At this point after my breakup with Grey, I had slept with two people and was onto the drunken abusive rows with him stage. Initially though, I tried to make things as easy as possible for Grey and tried to remain friends, as he wanted to. In a way I’m doing the same thing for Dale, which is making it as easy as possible by just not talking to him and giving him the much needed time for his degree, while simultaneously investing as much time and energy into my own. The last thing I want is drunken rows with Dale, an entirely unlikely concept at the moment as I’ve given up drinking (except on holidays that is – I fully plan to have a champagne brunch on both Easter and for the Royal Wedding, less in celebration of the wedding and more in celebration taking a day off).

In the Magazine there was also an article about Linda McCartney’s private collection of family photographs that she had taken, which Sir Paul had released to be published for the first time. The article began:

In popular psychology there are perceived to be five stages of bereavement, “acceptance” being the last. But talking now to Sir Paul McCartney about his wife, Linda, 12 years since her death from breast cancer, you wonder if he has discovered an uncharted sixth phase: joy.

The article was quite heartbreaking at times, as Paul reminisces “unstoppably” about each photograph. For anyone who regularly reads this blog, I think it is quite clear that I can pretty much go on “unstoppably” about most things. I’ve always been this way though. My emails to friends and family are usually in word count contention with most of my essays. There’s a kind of sadness to the kind of reminiscing in the article though, knowing that this man has lost his soul mate. The dichotomy between his fondness of the memories and his grief over her loss is quite apparent in his descriptions of each photograph.

After reading the article I thought about my own bereavement. When a relationship ends it does feel as if you’ve lost someone forever. I feel as if I’ve lost everything, and as someone who was described by Grey as ‘the happiest person I’ve ever met’, I’m struggling with a kind of depression that has until now been completely alien to me. The thing is, the person I love isn’t dead, I haven’t lost him forever, and going through my text messages to find the quotes for earlier in the article (it was quite easy, as it was the first time we had texted each other), I looked over each one from that evening with the kind of fondness and grief which emulated from Paul McCartney’s interview. I can remember sitting curled up in a big leather chair, notes strewn everywhere, my laptop heating my legs as I sat with my hood up, laughing at each of Dale’s texts. I would get up to use to loo or to go for a walk, only to find myself returning quickly to see if he had texted me, which he always had. My heart pounded with excitement just as hard as it pounded with anxiety only months later. To be bereaved is, according to my handy Mac dictionary widget, ‘to be deprived of a loved one through a profound absence.’ I would say going from talking to someone and seeing them every day to complete radio silence could count as a ‘profound absence’.

I was reminded about the night that Dale first said we should separate and the man who tried to comfort me by telling me that his dog had just died. Though at the time I was completely consumed with my own drama, and slightly offended that this man appeared to be attempting to pick me up by thrusting pictures of his now dead dog in my face, I couldn’t help but retain a bit of philosophy he kept repeating. ‘My dog is dead, but the person you love isn’t dead.’ Not very profound, and it was quite frankly just the truth being blatantly stated, but in light of my bereavement, which thankfully isn’t due to death, but is a profound absence nonetheless, I feel more of a sense of longing than of loss.

As the last term of the year and exams draw near I have the unique ability to be completely selfish and be a recluse to everyone bar tutors, directors of studies, professors, and my study group. I’ve been distracted with boyfriends and lovers for so long that I’ve forgotten how to be the leaver until now. I would be lying if I said that I don’t hold onto a glimmer of hope in the back of my mind that this profound absence will eventually lead to Dale’s return at the end of the term. If it does, brilliant, and if it doesn’t, then I’ll consider those last stages of bereavement.