There are certain events in your life that define you.
There will be happy moments and sad moments in equal excess. They will take whatever you have become and chip away until the final result is no longer recognisable. You are created and destroyed a million times over in your own lifetime.
People call the happy ones an epiphany moment, that little light bulb above your head that brings about sudden influence or great ideas.
Those events that bring with them severe and irreparable damage, they’re called tragedies and accidents. Others say it’s a disaster.
Any one event in any one person’s life is not closed in a bubble. What you do will affect any number of other people, innocent or otherwise. We’re guided like sheep by our experiences in the great wide world. Moulded and sculpted by events beyond out control, which cause complete personality changes in the most extreme circumstances.
A lot of these crises, these black epiphanies and disasters are naturally occurring. Accidents or mistakes that were never meant to hurt but they did anyway.
My black epiphany. An accident.
I met her at work, one of those closed-circuit relationships that formed through light conversation behind the cash register and blossomed into drinks into movies into kissing into love. Hindsight, the golden tool in any lovelorn idiot’s arsenal, shows me now that I was no match for what she already was.
A siren singing me to shipwreck.
Picture me in a red shirt, my company badge embroidered in white on the breast. Ill-fitting grey trousers cut me off at the waist and frame my legs tightly, despite being my usual size.
Picture her wearing the same unisex red shirt, only much more loose-fitting because her body is smaller than their sizes are tailored to suit. Her waist is accessorised with a simple black belt hooked into her grey skirt, regulation knee length. Although her skin is pale, her legs are even paler because she she’s wearing off-white tights and a pair of low-heel black shoes.
Picture us catching every moment we can during the course of the day to discuss trivial banalities like what her brother’s doing at the weekend or what I did last night.
And then jump to my first mistake.
We’re in a bar after a company party to celebrate us doing so well at work and selling enough crap to strangers that the company can afford to open more franchises in cities we’ll never want to visit.
She’s decided her mind is in bits. I think that was how she put it. I knew we’d had trouble as any relationship does, but the thing about a one sided love story is the trouble will only come from one side.
We’re on the ground floor of the bar, lights are flashing on automated motors all over the room, and mirrors twist and bounce bright white light into everyone’s eyes. In the corner where we are, we’re sheltered so I can look at her big brown eyes and see the vacant expression on her face.
I want answers I say. I want to know what you’re thinking.
All I get is nothing. Then, a simple yet well rehearsed “I don’t think I can be with anybody right now”.
Blow to the head. Pushed back to the side. Picking up my optimism off the dirty floor, I step outside into the cold night. Alone.
Even then, I’d pictured a great love story, like they’re always showing in the movies. But we all know that movies are scripted and around every corner there are writers waiting to adjust the dialogue for the best outcome.
This is the first time I changed. I took more risks and I went out a lot more. I admitted partial feelings for other people, slept with girls I knew liked me more than I could ever reciprocate and created a cascade of cause and effect life changing scenarios of my own.
My beautiful reconstruction. Their supreme deconstruction.
I aged another year in those four months.
Jump to me back at work. I have my feet on the corporate ladder now. I am working towards the aspirations I set myself when I stumbled out of education and blinked at the world with big wet eyes. She was still there too, working towards aspirations but those thrown at her, not necessarily her choice.
I don’t wear the red unisex shirt anymore. I am complete in crisp shirts and cut off at the waist in high street label trousers that fit me in all the ways I figure emphasise the physique I embody. My shoes are no longer stumpy and designed to accommodate harsh impacts. They are pointed and all shiny leather, designed to set me apart as a clothes model for a franchise that sells fashion to the masses, carried away in little plastic bags.
She doesn’t wear the unisex shirt either. Instead, a consistent canvas of red is replaced with the morbid colour canvas of browns, greys and black. Clothes that hug her small waist and frame her like a supermodel. Long slender legs and thin white arms poking out a sleeveless sweater.
We begin a dialogue again. That same banal talk across sales floors and in staff lounges except this time there’s more interest from her side. A greater desire to understand what I’m talking about and also who it is I’ve become. Gone is my paranoia, the neediness that dogged me from our initial relationship. The constant static of my need for a permanent connection to her.
Things this time are different. I’m stronger and less attentive. Not a quality you normally look for in a partner, but you have to understand: for her, distance is not a bad thing. We all need our space. And I had new friends and interest that I had to pursue outside seeing her.
We did things we hadn’t previously tried. We went shopping together and picked out clothes that made us look more attractive to each other. We met up more often when we could, went for drinks after work and there was also talk of meeting each other’s families.
This second time round I felt we had a grounding. Through a mutual friend I learned she loved me. I loved her the first time I saw her. If you want to attach fatalistic undertones and a sense of Hollywood gold to the proceedings, it felt like I had loved her all my life.
This time round was the first time we slept together. I tell you this now not because I want to show off that I bedded her or that she fell for any charm I might have displayed. I tell you this because it’s the first piece in the jigsaw that I never saw coming.
By this time, I had both feet on the career ladder and was sent away, glowing and beaming with the happiness my relationship had created in me to build other franchises.
Life support for commerce.
When I returned to my blanket covered existence, I realised that my next mistake was sat waiting for me. Promises of love and affection before I left were swiftly replaced with that same vacancy that I remembered the first time round. After no communication for over a fortnight after my return, the bullet in the gun that had my name on it was fired.
We’re sat in another bar, I’m drinking a tomato juice and she’s drinking an orange. We’ve just finished work and I’m still wearing a new Yves Saint Laurent black shirt. She’s wearing a black sweater still covered in animal hairs from when she left the house this morning.
When I go to put my arm around her, I already realise the gesture is futile. She squirms away on the seat and I ask if we are ok.
‘No’ comes her reply. I ask why.
“This doesn’t feel like a relationship anymore. It feels more like friends.” She explains.
And the anvil in my brain falls down through my chest cavity, ripping all my vital organs down with it.
Jump to us in my car, her in her pink coat and me still in my shirt. It’s cold but I don’t want to wear a coat. I want the cold around me to numb my body until I stop feeling.
“I need to sort myself out again.” She says. “I’m still struggling with things I thought I was over.”
And then we reach full circle. It isn’t karma, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.
Her beautiful reconstruction. My supreme deconstruction.
Two weeks go by and we don’t talk much. She’s out most nights drinking and I’ve thrown myself into my work. The career I have planned out has also gone awry. Six months of working my ass off has earned me respect from my superiors. Respect from my staff. So much so that I am to be replaced.
Am I bad at what I do? No. Words like development and opportunity are thrown at me by my boss, who I start to think has been planning this for some time. In my frustration at this, I neglect her. I only recognise her one morning when she comes into work after a day off, pale with no make up.
Her eyes are smaller without mascara, her face is blotchy and already I know something is wrong. It’s not until later that day that I manage to pry the truth out of her.
Miscarriage.
The first question I ask is, whose baby it was. We were careful. The look of sarcasm I get is the answer I hoped. Mine. In blind shock, even right now, I’d rather that miscarried baby is mine than to know it was some fleeting one night stand. A mistake wrapped in an accident.
She tells me how it came on that morning. She couldn’t stop bleeding and called the emergency doctor. She tells me how she only took the pregnancy test three days earlier. She seems ok with what happened. I realise that it hasn’t hit home yet.
I tell her I will drive her home and we walk back to my car and she asks me what I make of it. After all, she reminds me, the baby would have been mine. I admit in this first instant, I have no opinion. I’m an empty vessel stood on a high street, staring into a shop window watching things unfold before me behind a huge sheet of glass. I can’t touch anything and I can’t affect anything.
The baby would have been born next June she tells me. She was seven weeks pregnant.
At seven weeks old, the baby is still forming but has grown one thousand times larger than it was at two weeks. In one week’s time at eight weeks, a baby will be able to hear its mother’s voice and start to recognise different sounds.
Our baby will never hear its mother’s voice. Her voice. The one talking to me now asking me how I feel about what I’ve just been told.
My shoes knock against the pavement, I’ve worn the rubber heels away to the wood they were attached to and it sounds like I’m wearing clogs. Both my hands are in my pockets and although I want to hold her hand, this is not the right time. I tell her, despite everything and that for what it’s worth, she would have made a great mother. I don’t know how much of that she believes or takes notice of but I hope she gets it.
Dropping her off at home, I hug her. I tell here that I will be here for every step of the way and ask her to promise me one thing. That she won’t shut me out.
Over the next week, I forget I’m being ostracised from my workplace and instead focus on watching her. Making sure she’s ok. Ensuring that she’s coping and being there for her when she runs off to cry in one of the back rooms.
She says she can’t protect anything. She had this little baby to look after and she couldn’t even manage that. I say she didn’t even know she was pregnant until it was too late and that she shouldn’t blame herself.
I explain to her boss, my boss, the situation and offer to make up the difference when she struggles with work. Her boss is sympathetic.
Skip to her birthday a week later. I buy her a small teddy bear with the words ‘you’re special’ written on the left foot. It’s a little grey bear from a collection I know she likes. I buy her a birthday card with coloured balloons on the front. Something non-descript and neutral. Inside I write ‘hope you have a great birthday’ and ‘love me’ on the bottom.
I hand it to her during her lunch and do not see her for the week she is on holiday.
I start to think a little less about her when she’s on holiday and I give her the space she needs to deal with things in her own time. We talk once on the phone.
I start to think paternal. What would have happened if she had stayed pregnant? Would we have raised the baby as a couple? Would it have reunited us as couple? Or would I have been the stay away dad? The one that sees his kid only on weekends.
And then I start to wonder. I’m day dreaming. I picture a little girl, two years old. Brown hair, so dark it’s nearly black and tied into a short ponytail with a pink hair band. She has the biggest brown eyes, just like her mother’s. She also has her mother’s pale skin. The little girl is called Amy. A name we both liked, when we talked about baby names once for a laugh.
I think about how much of my life I would have given up for that child. The imaginary child in my head that was the product of the first night shared between me and her. Amy’s mother.
That baby would have meant everything to me. I don’t question whether I would have been ready to raise another life. You’re never ready for anything life throws at you. We’re all trying our best to keep our heads above water in any situation. My parents were a year younger than am I now when I was born and I turned out alright and besides, life is much different than it was 20 years ago.
I start going out again. With friends, acquaintances and people I met a few times. I do anything to not to have to think about what could have been. What the future might have looked like.
I go out on a few dates with a pleasant enough girl, I don’t know why. She makes me feel different, like I can forget about the past. At this point in time I’m considering transferring to another branch within the company as far away from here as possible.
A clean start, a fresh break.
Only when I tell her, the mother of my imaginary phantom baby day dream, does she recoil and tell me she wants me back.
Picture me shouting. Her saying the baby and I would have been her whole world. Me saying even if she hadn’t lost the baby we’d still be broken up.
I’m arguing against my own dreams.
She tells me she loves me. In her own words, from her own lips. Something she has never said before. She tells me she’ll wait as long as she has to be with me. If I need time, then take all the time I need.
But time is not important. I don’t give in at first because I want to her understand what it feels like to be on the other end. That anticipation, the sickness in the pit of your stomach wondering when a decision will be made and you can carry on with your life.
We fall back in together. I spend three days at her house and it’s like nothing before. We get on better than we ever have before. We cook together, sleep together. We don’t have sex because in the back of my mind still lingers the possibility that we could repeat the pregnancy all over again too soon and also because I don’t think either of us is ready.
Things are bliss.
Picture us in bed together, spooning. Her in her baggy pink trousers and a skinny pink vest, me in a grey t-shirt and navy blue shorts. My arm wrapped around her waist where the baby should be growing. My arm, protecting our phantom baby. I kiss the back of her neck and tell her I love her. This is how it was supposed to be.
Christmas comes and I buy her perfume. She buys me a card and says she’s going to buy me a new year’s present because she feels like doing things differently this year.
New Year’s comes and we do not see each other. I’ve been working, my body is shattered after a few twelve hour shifts in a row and I sleep through the end of 2006 and wake up into 2007. Go to sleep one year and wake up the next. I’ve aged in twelve hours.
It is not uncommon for women to miscarry within the first 6-12 weeks of pregnancy. This can be down to stress, poor diet through consumption of alcohol and cigarettes or through sexual intercourse.
Jump to three days after New Years. I’m back in work and I’m happy. For the first 8 hours of today I am happy.
Then he comes into my life.
Technically speaking, he’s been in my life for a few months but I never really acknowledged him. I never had cause to. We occasionally crossed paths at work and said a polite gesture but I never had any need of anything more.
In conversation with a colleague about him, as his performance in our workplace comes into question, it comes to light that he slept with her.
Inside me is a volcano. My heart boils and shoots blood as hot as lava throughout my entire body. I stumble back up the stairs to my phone.
“We were broken up” is her excuse.
I ask ‘When did it happen?’ I already know but I need to hear her say it.
After the last time we broke up. When she was pregnant.
Chaos.
Inside I am broken. My fist clenches, my phone still in the other hand. I hang up. I never saw this coming and to find out from a colleague disgusts me. She phones me back and hesitantly I answer. The excuse everyone who’s ever done something they knew was wrong comes forward.
I didn’t want to hurt you.
I didn’t want you to hurt me either I say.
I need to vent. I need something to let out the pressure building inside me.
I want to burn down rainforests and throw endangered animals off cliffs.
I want to spread oil over a five-lane highway and stand in the middle of the road. Hit or miss I wouldn’t care.
I want to put holes through walls with my bare hands. I want broken bones and blood. I want pain I can see. I want pain she can see.
I go upstairs to the empty floor and smash a pane of glass. I take the sharpest piece of glass I can find and dig into my left arm. I drag the glass, stuck in my arm, down towards my hand. Blood begins to ooze out instantly. Six inches down with my arm covered in blood, I stop.
My common sense clicks in, like a refrigerator fan on a hot day, bringing me back to rational thought.
We were broken up. I have no claim on her actions. She didn’t know she was pregnant so it wasn’t exactly murder. If no one knew then it was an accident. A sad, tragic car crash impact of an accident.
The black bulb above my head has clicked on.
Here I am stood in front of ten or so people, I haven’t counted. I give them their day’s tasks, sales figures and briefing. All the while, blood still dripping down my arm.
I decide to be an adult. To accept the consequence of her actions. At the end of the day, she’s the one who’s lost the most out of this.
I hope the pleasure was worth the pain.
Our beautiful construction. Our baby.
Their supreme deconstruction. Our phantom baby.
Everything I look at has no colour. I wore reds and blues and greens to work. Now I wear black and all I see are shades of browns and greys. Her colour canvas.
It’s enough to know the details, that it happened, but what hurts more is I have to see him everyday at work and he doesn’t know that I know. I still have to make polite conversation when really all I want to do is destroy him.
That smug fucking grin. The baseballs caps. The piercings.
Inside me is conflict. I want to forget it happened and move on. After all, we have a better stable relationship now and the worst is past us. On the other hand, my baby is dead. Washed away in a pool of blood one night because of what they did. What he did.
I find a bitter irony in the fact that the same act that created that little life, destroyed it.
Any one event in any one person’s life is not closed in a bubble. What you do will effect any number of other people, innocent or otherwise.
I was the innocent victim this time. All I gave was love and all I received was lies deception and destruction.
Sometimes you snap. A little piece of string in your mind, the one holding your sane thoughts together just tears and every thought in your mind begins to bounce around.
What you do will effect any number of other people, innocent or otherwise.
Which brings us to now. Everything I’ve just told you is past history. A six inch scar on my arm and a forgotten memory.
But not forgotten by me. I’ve been planning all this time. Six months. One month for every inch on my arm. Sure, maybe it’s wrong to blame him for the miscarriage but I disagree.
He pursued her. Even when I was with her, he nagged and he goaded. He got what he wanted, I lost what I’d always wanted. Our baby.
My career is a distant thought to me now. I don’t wear the coloured shirts anymore. I wear black every day. My eyes have dark rings underneath them, giving my green irises an evil glow. My light brown hair looks less; receding hairline you’d call it. I’ve lost weight, maybe twenty pounds or so.
When you’re this far along the curve of madness, sheer bloody mindedness, then you don’t think much about looking after yourself or even feeding yourself. You watch and you plan. Thinking about how you’re going to exorcise the one demon still plaguing your life.
Six months of planning, waiting, preparing and watching has come to this…
