Kissing Frogs

The exact details of the videos don’t really matter, what finding them represented does. After years of having no idea what ESL looked like now – the absence of any photos of him online except, I assume, to those people he had given access to on social media, was quite remarkable. And now here he was in glorious technicolour, centre stage, in the spotlight, the leading man, costume changes; he even had a couple of soliloquies. The effect of seeing him, of him being brought in to the world’s light, was breath stealing. So much time spent shadow boxing with nothing more substantial than a memory meant the appearance of something solid and real that inhabited a space in the world, was unnerving. More unnerving was the fact that had I not had the sound turned on, I would not have recognised him. It was only the voice, the one that had spoken to me so clearly in France, that identified him and, after some closer inspection, the eyes. And yet, at one time, I had known every inch of him and he had known every inch of me. The dislocation between the past and now was immense. While this knowledge should have helped, being able to locate him in the world, it didn’t. What it did tell me was that I wasn’t the only story teller, that in terms of weaving tales, we were probably evenly matched. Whoever I was seeing, was a carefully constructed character working to a tightly written script which he delivered nearly flawlessly. What a performance, what a show. The audience were spellbound, well, nearly all the audience.

The temptation to keep re-watching the videos like classic film reruns, was enormous, but I didn’t. I stashed them away under ‘Too difficult’ and left them there. It didn’t help, it didn’t solve the problem, it didn’t turn off the constant song playing on a badly tuned radio just out of earshot. That, went on and on and on. For big chunks of time, I learnt to tune it out, drown it with other sounds and although I made a couple of ill advised attempts to make contact, to try to explain what was driving my need to be in touch, I increasingly understood I was wasting my time and each time I tried, I sounded more not less crazy.

But, the song was still playing along in the background, sometimes louder than others. It’s persistent, relentless beat, became a nearly constant earworm, a form of tinnitus. I never spoke to anyone about it or about what was happening, partly because it was all too odd, too inexplicable. I know that had I talked about it, everyone would have had sage bits of advice about how to deal with it, clever, clinical strategies, but they weren’t in the midst of it, not living the sheer oddity of it. I needed an exorcist, someone to drive out the dark thoughts, sprinkle holy water on the feelings that tormented me, cast out the spirit that haunted me. Did I think my behaviour was obsessive, abnormal? Well, yes and no. The more I couldn’t resolve the issue with, what felt like to me, a simple and short form of contact, the more it chewed and scratched at me.

All this time, the book was sitting, waiting for something to happen. I kept looking at it and it looked back accusingly. I’d write a few lines and stop because the sense of fear I had felt when I got the ‘cease and desist’ email lurked in every corner of my brain. I’d close the file and for months it would sit, stored in the cloud, untouched. Then a new sequence of events started and they, like all the others, defied explanation. All of a sudden, it was me who felt stalked and I definitely wasn’t imagining it any more than I am now.