Fictionalisation. - unfinished.
I hated everything. Everybody thought I was lost or somehow broken but from where I was sitting, I was the only sane man alive. Trust had let me down and I held it directly accountable for my state of mind. I'm going to tell you the story of my empire's decline; the decolonisation of my heart and the great exodus to my head. While what I will tell you is correct, I don't want you to assume that it's the truth. It's just a truth. A one-way mirror.
*
Good things happen in autumn. If I was to list the majority of the few good things I think have happened to me, they would have happened to me in this season. This is nothing more than a romantic idea, but it's one that serves its purpose. This is to say that my story begins during an autumn month when the air has a comforting chill and your exhalation is visible in the night. I find this undeniably beautiful. The story itself begins with a similar romantic fabrication; hope. Even in those more innocent days passed, I'd learned to distrust the idea. To this day, however, the distrust has never put me off. This lingering naïve weakness has rarely served me well.
They say the Devil is in the detail and I can think of no better example than this. She was hair dye in tight jeans with a nervous smile and over-zealous eye contact. This wolverine in lamb's attire bore a face that had launched countless ships and a body that could stop continental traffic. I'd like you to meet Her. She had appeared to me as if from nowhere to offer me deliverance from the dark dream that shadowed my waking life. Deliverance that I was in dire need of; I was far from home and in a bad way for it. I was being haunted. By myself.
The official story is that I had moved away to study in an apparent attempt to become a productive member of society. The empirical truth is that I had shipped myself into cold obscurity and embarked upon a determined attempt to drink my environment dry. Distance had become a fools' asylum in which I had been placed to keep me from my friends. Home sickness quickly fell ill and mutated into loathing and despair. As darkness built its sprawling fortifications around my consciousness, She appeared. An unambiguous shaft of pure white light piercing some forgotten chink in my black armour. I saw the sun rise inside of me for the first time.
It was in a champagne-rich Paris that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman had sparked the on-screen romance in Casablanca. My saga begins in a damp parking lot, clumsily restoring an unfortunate wing mirror to its rightful place. She was the most beautiful face I'd seen in a lifetime's staring but she drove like someone who was in the wrong place when spacial awareness had been handed out. The most cavalier act of the night had been a tentative kiss that petrified me. I wasn't a patch on Humphrey, but it was enough to make a usually wry smile genuine. In my mind's movie that night, I had won the attention of the female lead and was eagerly awaiting the credits rolling.
Increasingly now, I found myself in Her perfect company. To the approving cries of both my heart and my head, She was quickly becoming a constant in my improving life. The sun in my heart was by now beating down brilliant rays with enthusiasm and consistency. As I frequented low-budget restaurants, sat through hours of dreadful cinema and drained countless bottles of wine with my self-appointed saviour, something approaching content set in. Now apparently cured of melancholy, I allowed smiling to become routine and for a while stopped cursing God. I was taking a welcomed holiday from cynicism.
*
Three months later and Christmas had been and gone. The happiness lingered on. Some time around the New Year, we had found ourselves drinking with the family of a good friend. I might have been cured of my melancholy but I had refused wholeheartedly to let something such as smiling, that had been no friend of mine until recently, get in the way of my familiar companion Alcoholism. In an act that was most likely spurred on by paranoia and encouraged further by drunken and youthful excitement, I dropped a sentence into the air and crowned it with a question mark. Few people can match me at drinking and I'm guessing that She'd tried. She slurred to the affirmative, kissed me unusually tenderly for a drunk and made her way to the bathroom. I had a girlfriend. Who was vomiting. With help from the demon Hindsight, I realise that it should have been me retching my guts up in a cubicle. My friend's mother had checked on her after She'd been gone for half an hour. It wasn't until long after the conclusion of this story that I was told it was Her eyes that were gushing, not Her stomach. I couldn't bring myself to ask what words were exchanged. This omen was unfortunately unknown to me, though, as I grinned in the face of apparent triumph.
It can't have been later than April when the first of many nails was pounded into my Calvary cross. Even now, I have no idea whether my reaction showed extreme emotional strength or a radical case of personal weakness. She'd rushed over; there was something important to say. The gnawing in my stomach felt like a cancer. My guts weren't wrong. This girl with flawless emerald eyes was staring into mine and from the lips I used to kiss came the hammer-blow that sent that nail home. With all the grace of a war-widow receiving a telegram, I stood paralysed and silent. The previous night, hair dye, tight jeans and perfect eyes didn't sleep in their own bed. A man with an ego might have been mortified by the breach of trust or the personal hurt inflicted and issued marching orders to the turncoat in front of him. Your narrator claims to be no such thing. Not being wired right, I rapidly found myself in a state of panic; I didn't want to lose Her. I told Her that and I kissed her and for the first time, I told her that I loved her. She reciprocated in kind. I meant those words with every fibre of my being and given the circumstances, that fact now comes accompanied with pangs of baffled nausea.
To the best of my memory it was around now that the arguments started. These stalemate rounds of verbal pugilism would become a permanent fixture. It was usually my self-destructive lifestyle and my circle of close friends that lit Her fuse. Sometimes, it was anything else too. Either to the credit of my stone-set feelings or to the shame of my fading dignity, I remained immovable. I loved the girl who'd kept Her nervous smile and her captivating stare. I loved her more than ever.
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
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