A Lone Marriage

Make or break. That’s what it was. That’s what it was for me. Maybe it was for him too. I don’t know anymore. There’s a lot I don’t know, now that my eyes are wide open and I know more than I have ever known.

How I wish I could take it all back, every last bit of it.

Ignorance was bliss, but then it became difficult. I didn’t want difficult. I think I wanted easy. Easy was a big mistake, but not the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I’m still trying to define that one. I see its shadow, but still I can’t see it for what it is. Perhaps I don’t want to.

It’s not that I’m chicken. I don’t scare easily. Some things we are supposed to fear though, and quite rightly so. We have to be wary of those things that would end us. We all have that will to survive, so we can live to fight another day. I think I may have always known, my unwillingness to see it for what it was, was used against me. They use you against yourself. They don’t do the heavy lifting. You do.

I think that fighting was all I had towards the end, but I wasn’t sure I could do that anymore, and I have a feeling that that’s exactly what he wanted. Either way, he was going to win. This was all a game to him and I was just a piece on the board. For as long as he could move me and play with me and do whatever he wanted in order to get what he wanted, then everything was fine with him.

Except it wasn’t. He was far from fine. And I was so far from fine I was terrified that I was too far out to find my way back. I didn’t know what happened to a person then, if they could avoid being like him that was. The alternative to being like him had to be better, but it was still a fate worse than death. 

It was a death.

It wasn’t always like this. 

Everything began so well. I was in my own fairy tale. He - I no longer refer to him by his name because he’s not that person. I don’t think he ever was – swept me off my feet, dizzying me with his charm and attentiveness. That was all I‘d ever wanted. I’d dreamed about it. And here he was, giving me exactly what I wanted.

I thought that was love. But how could it be? We hardly knew each other back then. 

Mine was the usual story, or at least it seemed to be. That heady honeymoon period, but then reality seeped in through the cracks, drowning all the fun. The problem was that reality was relentless in its pursuit of us. I couldn’t get my head around the loss of our happiness. There was nothing to put my finger on.

Where had it all gone wrong?

I held on to those halcyon days. They kept me going through the hard times. I still saw the man I had first met. He was still there, but I couldn’t expect him to be there twenty-four-seven for me, could I?

Time went on and I found myself bruised and aching. Not bruises that show. It was my mind that was bruised. The bruises that no one can see are the worst, or rather the bruises that others know are there, but choose to ignore.

In the end, not that I realised it was an end of sorts, I resorted to a simple solution. I dared to dream, reasoning that if we were to get away from it all and spend time in the sun enjoying ourselves, then we had a chance. We would both remember what it was that brought us together in the first place, and we could reboot. That’s all that we needed, a fresh start. Then we’d be on the right track and we could share a life worth living.

We blocked out two weeks of holiday. I wanted more, but he was insistent that two weeks was more than enough. He was right about that.

His concern was money. After that initial flourish at the outset of our time together, he tightened the purse strings and we did less and less as it always came down to a matter of not being able to afford it. There was sense in saving money, but it never quite sat right with me, especially when we didn’t seem to actually be saving any money.

I booked a gite in Northern France. I had visited that region as a child and I knew it to be idyllic. I pored over hundreds of photos until I found the ideal place for us. A stone built dwelling that had once been a small farm building situated in the middle of nowhere, it looked out over meadows and a panorama of countryside that almost made me weep at the very thought of it. I was tasting echoes of the simple meals that we would eat together as we sat in the shade of the cottage, sharing the happiest of times together. We would go out in the morning to explore and return home with a fresh baguette, cheese and a bottle of red wine. My mouth watered at the prospect of it. There would be pastries and cakes made fancy by an artist intent on creating a feast for the mind as well as the body. 

I marvelled at the simplicity of my dream. I didn’t want much. All I wanted was some time with my man. A beautiful location, good food, good company and great sex. As I did the research and made the arrangements, I was already there. Everything was going to be fine. More than fine. We both deserved this. The break, and the life that followed it.

In the lead up to our holiday, he was a bear with a sore head. He was stressed, blaming me and the holiday for his stress. I was creating undue pressure. I was too demanding.

It was all my fault.

By the time we were driving to the ferry, my head ached and I was in tatters. I’d almost called time on the holiday such was the state I was in. The idea of driving to the ferry. A potentially choppy crossing, then driving on the wrong side of the road and finding my way to the place I’d booked was becoming too much. 

I went ahead anyway. I’ve been called stubborn more than once in my life. Sometimes I reckon it’s pure bone idleness on my part, I don’t want to take the time to consider my options, so I forge ahead, come what may.

For the entirety of the trip over to France, he was a glowering dead weight. At no point did he let up. He was there, but in a way that added to my woes. I remember thinking this is the wrong man. I’ve brought the wrong man on holiday with me.

There’s usually a point in the holiday where the stress of planning and executing the holiday itself falls away. This often happens when you arrive. It sinks in that the escape from home and the drudgery of a humdrum life has at last been achieved.

You’ve arrived!

Well we arrived and if anything, it got worse. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I finished unloading the car and unpacking and I blew out a long, hard breath, “here at last!”

He just looked at me.

I stood, deflated and helpless. I stood there for some while. He’d bestowed that look upon me and then turned his head away. He would do this. Just sit there. Like a reminder. I began to think of him as a gargoyle. A grotesque with a function that I had yet to fathom.

“I’m going outside,” I told him. I resented having to state the obvious. My actions were about to make my words redundant.

“Right,” he said, without looking up at me.

It seemed that I had brought a teenager with me on holiday, not a grown man.

I did my best to walk from the room, it took much effort not to stomp out or slam the front door behind me. As I looked out over the scenery I had dreamed about, I could not find it within myself to let go and be present in that moment, for he was there behind me and his presence changed everything.

Taking a seat at the small metal table that I had planned more meals at than was possible in a fortnight, I tried to relax. I didn’t want to think of him, but he had dominated my waking thoughts for as long as I could bring myself to remember. He was always there. But as I sat there in a dream turned sour, I could not help but think at last about my predicament.

I had come here to reconcile with the man of my dreams, but now I understood that I was in fact alone. Alone with my thoughts. I had brought someone here who did not belong. Whoever was brooding angrily in the gite was not the man I had married. Or, if he was, I had made a terrible mistake. I had seen something in that man which had never existed.

Later, I would understand that we all do that. That in those first crazed months with our beau, we are engaged in nothing more than a fantasy. Thankfully, for most of us, as the fantasy fades, we both have it within ourselves to care and to think. We engage with each other and we get to know each other. As we do this, we build something worthwhile and we keep going, even if sometimes, what we have built collapses despite our best efforts. 

You see, we invest ourselves and once we’re invested we find it difficult to let go. Right there, as I sat in the middle of a field in the French countryside, the sun shining down upon the ground in front of me, I was utterly invested. To me, that was what marriage was. There was nothing else. Only, I was beginning to see that what I had was a form of nothing, now I was allowing myself to see things for what they were, despite how much hurt that caused me. 

He didn’t care about me, and I suspected he never had.

I kept drifting between two versions of the man on the other side of that door, wondering which was closer to the truth. It would be some while before I realised that neither were. Back then, I thought I’d brought two men on holiday with me, now I think there was nothing there at all. Not a person anyway. 

He was not, as is sometimes said, relationship material. He was not made of the right stuff. He had forsaken his humanity and given himself over to the dark within him. He was made of the wrong stuff and I wondered at how I had not seen that until now. 

Bringing myself to think about the reality of my situation was hard, but harder still were the revelations my thoughts brought with them. They flew at me, hitting hard, grabbing me with stone cold hands and dragging me down into depths of despair. 

I was alone. 

I had always been alone. 

Alone with a monster who cared nothing for me. A monster who had been taking me apart whilst we both pretended we were living.

Despite my state of utter despondency, made worse by the sun absenting itself from my world, I returned inside. He was in the same seat and same position as he had been when I had left him. The gargoyle. Waiting. Shutting himself down until the commencement of round two. I looked at his downcast head and rounded shoulders. His eyes would be staring into space. Zoned out. His mind elsewhere. Always elsewhere. In a kingdom of his own making. A dark and pointless place that bore no relation to the reality that besieged him. From his castle of lies, he took petty revenge against a world that he had rejected. A world he feared so totally, he could never step forth into it as himself.

I felt sick as I thought about all the time I had wasted. I’d never known this man, even in those first months when I thought we were happy. A time that was supposed to be a promise of the life to come, but was only ever a badly drawn lie intended to entrap me in a living nightmare.

I remained standing, wanting to take the high ground, but failing in the face of something I could never understand.

“Have you…” I began to ask a million dollar question, but the currency lost its value as I spoke the words out loud.

He looked up then and I saw through the vacancy in his eyes. I saw fires of anger and hatred. There was nothing good left in this man, or if there was, it was buried deeply under layer upon layer of lies, rage and the hate I felt boiling off him right now.

I pitied the boy who had been so badly treated that he thought this was the answer.

“Have I what?” he asked me in a cold monotone.

I took a seat, what little energy I had was being drawn through the soles of my feet, “who did this to you?” I asked this broken figure of what I had thought was the man who loved me. My supposed soul mate. But this figure had no soul. He’d crushed that part of himself and left it languishing in a dark cell of his own construction.

There was no love here. No capacity for it. Yet still I sought the truth of it, even in the face of a million lies.

“Did what?” he asked me. But he didn’t want an answer. This was one of the many petty games within his Big Game. He used words to lead me a merry dance. Nothing mattered and words had no meaning for him, they were merely a means to an end.

I reached out and took his hand. He snatched it away from me. Withdrawing himself and his affection. I was beginning to see all his tactics now. At times he would love bomb me, overwhelming me with a sense of affection, building my hopes up to a point where I was delirious. Then he would drop me from a great height. It was always my fault. He found something he could use to blame me and he would turn on me before going cold. He’d stay out, whether that was at work or in the pub. He’d leave me with nothing but an empty bed and a house made cold with despair.

“It was your mother wasn’t it?” I saw that now. Although she was very different to him on the surface, she was afflicted in the same way. 

Somehow, it made it worse to know that she had made him this way.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he rose to his feet, his face now a mask of cold rage, “you always have to do this, don’t you? We’re on holiday for crying out loud! Want to ruin this for me too?!”

I smiled.

“What the hell is wrong with you and that idiot grin of yours!?” he hissed at me.

I was looking up at a callous little boy. This boy had never experienced love, so he’d withdrawn into himself. He was the kind of boy that happened upon a bumble bee and instead of showing it kindness, instead of a teaspoon of sugar water to drink, he’d pull its wings and even its legs off, placing it in a matchbox and inspecting it often as it died a slow, helpless and terrible death.

I was that bee. He controlled and hurt others in order to gain respite from what he was doing and what he had become. A sad and pitiful addict using me for his supply. He was as dangerous as they came, capable of anything, just as long as no one found out what he was.

“I love you,” I meant it. 

I wanted the little boy to hear me. I wanted to give him those words for the very last time. He deserved that, and I had deserved to be with the man that boy should have become. Instead I was confronted with a weak and cowardly demon possessing the body of a man I thought I’d loved, but had never been given a chance to get close to.

Those three little words were also goodbye.

I watched him do his usual thing. Turning his back on me, muttering something about going to bed. Retreating once again in order to draw me in so he could hurt me all over again. A destructive cycle that had already taken a terrible toll on me.

I watched him go and I waited.

I knew what I must do and that I must do it whilst he did not expect it. 

I had to escape whilst I still could.

As the clock approached the witching hour, I took my bag and crept away from the gite. I climbed into my car and drove away into the night. Into the dark, but away from his darkness. I was travelling back towards the light and the first I saw of it was the sun rising from its slumber and bathing the ancient spires of Mont St Michel in golden fire.

Stopping the car, I stepped out and I cried with relief, giving thanks for a return to the life that was always meant for me.