I’ve never been a big believer in romantic gestures.
Candy hearts, bouquets of exotic flowers with sentimental messages, they’re wasted on me. Tell me you love me in a thousand different ways and I’ll show you a thousand different facial expressions all of which say I couldn’t care less.
Take me on holiday to far-flung romantic destinations, Paris, Prague, Rome, Madrid and all I’ll want to do is sit and drink Martinis until we can get back on the plane and fly home.
Call me and tell me you love me, I’ll just take a deep breath and if I’m in a good mood I might even say it back but I promise you I never actually meant.
You bought me the perfume, the flowers, the teddy bears holding love hearts and every time I put them away somewhere to gather dust so I never had to look at them or smell them again.
Every gesture you ever made to tell me how you felt about me went over my head.
I never built your hopes up, I never led you on. I admit sometimes I enjoyed playing with your emotions, being so goddamn shitty with you. Other men – real men – would have turned around and walked away but you just laughed nervously and tried to kiss me when I could barely stand to be around you.
You shouldn’t have bothered celebrating our anniversaries either.
One month.
Six months.
A year.
I wasn’t keeping count and if you ask me now I still can’t tell you how long we’ve been together.
All I know is it feels like a lifetime.
Other men seem so long ago that I struggle to recall if they were really my relationships or something I’d read in a book or magazine.
Glossy memories neatly categorised with only the highlights to scan over.
Anyone can look back at their life, try to make sense of their time and only see the movie moments.
You could try and introduce me to your parents and sister a hundred times over and I’ll show you a hundred different illnesses that prevent me from leaving the house that day.
Are you seeing the pattern yet?
It’s not that we aren’t compatible, it all stems down to the overwhelming fact that I’m not compatible. You see, there was a point when I really did try and love you. There were a brief few weeks when I thought about you every day and picturing you in my mind would make me sick inside. That school-girl kind of sick when your organs squirm and your heart freezes at the sound of a name.
Your name.
Infatuation is a strange beast. It’s the half way house between fond affection and all out love. That’s where we were. Half way between the start and the finish of something beautiful. Something so tremendously tortured and decrepit that even though I knew I didn’t love you, I still had to see it through to completion.
Well let me warn me you darling, the finish is a lot closer than you anticipated.
But first we have to get there. On my terms.
Where I am right now is sat inside a rented blue Ford. What I’m doing right now is thrashing the life out of it, as it speeds down the high street in this deserted town.
The weather is grey and cloudy, looks like rain anytime soon. Not even acid rain is going wash the stains off me. The remnants of what I’ve become and who I am now, living, breathing and polluting the gene pool for everyone else.
As the car hurtles over the asphalt I cast a sideways glance out the window and fail to spot a single person on the pavement, so there’s going to be nobody around to stop me or hold me back should this all follow through.
This town, this place used to be vibrant and bright and when my little sister and I used to come here as children you couldn’t move for fat people and ice cream vans. There were shops full of candy, fast food and windmills that you could stick in the sand. Arcades with slot machines; games that involved the use of a giant metal claw, to fish a tiny stuffed toy out from a pile of other stuffed toys. Just a bunch of shiny bright lights to take away your money, leaving you with that temporary euphoric high that comes from the combined joy of loss and success at the same time.
We would come here every summer for a weekend, usually in June when we were on summer vacation from school. Mom and Dad sad it was our treat but really it was more for them than it was for us.
Slowing down in the car, all I see are boarded up windows and closed signs in every store. The arcade doesn’t shine with neon lights anymore; there are no windmills outside the convenience stores and there are no ice cream vans or people to buy them.
This is my lost childhood. Now I’ve found it again I realise what I’m about to do is right. Unless you stop me.
Leaving behind my job, that apartment, that city is the best thing I’ve done in years. It’s one thing to rent a car and drive away from everything you know.
It’s another to make it permanent.
Unless you stop me.
Coming to the end of the road, I take a sharp left and the wheels screech as rubber tries to grip asphalt and fails miserably. Just ahead of me is the beach, a vast wash of grey sand and blue sea for as far as I can strain my eyes to look through the sunglasses I’m wearing.
I slow down and park the car against the promenade that runs parallel with the beach and step out on the pavement. The breeze flows around my ankles as my patent red leather stilettos touch the concrete. Slamming the car door behind me I put my hands in the thick black Prada coat I’m wearing and stare out over the beach.
There’s a reason no one comes to this beach and this town anymore. Well two, actually. And they’re both seventeen year old girls.
