Tag: together

49. Why didn’t he just go for it instead of running at economy level.

There’s a balance to be had when you’ve things wizzing around your head. A balance between thoughts that can build into something that you have to process before you can move forward, and things that you can keep stored away until you have time to unpack them. But it’s not as if you always have as much control as you’d like. Emotions, especially those attached to memories, rarely stay where we put them. They dance and skit about, hiding from us and distracting us when we least want them. Maybe we never want them, that’s the problem.

So yesterday, I took the dog over to his flat as this is his weekend to have her, and in the warmth of the sunny spring evening I was shown onto the newly decorated, laden with pot plants and flowers, just painted table sight of his roof terrace. I looked around at all his hard work, at his choices and effort. And all I could feel was the depth of disappointment that he had never put that much time and effort into our home together.

Don’t get me wrong, that flat really needed decorating, and all the things he has done look good and will no doubt help him. But it’s so hard not to feel that, by committing to our home in the same way, putting in the effort and taking responsibility for the space we had together, we would have been so much better. We could have been something special, instead of just ok.

What a waste. And that’s where the balance issue comes into it. I’m pissed off. But that’s what I have to balance… do I unpack these thoughts, unpick this trail of emotions until who knows what is unravelled? It’s starting to feel like we had a life together half lived. What could it have been if we’d lived it fully? Why didn’t he just go for it instead of running at economy level. We wouldn’t be worse off than we are now. We could have been so much more.

But now he has to ‘be more’. No one to fill in the gaps, do the things that need doing when they need doing. It’s all up to him. He’s been spoiled all his life so maybe it’s the lesson that he couldn’t learn unless he one hundred percent had to. More fool him.

46. So are we starting to be friends?

Today, he and I have been working together. All day. And it’s been good. It’s been friendly, chatty and only a bit weird. In fact really, only weird in moments.

He used to help me with occasional days on big jobs. So, as I’m currently working on a big job, he offered. I said yes. I knew it might be odd, but the advantages a the day’s work  really outweighed the potential strangeness. And I thought if we can be together for a day then that might make future times much easier to manage.

And it familiar, but not painfully so. There were moments when I had to step back from feeling completely normal, because our normal isn’t the same any more. But that’s not the worse place to be. We still have patterns that we slip into and some of those are worth keeping. Knowing how someone likes their coffee isn’t a thing to unlearn so you have a distance, and the fact that we both brought hot-cross buns in as a treat for each other made us both laugh – they’d always been a favourite of ours, and a separation isn’t going to change that.

So we sanded and prepped and filled the day away. We talked of family, of the dog and her recent anxiety issues, of friends and outings and the daughter. We spoke of the plans for his roof terrace and the cherry-blossom on the street outside. I asked about which evening the pooch could go for a sleepover and this was the stumbling moment, because he was busy some nights, and I couldn’t ask why.

But I told him, because it felt right to. “It’s weird, because I was about to ask you where you were going and I’ve just realised it’s none of my business.” and even that was ok. “you can ask, it’s fine”.

So are we starting to be friends? Is it this simple? I look back over the things I have written and know how much all this hurt in the beginning, but it really isn’t at that level any more. Has being nice served us so well? I wonder how I will feel if the answer to “where are you going?” was not out with friends I know well.

But being angry wouldn’t have helped me. And I’d rather be better than that. I have enough to think about, with an anxious dog and a life to plan as my starting points then I really don’t feel that I need that weight of negativity. It’s just I wasn’t really sure it would work. We’re not fully there yet. I still have moments when I feel sad, I still find saying goodbye to him the strangest of pains. And I still can’t touch him. But we can talk. We can be together without incident or tears or drama. I think, so far, we are doing this well.