22 :

The third date was the big one. The first time you go on a date, there’s no pressure. You meet someone. You talk. They don’t mean anything. Neither do you. Just people. Just humans. Being. You can walk away from that date, and you’ve lost nothing. There was nothing to lose. You can’t invest in something that means nothing. You can’t be disappointed by what you never had.

The second date is just as important. By now you’ve established a few things. How we meet. How we part. A kiss on the cheek? A vague hug? A wave farewell? And then out of your life forever?

Or just until the next time?

A seasoned dater will know the rules. Know the rituals. Know the inner rhythms of the game, and how to play it. The times and the venues – when and where is just right to escalate the affair to more than just a fling. Or how to extricate himself from it.

And I was an imperfect dater. I was out of practice.

So second date was a meal, this time on a Friday night. Whilst around me millions of people were frantically trying to celebrate being alive by finding someone, I was trying to feel alive by knowing someone. Not just anyone, but someone.

The more I talked to her, the more I tried not to feel the familiar chemical rush that signalled another attack. My hormones were dancing around like the Mardi ;Gras on poppers. I couldn’t help it. Sunshine was in my blood.

There was something about those eyes.

Those eyes were another world. Like a black hole, the iris sucked in everything and everyone in its path. You were hypnotised by a simple girl. In past centuries this woman would’ve been turned into a siren to lure ships onto rocks.

This is how it always happens. I try not to fall in love. But I can’t help it. Just like the fucking Elvis song. I can feel it happening again.

If it happens it means I’ll get ripped off again. But what it?

What if she’s not like the rest?

She’s talking about her ex-boyfriends. I’m listening but not listening. I don’t want to think of other mens paws on the skin I want to be mine. So I nod and mumble supportively. I’m paying attention, but somehow distracted. I don’t quite know why or how. My mind is elsewhere.Somewhere and on something else. I was tired, but somehow the adrenlain of desire was keeping me awake. I was hoping that somehow, in someway, this would keep me through this. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore. My insomnia had yet to be cured, and yet, at least now, I hoped there was a reason to be awake. I was jealous. And it felt good and bad at the same time. I fumbled my way through sentences – desperately paying attention and failing to make sense of it all.

“Huhuh”, “Yeah”, “Really?”, “What a bastard.”

Followed by supportive glances and eye contact, soft murmurs. The gentle flirtation of brief touching over Italian food. I hold her hand for maybe a second too long as a gesture of support. A statement that I am, in some way, better than the rest. That the things she had suffered in the past are over. Ythat there will be no more tears, no more sorrow.

We like Italian food.

Sometimes I feel ashamed to be male. Not because being male is a bad thing. But because people tar me with the same brush as everyone else. I’m not all men. Men do bad things to women. Women do bad things to men. I am not all men. I am just one man. I am not That man.

For every great person I meet there is normally a shitty ex-partner behind them. Someone who broke their faith in love. Someone who fucked them over and hurt them. An abused child becomes a child abuser. An abused lover becomes an abusive lover. But for some, for the strong, we still believe in love. We are strong because still we believe in love. Because the corrupt have yet to corrupt us. We are stronger than them.

They tried. And they failed.

And yet most people are so much better than that and it happens not that way. Some people do just stay good, stay beautiful, in the face of an ugly world.

The endless circle of life stumbles on. All it takes is one of us, one person to be brave and try to break the cycle of abuse and treat people better than they have been treated by people.

I’m trying to be that person. I’m trying to change the world.

I’m trying to look beyond someone’s gender as a defining part of their personality and see the person underneath. But I can’t help it. Women are still my target. I am programmed to breed. To replicate like a virus. To set up franchise.

I can’t help but notice her tone as she talked of other men. She seemed sad. Not now, but sad for what could’ve been, yet was not, could never be. How could something that once burned so bright, been so beautiful, suddenly be perverted and ugly?

How could someone stub cigarettes out on her arm?

How could someone punch her so hard that her nose had to be reset?

How could someone do that and look himself in the face with anything approaching pride?

Maybe because women are objects to be treated, mistreated, used, and abused. Maybe because some women are cruel, or stupid. Maybe because some men are cruel and stupid too. Maybe there are no answers.

Maybe because he’s a fucking idiot who needs to learn a lesson.

We are strong because we have to carry the weakness of others. We are proud because we know that the values that others lack, we have. The problem with that strength is that we carry the others because they cannot carry themselves. We become strong by necessity.

We never wanted to be that way. But its all part of Generation Fucked. The one that walks out on things and lets someone else pick up the pieces.

Her life was in pieces. Her home was her prison. Her lover was her torturer.

She never explained the large scar on her forearm, the scar that looked like a chemical burn. I never asked. I didn’t fucking need to. It’s nothing something you should ask. Not something you want to know about. Not something you even want to admit happened. A reminder of a life you want to forget. Like the stain of an old tattoo.

It was the one thing, the one chink in her beauty. Like Marilyn Monroe’s mole, it accentuated the rest of her, because you had beauty ruined by the beast.

He already had a name in my mind. Not a name, like Steve, or John. He was just The Beast. An animal trapped in a man’s body. One that did a remarkable, convincing impersonation of a human being, but whose morals were so far removed from any form of empathy or reason that the only connection he had to a human being was purely physical.

Of course, the easiest way to reduce any emotional connection is to dehumanise the victim. The Jews became Der Juden, became animals with hooked noses. Became some form of vermin it was acceptable to destroy as one would an infestation of insects.

So although he had a name, a name she had once cried in the throes of passion, a name that once was love for her, and now was a ghost of a life past, a life that should never have been. I was never to know that name. And I never wanted to know it. I never even wanted to know that he had ever been.

He was far away now. In prison. She’d changed her name, changed her hair, changed her town, changed her friends. Trust is a weapon and it had been used against her. Never again. Sometimes you know you are a person living the wrong life, as if somehow your life has been transported brick-by-brick to an alien land that was nothing to do with you - and you must change everything about your life in order to survive. Survival is what it’s all about. That is what her life became about. Distance. Distance from her past. As much as distance as she could put between them was still not quite enough.

Even a lifetime away is not far enough,

I couldn’t relate to this. A person with a moral centre so far away from mine – an inhabitant of the same physical space, the same world, the same upbringing – who could be so morally removed from empathy, understanding. So cruel to someone else. Instead of people, they saw victims. Instead of a world, they saw treasure to be ransacked and vandalised for their own amusement.

What was it? Every man destroys the things he loves. Or everyone loves the thing they destroy. Some men just loved to destroy because they love themselves more than anyone or anything else.

We’d reached a plateau. It was only our second date and she’d confessed to me her darkest secret. Not majorly. She’d hinted at it, offered just enough information to explain yet dissuade further investigation. It was a closed door. It was the past. I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to know more.

Speaking in detached fashion, it was almost as if she was talking about another person. In some respects she was – another person, another lifetime. In a different city, a different name, different hopes, and dreams.

But here she has been strong. She had broken through. She had survived. She had built a better life.

I wanted to be part of that life.