A place in time

A car stands deserted next to the road. Its my car. And now it stands there deserted. Abused. Battered. It looks like I feel. Sad and alone. We made quite a pair. Her with her faded red interior, me wearing my dark red dress. Her blue furry dash board, so kitch I know, but it was a present from my recent ex – in memory of the blue, synthetic fur coat I wore on our first date. The date that started a whirl wind romance that is the reason we were standing here in the first place.

I remember it was raining that night. He took me to an Italian restaurant, you know the type, red and white chequered tablecloths, waiters in jeans and a tacky red shirt with the logo printed all over the back. I remember thinking that night how grateful I was that I’d never been a waitress; I couldn’t have handled all the complaints, the viciousness of some of the paying customers. It was also owned by family and was almost like his second home.

I can still remember the rich aroma of the restaurant, probably because it was his favourite one and we ate there often. It smelt like stale cheese and wet dough, which, combined with his scent, always somehow tasted good. It’s strange how sometimes relationships start and end in the same place. Full circle.

We only dated for 9 months. It would have been longer, had I continued to drink. He used to hide things from me. Lie to me. Its not that I was a drunk, or even had a drinking problem, its just that he would always take me out, with his friends and there would be alcohol, tequila was his favourite. Of course, while they were drinking, I was drinking. And that meant I wasn’t really paying attention to all that was going on around me.

I realised one morning, when I woke up for work two and a half hours late that this sort of thing wasn’t for me. Neither my body nor my mind could handle these amounts of alcohol so often, so I stopped drinking so much. That’s not to say that I stopped drinking entirely, I just held back. When the tequila was going, I would politely refuse, he used to try and get me to drink more, but he got used to the idea that I didn’t want to. I stood my ground and he backed off.

But it was then that I started to notice the little things. The way he and his friends would go off in a group for a few minutes at a time. I thought girls were the only ones that went to the bathroom together, apparently I was wrong. If there are drugs involved, everyone will go together. I used to think the sweet smell on him after a few drinks was the tequila or beer, you know, sometimes different foods make people’s breath smell differently, well, I used to think that booze made him smell sweeter. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant smell. It was just different.

I realised it wasn’t the booze when he and I went out a few times alone together, and we sat and drank and talked until the early hours of the morning and the smell of him didn’t change. I also noticed that a night out with just me didn’t bring about mood swings and food cravings at odd hours. When it was just him and me, things were calm and peaceful, but with his friends things got a bit out of hand. He got a bit out of hand. His ego would come roaring to the foreground and there would be no place for me to say or do anything that he didn’t agree with. If I hurt his feelings, he would make sure that he did something that paid me back, that made me hurt. Spiteful bastard.

I remember the one night, I had been drinking margarita’s, and I was practically passed out in his car, a 19 voetsak banged up old Volkswagen and he took me with him. There were four of us in the car. I had passed out on the front seat, but woke up when the car stopped. I lifted my head try and see where we were, to try and see what was happening. He turned to me and told me to stay still, to stay sleeping. I was so scared. I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into. It was something out of a very bad dream. Never in my life had I ever wanted to be involved in the drug scene, and yet there I was, going with my (now ex) boyfriend so he could pick up a line or a few grams of Charlie I didn’t realise we were going to meet up with his dealer. I didn’t even know what Charlie was. Silly me to think it was someone’s name. Oh yes, that’s right, it was. It was what he saved his dealer’s number under. Charlie.

We used to argue about the drugs. I told him that he could do what he wanted when I wasn’t around. When he was out and about somewhere else; but I asked him to have enough respect for me to not take drugs around me. Little did I know that when the bug bites, it bites and it needs to be fed. The drugs were his wife and I was his mistress.

It wasn’t all bad. There was passion between us. We really cared about one another. The highs were incredible, when he was making money and trying to stay clean, I was happy. When he was taking drugs and spending all his money, he was happy. We were living in a lose lose situation, only we were both to blind to see. He loved the good girl he saw in me, and I loved the bad boy I saw in him. All I wanted to do was save him, and deep down, all he wanted was to be saved.

He used to get jealous when I spoke to other boys and yet, he would stay out all night and not be able to give me a straight answer as to where he’d been, and I wasn’t allowed to be upset. I had to be content that he was now home.

We’d spent many a night at “our” Italian place. For all the strange smells that used to waft our way, from the smelly waitress to the ditzy blonde, it was always cosy. It was a place we could go to just be. It was his uncle’s place, so he would always behave there. That is, until tonight.

I arrived there and he was waiting at our usual table. I could tell that something wasn’t quite right with him. He was fiddling with the ring that he wore on his middle finger. It was a solid gold band. His late father’s wedding ring. He looked like a cat, waiting to pounce. I’d seen him like this before. More than once. He was high, in a good mood, and just waiting for someone to say something not quite right to him. At the moment he saw himself as a god that could do no wrong. If I’d wanted to talk to him about anything, saying it now would be useless, only his alter ego would be listening. No, sorry, only his alter ego would be pretending to listen.

When I walked in and saw that look on his face that night, I realised that this couldn’t go on anymore. I couldn’t keep hoping that the good I saw, the potential I saw would one day come out. I realised that it wasn’t up to me anymore. I realised that it never had been. It was his decision and he’d chosen his path. And I had every right to mine.

I walked up to him and told him that I wasn’t prepared to do it anymore. That I couldn’t watch the man that I care about throw himself down this deep dark hole. I told him that if he ever wanted to walk away, if he ever wanted something real, then he should call me. I walked out. He started shouting at me, at my back. Something about me breaking up with him so I could be single and shag anything I came across. Something about me shagging his friends, because he believed that I’d slept with all of them. He really wasn’t very rational when he was high. Come to think of it, he really wasn’t very rational at all.

I left the restaurant, got into my car and started driving. I was in tears, feeling so guilty for leaving him, like it was my job to save him, like it had been up to me. I couldn’t really see much of anything through my tears and the fogged up windscreen, so I pulled over to the side of the road. I needed some fresh air. I had to get out of the car, stretch my legs, blow my nose. I had to stop crying. And I stood there. Staring at the car. Thinking about my life and how it had come to this, how it had come to a place that I could compare myself to a car. A car that stands deserted next to the road.