The Spaces Between

At first it was a fantasy. An older man. Complex, attractive and a delicious mix of masculine (good with his hands) and feminine (into poetry and using the word “beautiful” — although never to describe me).

We grew closer as the Summer went on and I grew further from my current partner, but that’s not what this is about (I don’t think).

As time went on the power dynamic between us became abundantly clear, even as I insisted I was an autonomous adult who couldn’t possibly miss the signs.

I would wait for him to call or to text. I wouldn’t make plans, I’d cancel plans. I’d go over late, or early. I would bite my tongue until it bled when something hurt (don’t under any circumstances cause a fuss, don’t give him a reason to end it).

My anxiety grew — I blamed my surroundings. I blamed the grey, the lack of sunlight in my room, my job that kept me up until 3am every night. I didn’t point the finger at his coming and going (emotionally and physically). I didn’t admit the rejection I’d feel when he’d hold onto me at night and sigh deeply into my neck only to not contact me for days afterwards. I wove lies to tell my roommates, my parents and when he called me at 11pm after being out with another woman (he’d canceled our plans — no, worse, he’d claimed we’d never had any) I went over there and willfully ignored the two empty beer glasses by the sink. I told my best friend I’d ignored his call.

Like an addict of a sort, I was drawn to the high that came with and from his approval. From being one of the few he looked to, respected and called “remarkable” as we sat at a brewery at midnight at the beginning of December. The high that came back everytime just as my withdrawl aches and pains were about to subside. Relief would be in plain sight, just a few more hours now! but after days of agony and lost sleep my phone would light up with his picture.

“Kat!” he would say as I answered the phone — as if my name had been on his lips since we last spoke. It coursed through my veins.

I told myself it was okay to love someone who didn’t love you back and that it was okay to fill the spaces in-between the widening cracks with claims of “it’s an adventure”. I told myself it was okay that there was so much I didn’t know about him. I knew that he read the New Yorker (or really, whatever his writer friends were recommending at the time), that ultimately he could live without anyone or anything if he put his mind to it and that his back turned towards me as we slept was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever enjoyed — and so I claimed that was enough for me.

Hiding from yourself is a difficult thing and I hope you never do it. To quiet your inner voice for so long or to ignore it so fiercely that it eventually quits trying is a unique and awful sensation. To know with every fibre of your being that you deserve more but to believe that you don’t is truly awful. But then, he calls you, and for another day you’ve got your fix. It’s all worth it.

I had my moments. I walked into his AirBNB room, told him that no one, but NO ONE was looking out for me an that I had to do it — and I left. I got on a plane and enjoyed 5 days of satisfaction before he told me that I’d hurt him and then I climbed into his bed and watched him text the aforementioned woman as we drove to a yoga class together. I yelled at him. I told him what I thought, finally. After months, my face was a mess, and stress sweat smells.

I slept beside him in his mother’s house and I told him how I felt and then after seeing the parts of his life that had for so long been only myth to me — the page on the calendar turned. I drove away across a dusty province to a life that I’d known all my years, but that now felt incredibly foreign to me.

You might now be thinking that I hate this person, or that I’m mad at them. I don’t and I’m not, on the contrary, of course. I accept responsibility for my half of the deal, or perhaps more. That’s the bitch of it isn’t it? It’s not my fault that someone treated me poorly — that’s on them, but it is my fault that I let it continue until my heart was so raw I thought it would shrivel up and fall out of my rib cage and into my stomach (which was not coincidentally constantly aching).

I left and he let me and as far as I’m aware he never wished that I wouldn’t.

We all make choices that we aren’t proud of. Ideally we learn from our messes and we don’t re-offend.

I’ll be carrying this around for a long time, this I know for sure. I’ll hear Louis Armstong or only eat 2/3rds of an apple, I’ll order a Pilsner (I fucking hate Pilsner), I’ll see my phone light up and I’ll think of him.

The dangerous thing about fantasies is that they’re often mirrored closely enough by reality that we can be tricked into thinking that they are built in truth rather than in what does not and more likely cannot exist.