8 :

This is how I fell in love again. After too many lonely, directionless nights, not really knowing where I was going, or what I was doing, just blindly improvising my way through life, I started to think that maybe I could love again,

I would love to say our eyes met across a crowded room, but they didn’t. In fact, I don’t even remember the first moment I became dimly aware of her existence. In a crowded jostling pub, at about 6 on a Friday evening, I suppose my life took the first steps to changing.

Before that I was living in a dull greyness I used to call freedom.

I could get up whenever I wanted. See anyone I liked. Go anywhere I wanted. Fuck anyone I wanted. If they wanted me. I was king of a small world.

But that type of freedom was a prison. The one thing I wanted to do more than anything I couldn’t do. The one person I wanted more than anything I couldn’t have. The one love I used to cherish had gone away.

It’s the same old story. Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Girl likes Boy. Girl goes home with Boy. Girl and Boy decide to live together. Girl moves out one day whilst Boy is at work and pretends Boy didn’t exist, was never even alive, was never a part of her life. Boy find it’s difficult to trust human beings again. Yeah, the usual.

The usual story of suburban heartbreak and emotional abuse. Everyone’s got one.

That’s how I became a divorcee.

Divorce isn’t something you plan. It isn’t something that happens willingly. You don’t get divorced - divorce is something that is forced upon you. Like violence. And divorce, the twist of separation, that’s the kind of violence no one can see. That leaves no bruises. Only scars on the inside. The worst kind of violence.

Divorce is inflicted upon you.

Who could love a thirty something divorcee? A man who made the ultimate commitment, yet been spat out the other end? A man who pledged the rest of life to someone who changed her mind?

Could you love someone else’s rejects?

I don’t know who could love a man like that. A man like me.

Of course, she has her side of the story, and for her, it makes perfect sense. But not to anyone else. Whatever her mother tongue is, it doesn’t make sense. I’m so glad she left me though, even if sometimes I don’t necessarily sound it.

And so I drifted on the current of life, moving from situation to situation, tide to tide, as if I were a free agent. A loose cannon. A vagrant looking for a direction.

Free I was, but freedom includes choice. I had no choice about the situation I was in. I wanted us to be a continent, a united state, but I was an island. I’d had enough of these things. Too much freedom. Too much time.

There were still papers to sign. Arrangements to be made. That type of thing. A divorce is having to be polite through gritted teeth to someone you do not wantr to have any contact with ever again.

There was so much I missed, as if it had been rent from me, as if it was just a part of me that had been amputated. I missed her hands. I missed the wobble of her cellulite. I missed the smell of freshly washed hair, of talking in bed, of arguments over the distribution of the duvets, of accidental nudges in the kitchen whilst cooking, of holding hands in public places. I missed the casual security of knowing that somewhere out there was someone who cared. Someone who would leap unthinkingly in front of a bullet for me. And knowing that I’d do the same.

I didn’t miss who she was. I missed being in love.

My senses had become dulled by a lack of stimulation, by an overdose of solitude and poverty. Things had turned grey, cold. And where I live was no longer home. It was a house with bad memories and bad debts. I was the Dead Man. My heart, so full of love and trust, felt aborted. Cut short.

I knew about the glory of love. About the new colours and different shapes it gives life. But it was bullshit. Love was, is a weapon. The power of trust means the power to abuse trust. And I felt fucked by love.

So I wasn’t exactly looking for it, but I knew it was out there, somewhere. If only had her phone number. If only I had the details. The email address. The inside leg measurement. The bra size and postcode. If only I had some way I could let words fall out of my mouth that could convince her, whomever she is, to collapse completely in my arms and admit that I was the way, the truth, and the light. And there was no way to happiness except through me.

Instead I ended up crucified on love. With the nails of bankruptcy, loneliness, poverty, and hurt hammered through me. Self-pity is my drug of choice on lonely days.

But I believe. I believe in the power of love to change. To transform darkness into sunshine. To transform night into day. To make sad into unsad. To make me love again.

It was then that I met her. Only the brave love in world so cruel.

I could only hope that whomever she was, wherever she was, she could show me a world I’d never seen before. The glory of domestic shopping. The beauty of sofas. The bliss of joint accounts and of Sunday mornings choosing fridges, washing machines, third rate remote control packages and commuting. The joy of meeting her friends, her relatives, her nieces and nephews. All that stuff I craved.

Craved like an addict who’d overdosed, been brought from the dead in the back of a speeding ambulance with a heroin shot. Knowing that I couldn’t take anymore. Knew I was dying. Killing myself with love, yet I couldn’t help it. I needed one more kiss. One more affair. Another lover.

This was my world, but not of my making. I craved something else.

But I daren’t appear desperate. Women can smell desperation at a thousand paces. The sense that a man is looking for someone translates as a man will accept anyone. And a woman is always someone. She is never just anyone. And a man who will have anyone will end up with no-one. That’s why we say we’re looking for someone special.

And so, in a loveless state of grey freedom, aware yet wary, scared yet hopeful, I met her. I don’t even remember meeting her. I don’t remember being bowled over by her. I don’t remember heavenly choirs of angels, massed chords of Hendrix, and a heaven-sent shaft of light beaming down. I remember Paul saying to me "and this is Helen" at the end of a sentence I was half listening to. I glanced over, caught her eye, and rolled my eyes to the heavens in the unspoken gesture of greeting.

Love is so prosaic. It starts in the most mundane of places.

Paul was just some guy I worked with. Helen was just some girl he knew who knew some of his friends, people, friends of friends who used to work at the same place Paul used to work. Paul went onto work somewhere else, as did his friend Paul. And Paul worked with Helen. I liked her hair.

Everyone knew Paul was a tit. I’m not sure exactly what characteristics exactly make someone a tit, but I know for a fact Paul was one. The smell of desperation reeked off him. Years and years of renting in Central London, years and years of failed relationships and so-so jobs, years and years of waiting to be plucked from obscurity into the fame he so rightly deserved, years and years of masturbating like a bastard and failed chat-up lines had given him a scent no aftershave could remove. He drifted like rubbish in the sea, too strong to sink, too weak to swim.

This man needed marrying. And the first man, woman, rock or fish that would say Yes would get the accolade of Mrs Paul. Helen knew it. I knew it. The world and his dog knew it. You knew it before you even knew of him. Because he wasn’t the only one. The world was crammed full of millions of men like this. Millions of us with hopes, dreams, aspirations, and no chance of meeting the woman who would spark our souls on fire. The scent of despair ran into his very soul.

This is why, when Paul was talking crap about something or other I’d already tuned him out of my mental radar and was concentrating on something else which, whilst highly boring, was infinitely more exciting than whatever Paul was saying. Honey, he could bore for England. These people aren’t my friends. I just happen to know him. In the same way as I know my dad, but he isn’t exactly someone I’ve got much in common with.

And so, when Helen was introduced as ‘yet another pretty filly in my harem’ (except Paul pronounced it Hah-ream, I think he thought he was posh or something), she did the same as I, inwardly she shuddered, outwardly she smiled, and we caught each other’s eye. I rolled my eyes, and we both knew what it meant.

Take me away from this horrible place full of beer, fags, and desperate men called Paul.

I now have telepathic powers. That’s my secret X-Men power I wanted when I was younger. Telepathy. Then nobody could betray me. I could see their thoughts form in their mind. And I’d never lean forward to kiss a woman who’d silently be thinking please don’t try and kiss me.

And with that, I just fell in love. I tried not to, but slowly I did.

I didn’t want to be hurt again. Love hurts. Love hurts, because you’re exposed.

The kind of love that comes from slow evenings. The kind of love that comes from stolen glances across crowded pub tables when your mutual friends surround you and all you really feel like doing is getting to know someone a little bit better without the babbling of fools and drunks crowding you. When it gets too much, we all retreat into our shells, detune from the static, find the internal monologue. When someone else is talking very loudly about something completely meaningless you cease to hear them. Whatever they’re saying just ceases to exists, gets detuned, disappears.

We were both lost in thought. For a second. She smiled. And we both knew. A silent click was heard. I wanted to get to talk to her a bit. And so when Paul wandered off to visit the gents after regaling her for a few minutes about his new Hire-Purchase Car and his Mobile ring tone, I slowly, nervously slid across and sat next to her. I don’t know what I said next. Nervous. My hands were shaking more than Michael J Fox on a rollercoaster. But whatever it was, she smiled, she still spoke to me, and sometimes the rest of the world just disappeared, went dark and quiet, as if we were alone under candlelight.

Unlike the rest, I didn’t have to try and talk to her. She just seemed to know about what I was saying. Conversation fell naturally. Everything lead neatly to the next thing. Every nugget of information was quietly stored in my mind for future retrieval. Age, gender, likes, dislikes, music, football, where she worked, what she did. All thrown into that confused filing mechanism called my brain and kept for future use. In case I ever needed it. And Paul? He just started talking about cars with a bloke from my office called Steve. Boring for England again.

Heaven take me away from this babbling circus of fools.