Swallow  ~^~

A <pedant> writes </pedant>

A Work Of Fiction

I wrote this on my birthday, I think, this year. It's a work of fiction. Obviously.

First, she tried being a hippy traveller, but that didn't work.

Then, she tried sado-masochism, but realised she couldn't tell them.

Finally, she found me, and this did manage to annoy her family.

Still, within six months of her hitting the real world and getting her first real job, she had dumped me, and I mean six months before, not six months after. Fairly bluntly, she said that I wasn't earning enough, that the imbalance in our means was too great, and it wasn't that she didn't love me any more but that was that.

We split up in December, the day before New Year's Eve in fact, after an alternately intense and sparse six years together, during which we spent one year when we had mostly split up, one year living together, and four years which we either spent either in different countries from one another, seeing each other rarely, or in the same country but different cities, seeing each other at weekends.

When we split up, the thing that hurt the most was not the money thing. I don't know whether it came from her or her family, but it isn't the kind of thing she or they would ever tell me anyway. It is the English style of snobbery, like the guy from college who was mortified when I pointed out I was Jewish just after he'd made an antisemitic remark. The upper class in London may call themselves middle class, these days, but they still know who is and who is not one of theirs, and woe betide anyone from the suburbs who takes their outward denial of snobbery at face value.

But that wasn't what hurt the most.

What really hurt was that 'it wasn't that she didn't love me any more' bit. Whether it came from her or her family, this totally negated any value that her love might have had for me. Within a few months, she was in another relationship, and since, seven months on, I still love her, this all became unbearably painful.

After I sent her three excoriatory emails in two weeks, she finally rang me, tonight, and said that she wasn't prepared to enter into discussions about our relationship by email, but that she would be prepared to see me to talk about it. This surprised me completely; she had refused to see me at all since December. Before I could answer, though, she also told me very firmly, using her 'power voice', "It's over. I don't love you anymore."

A wave of entirely unexpected relief ran through me. While I thought she still loved me, the fact that I still love her became unbearable, and my jealousy of her new man became extreme. Now that she has said what she has said, the fact that I still love her hurts less, because it doesn't matter any more.

We then discussed this and that aspect of the emails I sent her for a little while: she said it was totally out of order for me to have told her about the dream I'd had in which we'd been making love but I hadn't been able to feel anything, and pointed out that she really didn't want to hear any of my sexual fantasies; I explained that it wasn't a fantasy, it was a dream, that the trend in the emails was away from sex, but what the hell did she expect? I'd had that dream, I wanted to tell her, and I did it by email. Then she said she wouldn't read my emails any more, and I said don't worry I won't send any.

She didn't deny any of the stuff I'd said about her callous attitude to love, though.

When her doorbell rang, I suddenly didn't want to talk to her any more. After a brief pause while she answered the door in whispers (her college room is not big), we ended the conversation.

I bet it was him, her new man, and I am still jealous, but much less so than I was and falling. Not only do I feel slightly sorry for the poor sod, but I should also, perhaps, be grateful to him.

After all, there's no way she could have worked out by herself that the best thing to do would be to tell me firmly, "It's over. I don't love you any more."

None of the characters referred to in the above text ever existed outside of my own warped imagination, and nobody should be surprised by anything they read