I am deleting the Nevada videos. The whining ‘Dieaaane’, the lovely Senator who is endlessly polite, the fact they get your name wrong, the ridiculous comment about “‘it’s the way I pronounce my vowels”, all that is the nearest I have to knowing who you are now and also the furthest. The person in the June one looks familiar, I recognise the eyes, the laugh, the hands, but little else and the September one, the suit, the changes to your face since the June one, just add to the insubstantial and shadowy image which never fully forms in to the person I knew, or thought I knew. For a while, they were helpful. In the absence of any real social media presence that was accessible to me, they were the only things that proved you were real, existed somewhere in the world. I don’t count the drunken LinkedIn conversation, I’m still not convinced you knew who I was and all the waffling about Avril and the hotel in Paris – your version of which was laughably wrong – just adds to the sense of how insignificant I was and that, that is harder to bear than it should be.
I am, literally, exhausted by it all now, the constant sense of needing to watch out for the unexpected, emotional land mines planted everywhere which I seem unable to avoid, the lack of any way of rationalising, understanding the relentlessness of it, the albatross-round-my-neck weight of it and the persistent thud of it behind my breast bone.
I don’t understand it. I can understand why you don’t why it may feel weird and stalkery and crazy, I am acutely aware of the weirdness of it all, but I can’t keep apologising and, actually, I don’t think I should. What I am certain of is that I will never be able to forgive you for the email, never. But, that is going in to the trash folder where it belongs. I look at it occasionally to remind myself that this ridiculous semi-fantasy version of the past I seem stuck with, has edited out a lot of your less desirable qualities, but I am with the lady senator who took over from the delightful Senator P and her comment about you ‘Shame on him“. That sums it up really.
Spellbound and Swallowed 