The Game Changer

…the next instalment of my journal, chronicling a year of change ..

29.4 22.09

And I mulled. All afternoon. About what I should do. How can I close this. Come out at the other end. Why had he not responded — OBVIOUSLY because I hadn’t asked him anything, there was no express request for a response, just an emotional need for one. This is going around in my head all the time. And I know I am overthinking it. Women do that. I don’t think that is sexist, I just think that is true.

So I got home from class and skype messaged him. I told him about Brighton, and he was really happy for me. He asked whether I was happy. Neither one of us ‘picked up the phone’ as it were, for a video conference. At this time, the chat was comfortable.

Then I asked him whether we were okay.

The response? A long line of question marks.

I said that he had not liked my email, and I had not liked his. I wanted to know that we were ok. And that he was not shitty with me. Yes, crap, I couldn’t help say that. He said of course we were okay, today and yesterday had been really busy for him. I said cool, if he was not shitty with me, I was not shitty with him. He text-laughed and said thank you.

That was it.

Then we carried on and chatted.

I had been churning this around in my head, and he hadn’t given it another thought. Enviable, utterly enviable. I could have gone into a wild rant about him being insensitive, and for him, it would have come out of nowhere. I remember a conversation with my ex. He once said to me that if I wanted to hear something from him, something specific, I had to tell him what it was. We laughed at the time, but it’s true. We can’t coach guys into a response we need, we are too different. If we hope for something we will just be disappointed again and again.

It reminds me of a joke on TV, well, not a joke as such, but an explanation given by a marriage counsellor on the difference between the male and female brain. He explained that in the male brain, there is a series of separate boxes that never touch each other. When the man deals with one issue, he is in that box. When he is done with that issue, he puts that box back. Then he enters another box. In the female brain, the presenter continues to explain, everything touches everything else, all the time. Which is why, while I do my French home work, or go bouldering or do anything else for that matter, my situation with my game changer runs in parallel to what I am doing. And I function perfectly well. For him, it’s different. He didn’t respond to my last email because he was busy in a different box. At the heart of the male brain is the ‘nothing’ box. When the man is in that box, he thinks of nothing. Women don’t have a box like that and we don’t understand it. It’s the root of most of our problems.

If the roles had been reversed, if he had been the one with the broken heart, would things have been different? Do men need validation? To my knowledge there is no box for that, but I could be wrong. Enviable.

I think if we all understood this difference fully, there would be fewer divorces. I used to go home to my ex and want to vent. He used to make suggestions about the situation, which drove me crazy. Eventually we got it. Men like solving problems, when they think they have done that, they are done, if they are not sure what the problem is, they are dumbfounded. My ex half-jokingly used to say to me that if I wanted to vent, that’s what my girlfriends are for and if I wanted a problem solved, I should come to him.

I don’t think all the comedy sketches about gender differences come from nowhere.

And if I argued that women do more of the work, adjust more, there would be scores of men telling me the opposite, that they do everything they are told, bend over backwards and yet she is never happy.

I have done a lot of work to get to this point with my game changer. I poured my heart out to him, held back my fury and my need for compassion, have coped with my heart break by crying many hours on my own without ever letting this affect our time together and finally, I have thought about this, analysed and explained to myself, kept busy and talked to girlfriends. I have no idea what precisely went on in his head, whether he realised things were difficult for me.

In the past I haven’t always been good about saying what I feel and been resentful in the end for being misunderstood and hurt. I tried to learn from that, and told my game changer how I felt. So I could carry on being his friend and avoid resentment. The result was that he told me off and I felt resentment.

I will come out the other end, but I will be sad for a long time. A long, long, long time. And I will miss him for a long, long time.

And in return, maybe I just ended up with the perfect romance that never went bad. That’s better than nothing.

30.4 20.17

Too many feelings today, saturated by them.

A sense of an ending. A sense of a beginning. Thinking of what could have been. A deep sadness. Fierce determination. A sense of being lost. A sense of certainty.

And the whole thing just imploded like a bad soufflé.

My shoulders are perennially sore from bouldering, I love it. Some of my rings no longer fit because the skin is getting too thick, I love that too.

I will make another soufflé.

2.5 7.53

Arrived in London for a lindy hop event after two hours’ sleep yesterday. I just love this place, you can feel that stuff happened here.

I am being hosted by two men who have been renovating their house for the last two years. There is a makeshift kitchen, no floors and a whole lot of dust. They were still happy to put up a stranger, which is an impressive gesture of kindness and generosity. We mixed great conversations and laughter together with the dust, my second really nice experience of being hosted. I can’t wait to host. I look forward to offering the same kindness someone has offered to me.

It’s my first time in the North East of London, a completely different feel to the tourist centre. This is where people actually live. Chinese, Indian Lebanese and African cafés line the streets, and somewhere in the middle of it all is a gallery dedicated to a man who used to live here and who produced decorative and very ornate textiles.

Haven’t heard from my game changer in a couple of days, he hasn’t responded to my couple of chat messages. He always used to respond. And the internal dialogue starts. My friends are probably right, I shouldn’t have contact with him. I still feel unutterably sad and really angry. And now less important, deserted. And I really, really miss him. I bought him an unusual postcard from that gallery.

4.5 7.55

I can’t immerse myself this time the way I normally can in my dances. My calves are troubling me again, and I feel generally weighted down. Everything is costing me effort. This time dancing is soothing and distracting, rather than invigorating.

But I make the effort. Took two walking tours and learned that the name ‘Charter House’ is a derivative from the French ‘Chartreuse”, because the English couldn’t pronounce the latter. The ’Ye Old Mitre’ pub reportedly has the stump of the cherry tree inside it around which Elizabeth I danced as a young girl. An angry crowd displayed the body of Oliver Cromwell at the Old Red Lion pub many years after he had died, before executing the corpse at Tyburn.

Then I went to the British Library (the very first place I went to when I first visited London many years ago) to see the Magna Carta exhibition. Pricey but well done. My favourite bit was one paragraph in one of the old and beautifully crafted books, which dealt with King John (the one from Robin Hood) and his cousin Arthur. King John was not a popular man and managed to rub just about everyone the wrong way. He decides to kill Arthur, whom he had held captive in Rouen. The text goes something like this “When John killed Arthur, Thursday before Easter, after lunch, drunk and full of demons ….’ . Gorgeous specificity and fiery melodrama in one, superb chronicling.

4.5 21.52

A boring morning in my office never passes as fast as an evening of dance.

Had a nice chat with a woman who is rebuilding her life after he relationship has ended. She feels miserable in her job, unsure, almost not competent. She is at a complete loss as to what to do. She is in her early thirties, a time, in my view, where a woman is at her most powerful. She told me that she was considering all sorts of options and used the word ‘should’ a lot. Maybe she should take a couple of months off and consider her options, then she would have a job to go back to if she needed it. I watched her face. Whenever she said ‘should’ it dropped a bit. She said that while she was in this job she couldn’t even consider what else she might be doing. This was all so familiar to me. I said that at some point it’s a matter of ‘have to’ and not ‘should’.

Then we danced until another festival was over. As we neared the end, I felt that familiar feeling of melancholy. I wonder whether other people have that, or is it just me. I have to ask. There is the normal sense of a good time coming to an end. But for me it reaches deeper, whenever I am in a group of people and see groups of friends. I have this sense of again losing something that never quite was, this realisation that I have never quite belong. A place where I really feel anchored. I have felt stuck, but not anchored. And at the moment when I feel the strongest sense of belonging I also feel the greatest urge to get away, to be alone. Leave before I am left, before I feel alone in a group. I wonder whether I will ever get over that.

I headed back to my dusty abode and was ready for the sadness to hit me, I am easy prey when alone in a room with nothing to do. Instead I watched my host put down his floorboards while I had some wine, and we had one of those unusual and interesting conversations that is hard to come by, about people and philosophy and all sorts of interesting stuff. My host saved me from myself.

My game changer is flying out soon, and that weighed on my mind all afternoon, during conversations, a drink and dancing. Nothing has changed since our farewell weeks ago, but the fact that he is leaving still feels like a kick in my stomach. It’s more final.

He has made me feel better than anyone ever has before. More alive. That everything is possible. I will keep that feeling, that possibility. The anger and sadness will fade, so my friends promise me.

I will really, really miss him.