Now is the time

This is something I wrote in July. I thought I had put it up on my blog – but clearly not yet. Its a sad story… and has made more than one person a little emotional… so bear with me.

I stand there wondering what happened last night. Why can’t I remember? It all seemed so vivid. So real. Was it? Surely I couldn’t have dreamt it. Not something so horrid? I don’t have that kind of imagination.

As I get out of bed I recall going to the hospital. It wasn’t last night. But when was it? This wasn’t fair. My mother used to tell me. Life is not fair Isobel. Never forget it. I guess I had. Until now.

The floor is cold beneath my feet, the sunlight trying to creep between my faded green curtains. I walk towards the kitchen trying to remember. What was said or what the reasons were. Nothing comes back to me.

Where is he? Does he blame me? Is it my fault? I don’t know what to think anymore. I remember now. We were having dinner, celebrating with his parents. We were at this beautiful Chinese restaurant; the one wall was a mural of trees and beautifully coloured birds. It’s almost so real that if you’re quiet and just concentrate on the birds you could almost see them singing. I had never seen love birds that colour before, such a startling blue. Such a brilliant yellow, the eyes staring at you as the birds sang with the flow and sway of the restaurant.

As I make my cup of coffee I see in my diary that it’s the August third. It’s been two weeks. How could I have been away for so long? What has happened in these last two weeks?

It wasn’t busy that night. It never really is. We had just told his parents that they were going to be grandparents for the first time. They were so ecstatic. We were sharing the sweet and sour duck with yellow rice. I had just had my third mouthful when the pain hit.

I gasped. He looked at me, asked if I was ok. I could see he didn’t understand. He turned to his parents, “She always puts food in her mouth when it’s too hot.” His mom turned to him and said, “Derek, she’s gone so pale. Izzy, are you alright?” I shake my head. I can barely keep my body upright. “Derek, we have to go to the hospital. Now.” He looks stricken. His jaw set, his beautiful blue eyes staring at me, worry the only emotion showing.

“Can you stand?” I try to get up, but another wave of pain hits me. Derek catches me. We’re causing a scene, people are staring at me. Derek picks me up. We’re both trembling. Scared of what this may mean.

Derek carries me out of the restaurant. His dad pulling up their car. The latest Jag, such a deep navy blue it almost blends in with the night. We drive to the hospital. The ride seems to take forever. Every traffic light red. The pain worsening. Each wave hitting harder. My body aching. My heart breaking.

We arrive at the hospital. Derek picks me up, it’s as though I weigh nothing in his arms. We run into the emergency unit. A nurse comes over to us; Derek’s dad arrives with a wheel chair. Derek gently puts me into the wheel chair. It smells of leather. Like my dad.

As my memories of my father are begging me to pay attention, the pain hits again. I curl up onto myself. The nurses have wheeled me away from my family. Away from my Derek. I ask for him. He’s right behind me, pushing me along the stark white hospital corridor.

We arrive at the examination room and Derek lifts me from the chair and onto the bed. Blank white walls stare at me from every angle. This room seems to have been forgotten. No-one to warm the room with their touch. I try and tell Derek how wrong and ugly this room is.

Another wave hits me. I passed out. The examination is over. For some reason the baby hadn’t been getting the nutrition it needed and had died a few days ago. I was carrying a dead baby. They had to get it out. I couldn’t believe it. Our baby was gone. It took but a few moments for them to deliver the news. News about something that had taken months to grow.

The heartache subsides a little and my haze lifts and reality remembers he left early for work this morning. I realise I’m growing out of time. Its time to get out of the dark mist and to start healing. Time to let my husband comfort me and to comfort him. I phone him to tell him I’m cooking dinner and was wondering what he felt like. Macaroni cheese. I can hear the smile in his voice. The first meal I ever cooked for him. I hear the relief in his voice as he tells me he’s happy to hear my voice. Its time to start again. The pain has become a part of me, but it no longer consumes me.

Some things are forever

As I stand here looking for her, I wonder where she’s gone? Dammit, why couldn’t she just wait? The noises around me are so typical of this place. There are people talking, laughing and arguing, bustling to and fro.

The sound of her voice filters through the noise. I hear her calling my name, why didn’t I notice before? Thank goodness we can leave now. Off to the car I trundle, packets crackling as I take her new possessions from her and place them in the boot. We get into the car. The noise of the engine fills the silence as she glares at me again. Frustrated. We shouldn’t have slept together. It wouldn’t be like this. I thought she understood. I thought I understood. Her silence says more than any words.

We drive on. Ignoring each other. I start thinking of the reasons not to date her again. She’s bold and brash (and sexy), she’s domineering and obnoxious (and passionate and caring).

Things have changed since then. I just want things to go back to how they were. There were no awkward silences, just friends enjoying the quietness of each other. We got on well; we could laugh at each other, with each other. We were just friends. No need to impress. And now I don’t know how to talk to her. I’m scared. Scared of falling. For her. I’m scared of losing myself in her eyes. In her touch.

What a laugh. Here we sit. In the car. I turn to look at her and I can see that I’ve hurt her. But I’m not sure what to say or how. I can’t bring myself to tell her how I feel. She’s got a solitary tear running down her cheek. I wipe it away. She pulls away from me. “How do we fix this?” I ask. I don’t want to lose my best friend. She tells me that she doesn’t want to lose me. She tells me that she would like to see where this goes. She says she’s still the same person. She hasn’t changed.

I know all this. But how do I let the wall down? It’s been up so long. How do I let her in? How do I tell her it’s got nothing to do with her? She knows me well enough by now. She needs to know how I feel. She tells me that if I’m not interested that there’s someone else she might like to date. Apparently they’ve gone out a few times. How come I didn’t see this? She wasn’t distant. She was here. My friend. My confidant. Did I notice she was missing?

I can’t let her walk out of my life. Out of my heart. She’s got patience, she took the time to know me. She nursed me back. I can’t let her go. I need her here. With me. How do I tell her this?

She looks at me. About to get out of the car. I know that if she leaves now I’ll never see her again. My moment will be lost forever. I lean forward to touch her. She looks at me. Into my soul. I know she knows what I’m feeling. And I know that I have to say it. She needs to hear it. But I can’t. The words get stuck. She gathers her bags together and gets out of the car. She walks away and doesn’t look back. She’s gone. And I have to let her go.

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.