Things Fall Apart

Reflections on heartache

Why cast the world away. For someone hooked up to Thou,

the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

— Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

Those some nice boots, motherfucker

— Doja Cat

It was the first real heatwave of the summer and I was sobbing on the station platform. I had been dragging around an enormous bag which was full of books from having gone to some readings over the weekend. Also in there were two rose heads that a beautiful girl I had met the night before had picked for me, a lipliner snapped in two, a perfume with glitter inside the liquid. Two of my divisively long and slutty fake nails had broken off, and my tears were welling up relentlessly behind my sunglasses. I was begging, actually begging him, to pick up the phone. We had gotten our wires crossed a few evenings before about our plans for the weekend. I felt that he lacked enthusiasm and was being unhelpful. He had a problem with this. He did what he always did when I expressed an upset emotion: he told me I shouldn’t pick a fight, all I had to do was wait until a perfect moment to discuss it, which I had failed once again to do, and so then the punishment via silent treatment began. He would never tell me when he was likely to speak to me again, and because I loved him, because I worried constantly about him and his volatile ways, because he had threatened me that he might kill himself multiple times, this would always plunge me into a terrible panic. Like being thrown from a horse, having all the air punched out of me. Sitting there by myself, I was desperate not to leave London without seeing him- I had been extremely unwell only the week previously with two hospital visits and I had been longing to see him. The idea of returning to Cambridge like this, having not seen him at all, was awful to me. I believed I could try to persuade him to yield. I prostrated myself, apologising hyperbolically. Go home Megan, he said. I wanted to buy myself some more time and so I pulled myself together and went to visit a friend. When I eventually got on the train later that evening, I could not remember what I had actually done. A few days later, I realised that if I allowed it, this would go on and on and on ad infinitum. I would stay with this man who behaved like he hated me. He had actually broken up with me several times before, and then walked it back, but we remained in this uneasy, nebulous territory, where he had been living with me (for free) without being my boyfriend, perhaps because he liked it that way. So I wrote him a very long message to tell him that despite how much I had always loved him, it had to end.
During the recent illness, he had come to look after me. We spent a very idyllic week together, and I had managed to capture the kind, tender side of him for almost seven, entire, consecutive days. When he had to go back to London, I went with him to the station to say goodbye. I was feeling very in love with him again and having my Visions. I waited on the other side of the barrier and waved goodbye to him, standing in place until he disappeared. That was the last time I would see him. Without knowing it, I was waving goodbye to him for good. He wandered along the platform, and out of my life.

***

A week or two later I had a lot of important things to do so I spent half an hour closely studying the messages between us from when we were first going out. It made me immeasurably sad to see both what I had felt was magic and simultaneously my own naivety in stark black and white; the inchoate, ghostly appearances flickering in and out of view of Things which would, slowly, and inch by inch, crest so toweringly high it would block out my entire life and make it black.
I say: You Are So Funny, with complete sincerity and no trace of irony. I will most likely never be able to do this again; be so forthcoming, react in such an uncomplicated way from the very beginning. She is gone. Some people are able to remain this kind of person their whole lives, with that unsullied, bright belief, a little breathless and wide-eyed. This is simply a person they can be, something they can keep, by virtue of having chosen wisely, of having met someone Nice while they were still young.
He says: I’m always drinking half the bottle in a situation like this.
And then a moment later: We had salad and I drank 2+ bottles of wine.
This was a subtle shot across the bows. I see my past self ignoring it. I try calling after her through the years. Her head turns, momentarily, but I don’t reach her. She was someone else, then, and I am someone else now. Your maths is so bad, girl. It’s not your fault, poor baby. But two plus bottles of wine in this scenario is actually not that fab, and he told you twice!
He had mentioned alcoholism in the past tense a couple of times. And it was ignored by silly me.

I had never wanted to become jaded in this way, where I had ceased believing in people.

I remembered the connection I felt with him, how immediate it was. It was summer, hot blue nights blowing in, evenings elongating. He asked me out, I said yes. We had a glass of wine somewhere, then went on a walk in search of cigarettes, trading stories of our Worst Christmases, a competition which he won, and then went on somewhere else for another. He was immeasurably charming. We got a small table, I pressed my wrist against his. We talked voraciously. I hadn’t met someone new and exciting in a long, long time. We were among the last people in there at closing. It was pouring with rain and I was wearing red satin slippers with ribbons which tied onto my ankles. I wanted to avoid getting wet so we smoked together under the eaves of the pub, talking and laughing. I thought he was just wonderful, and I couldn’t believe it. He was so clever, so charming, so calm. There was that inarticulable thing between us. He had seen me at a party a year before, but for me this was my first time meeting him, and I was thrilled. When it was time to part ways, he walked me to the gate of King’s College. I had only been in Cambridge for a year and was still in a romance with it. The rain was silvering everything but the night was still warm. He looked at me through his eyelashes and said, ‘May I kiss you?’. I had known already that I would immediately say yes. It felt incredibly romantic. There was no awkwardness, no stumbling, it was perfect and he moaned into my mouth with one hand on my waist and the other in my hair. We stayed locked in this embrace, swaying slightly in the rain, my hair slowly soaking wet until it was black as eels. I had never kissed someone on the first date before. I am very picky. But he had charmed me completely, successfully; I was enraptured. I loved his long coat and his stories about being in Paris and his plans to write about La Chimera and his elegant hands and his way. We drew apart, breathlessly, on my part out of slight sheepishness that someone might see us, and I was starting to feel that it was slightly scandalous. We parted ways, waving goodbye. I had a ridiculous smile on my face. I climbed in through the small door of King’s, scanned through the gate, and ran through the college, over the bridge, all the way home, laughing, running through the rain.
Looking back, I loved him from that moment. I tried to tell myself that I could be falling in love with him gradually, that I should wait to cast my judgement, but it was already done.

I was quite dangerously in thrall to him because I was, without realising, inventing him as I went. He seemed like everything I had ever wanted: intelligent, kind, well-dressed, with this wry humour I could not resist. I believed him when he said he was a writer. I found this hopelessly compelling. I thought: Finally. And I actually believed he was smarter than me. Despite never doing anything, he believed this too. I think I actually referred to us once, in a fit of juvenile thrill, as having the sort of Cambridge time as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Please dear God forgive me. Although, he was rather like if Ted Hughes never wrote anything but was still a cunt to Sylvia. In the beginning, he would tell me that he couldn’t see me because he needed to write, cancelling a date or two. He would describe in great detail the itinerary of his day- the hours required to write. Having quite a gung-ho approach to writing myself ( I still do- as I write this I am lying and vaping in bed), I was deeply impressed by this level of discipline, considering it lacking in myself. However, I did not discover until later that he did not write anything. At all. Two years later, I had since completed my master’s degree, written a new play, and several essays, reviews, and interviews. He had produced nothing except my misery. I had stepped through some horrifying portal into a land where my tears were costly, inconvenient, hysterical, my own fault; where my sense of self was shredded to ribbons which snapped uselessly in the wind. The tragedy of it was that it had once looked to me like a marriage, had once looked like a home. But it was just a world collapsing. There would be no end to it: it would keep on collapsing forever, glaciers falling into the sea. There could be no centre which held, because inside him is a deep, dark void. He is just a drain I was circling, like gulls above a rough sea, their calls dying on the cliffs. I became like his own personal anchoress, isolated from the world, walled inside.
Anchoresses used to attend their own symbolic funeral before withdrawing completely from life. I see myself walking into this walled-up cell of his world, becoming the venting point of all his agonies, and I try to stop her but I can’t.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Split Personality, 1954

We began living together quite soon after becoming a couple. To me it felt deeply serious and I was completely devoted to him. With him, I had seen my life suddenly illuminated in the future tense. I saw myself, for the first time, as a bride. You do not simply put it all away, unchanged. It is not like returning to the costume cupboard the rags of a world you once loved. People seem to get over things so easily. I will go back to myself somehow, but there is no me to go back to, because he eroded her.
I kept having these visions of everything I had spent so long imagining rewinding, in reverse- the children, the home, the wedding. It glowed in my mind like a zoetrope. The children with his eyes disappear. It would slow down and I would be taking the wedding dress off, the image flickering, then the slip beneath, folding it all neatly into a box lined with tissue paper, and feel with every breath the pleating of the years.

***

It was odd to be without him. I would sometimes feel a sense of displacement, that something was subtly wrong- and I would realise it is because he was not there. It is a similar sensation to expecting another stair but instead stepping through the air. The sudden and unexpected presence of lack. I would look up from scrolling on my phone in bed and where he usually was, there was nothing. His absence disconcerted me, but I also hadn’t cried until I could hardly speak since he had gone, or felt that my life was worthless.
I wondered where he would put all the things I gave him. I used to write I love you, your Megan on tiny slips of paper and fold them into his pockets for him to find. I knew that he had put several of these inside his wallet. Has he burned them, or might he keep them? Will some other girl walk beside him, not knowing that I am still there? Heathcliff would have been set free. But Emily knew how to catch a devil. She put into him in place of a soul the constant cold departure of Catherine from his nervous system every time he drew a breath or moved thought. She broke all his moments in half, with the kitchen door standing open.¹ I had made a photo album of us for our first year anniversary- an anniversary for which he got me nothing, not even a card. I was devastated by this but I hid it, just as I hid everything else. It had been his birthday not long before. In a gesture I hoped to encourage inspiration and courage in him, I bought him an expensive notebook and two hardback artist books: one of Lucien Freud’s Copper Paintings and another of Francis Bacon’s late works. I had wanted to read those. Months after giving them to him, I peeked inside the notebook, and beside my inscription, it was blank, blank, blank. Would he keep these things? I couldn’t bear to part with the few printed photographs of us I had neatly folded up into a book, and so I felt it was a small mercy that he was in possession of the album. I had taken many photographs of him. He hadn’t taken any of me. Once when I was feeling vulnerable, I looked at them on my phone. There was a video of us getting ready to meet some friends for drinks, and in it he kisses me. Watching this, an electric shock zipped up my forearms. I loved his way of being affectionate, the way he would stroke my hair and kiss my face. I should not have looked at it, but it was the middle of the long night.

The worst part of all of this is that so hooked was I on the beautiful man I found that summer, with his inner quietness, what I thought were kind eyes and the way he would look through his eyelashes at me, I still loved him. I was unmoored from home without him. I was both falcon and falconer, calling out and unhearing, questing on currents of pathless air, uselessly. It was the strangest thing. I knew he was filled with shame. I more than anyone in the world know the pain he is in all the time. But he redirected it towards me; endlessly critical, cruel without limit, always on a hair trigger. I was just a wound he deepened. He was very different when I met him. To me, he seemed cool as a cucumber, and like he loved women, and that was part of his appeal. When I discovered his fragility, it was already too late. I was devoted to him. I felt it was my responsibility to console him in this life.
It was all so horribly sad. Happy people don’t do the things he did. Happy people don’t disappear. And here I am with the dawn breaking writing about him, and he has disappeared completely. He broke up with me several times, then walked it back, then did it again, punishingly. I finally felt a moment of sharp clarity on that train station platform. I saw the crown of my head bent over my phone, dark hair hanging like curtains, and felt deep pity for my panic and desperation. This was his modus operandi, and this was the state I had been left in, almost constantly, for two years. But being with him was amnesia-inducing, confusing. I would somehow forget about the times he said You are disgusting, you are selfish, you are vain, you have a sneer. The times he would refuse to speak to me, or disappear for several days, or when he would fly off the handle if I asked him if he was alright, the times he pursued me into the next door, closing the door behind himself so he could shout at me and berate me. The way he would stare hard into the wall and I knew something terrible was coming. Because he would also dance with me in my room to a Beatles record, tell me I was the most beautiful woman he had ever been with, that I had changed his life, that he thought I was a saint. He made me dinner all the time, delicious things I could never make because he’s a wonderful cook. There were times that felt like our relationship was a long, wonderful conversation I never wanted to end. He would draw me a bath and brush my hair and yes, when he fucked me it felt like love. He woke me up in the morning with coffee, with breakfast, and I was so grateful for all of it. I thought he was taking care of me.

I realise that in the act of writing this I am untethering us, he is becoming just a story, and vanishing into air, and I am putting him there. I’ve started telling the story to my friends and family. The times he said I have a sneer or that he was the only person who really cared about me and that my friends and family didn’t care as much as he did, while I was crying in front of him, unravelling. The time when he was breaking up with me the first time, him on the chair, me on my knees. At a certain point he got up in silence, walked a few feet away from me, and deliberately smashed a plate onto the floor. I froze like an animal. He left the broken pieces there for several days. I think I actually remained like that, poised at a sharp angle and dangling, until the end.

I think a part of my loyalty to him still remains. At one time, I could not imagine living my life without him, and I thought, naively, that that meant I wouldn’t have to. I thought I was right. My bond to him felt incredibly deep. I thought he was my family. But instead, I have been tectonically changed. The plates of me have shifted like sheets of ice. I summoned, eventually, the courage to say goodbye. And I have found that the tightly shut bud of myself has unfurled, and in a revelation like the morning that Christ woke up, I can feel the sun on my face.

1. Anne Carson, The Glass Essay