Tainted Love

They say that there is someone for everybody, and this may be right, but sometimes the planets don’t quite align and those eyes do not meet and so two people who were meant for each other spiral away on the paths of their existence, never to meet and never to explore the special life that they could have had together. 

Sometimes Destiny slips up and what was meant does not come to pass. There is no denying that and there is certainly no going back to put it right.

You can never go backward, only ever forward. That is the nature of our short time here.

I thought of that often, both before my world collided with Stacey’s, but more so afterwards. I’ve had plenty of time to consider it since Stacey.

I have thought it over as I licked my wounds and brooded on the twists and turns in my particular fate, because if there are people out there in the world who never get that single moment that defines their life with another for evermore, then what about those people who got that moment, only for it to explode into a million shards of pain, anguish, despair and confusion?

Late developer was my by-line. My dad scoffed at the tardiness with which I came to each and every party. I came to everything late, so much so that I used to think better late than never. Some things you can leave too late though. You can’t sunbathe in the dark and everything worthwhile is closed after midnight. 

The permanent time delay in my life made me uneasy. I wondered whether I was lazy, or maybe even slow when it came to my thinking. Being behind the curve all the time made me question my suitability as a boyfriend, let alone as a husband and father. And once I began questioning myself, I very nearly began to unravel. My dad didn’t help. He planted the seeds of doubt and nurtured them throughout my childhood, but my being an adult didn’t stop him. Not one bit.

Maybe things would have been different if I’d gone with it and not fought my dad, just let the unravelling happen, but we all have this drive to survive and prevail and that kicked in at just the wrong time in my life, just as I thought that a life on my own wasn’t so very bad at all. At least I wouldn’t be inflicting myself on someone unsuitable and making them unhappy, the way my dad did to my mum. I miss her. I sometimes wonder why it was that she left and dad stayed in this life. He was never happy with her and he remains unhappy. I wanted to see mum happy and she had a shot at that. Without him in the picture to drag her down again and again.

The prospect of a hermetic life now seems like a living hell. Now my eyes have been opened and I am a different person and always will be. I don’t want to be alone, but loneliness is my punishment and I am serving a life sentence.

My life before Stacey was, as many lives are, unremarkable. Most lives are by their nature unremarkable, because there would be utter pandemonium and chaos if everyone was clambering to be remarkable. So we settle for what works and that is no bad thing.

In fact, unremarkable is bloody good. Unremarkable is without drama, it goes to work, it pays the bills and it has a little over at the end of the month for a treat. I was on my way to such a treat when my world turned and nothing was ever the same again.

The whole concept of a treat is amazing when you actually think about it. A treat isn’t just about the treat itself, it’s a celebration of all that is good in life. Keeping the treat simple is critical to the success of the treat. In this case, I was going to treat myself to a milkshake.

There, I told you it was simple. If you keep enjoying the small things in life, then you stand a chance of not getting carried away and taking things for granted. Life is short and we are blessed. There are people who even now will never set foot outside again. Think about that. They have felt the sun on their face for the very last time and most of them don’t even know that fact, let alone appreciate it. So, be in the moment and enjoy it for all that you are worth, and you are worth so much!

The milkshake was a corker. I’d researched it and I just knew it was going to be good. I love ice cream and this milkshake was a huge bucket of ice cream to which a genius had added a smorgasbord of calorific delights. 

Now, I know I said that you should keep a treat simple, and essentially I did. Milkshake. Simple. It wasn’t my fault that someone had taken the concept of milkshake and gone to town on it and then gone to city on it. Then abducted it and gone on holiday to the Caribbean with it. This confection was just madly wonderful!

It also wasn’t my fault when someone launched themselves into me and my milkshake, upending it all over my shirt and the front of my jeans.

“Oy!” I exclaimed in a heady cocktail of indignation and horror.

In the creamy aftermath of the collision and my involuntary exclamation, time stood still. I should have been making a scene and noisily so. The ice cold liquid had soaked me and was quite uncomfortable, but never mind the slurry of ice cream, I was frozen. Frozen in time as I stood gawping at the woman who had assaulted my poor milkshake and deprived it of ever having been tasted, let alone lustfully consumed by yours truly.

“I’m so sorry!” said the woman before me, “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

She grabbed a fistful of napkins and started dabbing at me.

I don’t know why, but I grabbed her wrist and stopped her. It was a gentle grab, the only force was in my words, “it’s OK.”

I wanted her to stop fussing.

I wanted her to calm down.

I wanted her to actually look at me.

And when she did, it all changed. 

She changed.

I changed.

We changed.

There was a connection in that moment and it hit me hard. Like a crossbow bolt to the forehead and another to the heart, and for good measure, a larger one to my gut.

I had never had anything like that happen in my life and I had always doubted anyone who said that they had. That sort of thing was a fairy story told by the older generation in order to encourage their children to pursue something worthwhile with another human being. It wasn’t that romance was dead in my heart, it was only that I was never destined to have anything as special like that happen to me. 

Special things like this happened to other people.

Unremarkable, remember?

I was just being realistic and I was happy with my lot. I hoped that I’d one day meet an unremarkable woman and in my own, unremarkable way, I would somehow find a way to make her feel remarkable. 

Then Stacey walked into my life, threw the best milkshake I’d ever bought all over me and I was head over heels in love. I really was. I’d just met the woman of my dreams and without exchanging a word, I knew that she felt the same way.

Everything aligned.

Perfect alignment in an imperfect world.

It was frightening and exciting and dizzying. I was deliriously happy. So much so that my milkshake was entirely forgotten. Everything was forgotten. We somehow found a seat. It was a battered, mid-brown sofa, and we talked.

We talked excitedly and we could not keep our eyes off each other. That was it, and that was all there was in that first time, but that was enough. It was too much. It could never be enough. It was a feast at which I was perpetually hungry.

Hours later, we were asked to leave the milkshake café. They’d made enough hints. Putting all the chairs on the tables and coughing and switching most of the lighting off. We genuinely did not notice, and neither did we notice the time.

“Can I have your number?” Stacey said this to me outside the café that was now closed and in total darkness.

I was stunned, but glad she had the presence of mind to ask. I was also gutted that this meant a cessation in our time together. I did not want it to end, and so I was frightened all over again as I realised that I wanted to be with this woman. I couldn’t breathe without her. Life suddenly made no sense unless she was in it. She became my everything the moment she walked into me and into my life.

What madness was this!?

We exchanged numbers and then we had to part. Our hands brushed against the other’s as our eyes lingered and we desperately fought the need to leave. That fleeting contact was electric and it was all I could do to resist the urge to take her in my arms and hold her. Just to hold her and feel her in my arms and to feel like I would never, ever let her go. I wanted that so much.

I wanted her so much.

Despite the wave of something like loss as we parted, I was smiling and there was a spring in my step that lasted for days. 

I’d met someone.

I’d met someone special.

There’s a seam of worry in those heady initial days of an insane romance such as this. The worry is that it will all end just as suddenly as it began. Fear of the end is very real. There are so many ways a relationship can end, but in those first days, you are willing it on. You need to see that person you are infatuated with again. You need to see them, because you need to know. You need to know whether what you feel is real, and you need to know whether something as wonderful as this can survive out there in the real world.

In the end, you just want a chance.

You want to nurture what you have and see it grow.

And we did.

We took it easy. There was no rush. We had all the time in the world. We laughed. We smiled. We talked and talked and talked some more. We talked like it was going out of fashion. We marvelled at our shared interests and the easy way that we had slipped into each other’s lives. There was a comfort in our being together, as though we had known each other in a past life.

This was just meant to be.

Stacey said that to me, “you know this was meant to be, right?”

“It feels that way,” I replied.

“Like we’ve known each other forever?”

I nodded.

“Since the beginning of time,” she smiled and that dimple appeared on her left cheek. I loved that dimple and it was that dimple that made me realise I loved her. Right from the very start. But I was no believer in love at first sight. How can you love someone you do not know? That isn’t even love. It can’t be.

It felt that way though.

“I’ve never…” I began.

She placed a finger on my lips, preventing me from saying another word. It wasn’t the finger in itself, it was the physical contact. Something in me came alive when she touched me. I fizzed with an energy I never knew existed.

“I love you,” she said it as I stared at the mischievous light show in her eyes. I lost myself in her eyes time and again, but in that moment I was cartwheeling in space. Tumbling through the infinite and I think I knew then that our time would be short. That it would burn brightly and then there would be nothing left but an afterglow of memory.

We were an impossible dream.

I knew that, but I wanted it all the same, “I love you,” I told her.

Not, I love you too. There was no reciprocity to my sentiment, it was all part of the same thing. We were one in that moment and I understood that we had always been one and always would be. That that was what our connection was. 

We are all connected.

We are one.

I was feeling love in a way I never had before and for that I will be eternally grateful. 

However much it hurts, I know I am better for what happened. I have to be, or it would all be for nothing and it wasn’t nothing. It could never be nothing.

Several weeks past and we found every opportunity that we could to spend time with each other. We lived locally and we always had. How it was that we hadn’t met before was almost a mystery, but in a town with tens of thousands of people, it was also no surprise. We had shopped in the same shops, drunk in the same pubs and bars and hung out in the same parks, but somehow we’d moved in ever decreasing circles, one following the other, but never meeting until that fateful day when Stacey had deprived me of my milkshake.

“How have we never met before?” I asked as we talked about experiences that felt like they should have been shared, but somehow were not.

“Timing,” Stacey said as she squeezed my hand lovingly.

“Timing?” I echoed.

She nodded, almost solemnly, “right time, right place. It had to happen when we were both ready.”

Now I was nodding. I hadn’t realised I was ready, but I now knew that I must have been, “I’m so glad I met you,” I told the love of my life.

“And I you,” she said.

And our lips met. We’d both been true to our word and taken things slowly, but that kiss was inevitable. Even now, I don’t know how it happened, only that it did and it was a kiss unlike any I have ever experienced. In that moment there was nothing else. There was no one else. Only Stacey. I lost myself in that moment and I never wanted to find myself again. I was hers and that was all I ever wanted.

That night of our first and only kiss, I visited my father. I wasn’t in the habit of visiting him as regularly as I thought I should. Our relationship always had an edge to it. Between us, we were always creeping towards fractious, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It was almost like we had unfinished business, but had passed the point when we could attend to it.

“You look like the cat that got the cream,” he said this and it felt like a challenge. Like I had transgressed and shouldn’t have that cream.

I took a moment and nearly didn’t tell him about Stacey, a part of me didn’t want to share my news with him. Not yet anyway. I overruled it. I thought I was in danger of being churlish. Truth was, I was overly protective of my time with Stacey. I didn’t want anything or anyone to affect it, “I’ve met someone.”

“At long last!” he clapped his hands together, “I was beginning to think you were going to be a confirmed bachelor.”

He said confirmed bachelor in a pointed way. I knew what he meant and I knew he wanted me to know exactly what he meant.

I smiled uncomfortably in reply.

“Go on then,” he said, “what’s her name? Divorced? Kids? Baggage?” You leave it this late and you’re running the gauntlet!”

“Her name’s Stacey and she’s never been married,” I told him. Then I noticed the expression on his face and for one ridiculous moment, I thought he was going to die on me. He’d gone pale and he was clutching his chest and I thought he was having a heart attack. To my shame, I thought to myself that this was the sort of thing he’d do to me. To me. 

I made it about me.

But then, it was about me.

“Stacey Morris?” his voice was trembling as he said her name and now I thought he was going to cry.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “what is it, dad? What’s wrong?”

I was leaning forward, very concerned about his erratic behaviour, so when he leapt to his feet I was shocked. I leant back in my own seat but he grabbed me all the same. He grabbed my throat and squeezed with a strength I thought long gone.

“You can’t!” he shouted in my face. I felt his spittle and I felt his rage.

Most of all, I felt his shame and it was his shame that made me understand.

He subsided then. A spent force.

I stood, shaking and sickened.

I stood over him and asked him one question, “does she know?”

He looked up at me with imploring eyes and shook his head.

I left without a single glance back. I left and didn’t think I could ever go back, not to him, not to any of it.

I’d had my moment in the sun, now it was time to move on and live my unremarkable life in a new, but unremarkable place, where no one knew me and I would never know anyone else. Not for me was the remarkable, but maybe one day I’d build up to the occasional treat, but never a milkshake. 

Never again.