The moth hovers round the naked light bulb singeing its soft wings as it tries to get closer. It flutters like a nervous heart with each attempt to touch the bulb. I can hear the tinny knock of its body hitting the hot amber glass. It’s a beautiful suicide.
I’m drawn to my boyfriend like a helpless mirror image of that moth that now lies finished on my rug.When he finished with me two weeks ago because of our irreconcilable lives dark suffocating curtains of sadness drew across my future; suddenly I couldn’t see a thing. I’m 25 years old, at the tail end of youth and the bottom rung of maturity. I have had relationships before; I’ve suffered the defeat of first love and felt the thrill of new relationships and the awkwardness of fifty first dates with new faces in classless places. But none of it compares to ‘this one’.
Three years ago we met in Ibiza on an island that floats in hedonism and chemical thrills and tiny magical pills. It should have been a simple holiday romance. It lasted 2 years 7 months, no days, no hours ; This boy was my greatest achievement, a prize of adulthood. I adored him.
It wasn’t an easy relationship. For one he lived up north. A place of steel skies, hearty pies and miles away from home. I took the chance and opportunity of our meeting to leave my southern abode like the romantic traveller. I was moored by love.
The two years I spent with him were buckled by uncertainty. Our relationship suffered relentless pressure of money, living together and blurred aims of growing up. We never gave up.Furniture was smashed, families were drafted in to help with reconciliations and dramatic dashes were made to the comfort of my mother’s skirts some 300 miles away.
One constant kept us going, I had to have him and he had to have me and no one else would ever do. Suddenly I walked the road of adulthood with a man that also wore converse high tops. I loved his music and his style and he grew to be my greatest friend on every long mile. We were never the boring couple that hung on for dear life but the two that got lost but belonged as a pair. We weren’t love birds, we were socks.
We were ….essential.
Last year I made a mistake; I left. It was never meant to be forever.
I can still recall the uneasy growl of dread as I boarded my stuffy bus back home.Our lease had run out on our rented home and after two studious years university was out. The settled life we had enjoyed an endured together seemed neatly packed up.I took my university degree and a case of clothes and memories.
I assumed the break would do us good, life philosophies screeched by my parents in my ears .
"Your only young, you have so much to experience"
After a month of partying and reunions with friends the novelty of ‘ home’ has worn off. Days and weeks pass and I exist like a pretty cut flower; withering without my roots. I want to be back with him. It was a gluttonous taste not sharing my experiences
Job rejections followed me with regularity interspersed by period of ominous silence by employers and a gradual distance opens up in my road back to him. I lost my confidence and loosen the grip on the reins of my life that is galloping in the wrong direction. I can see him in the growing distance, he’s got his back to me.
Nights get colder and longer and it gets harder and harder to admit I made a mistake. I waste hours on buses for temporary pit stops as his girlfriend and then spend dismal return journeys home watching the scenery change from north to south. I fascinate about jumping off the bus and running home, except which way was that???
The lights on my tree spark an interest in my puffy sad eyes; its nearly Christmas . “Can’t you just wait?” I want to ask the universe, I’m sad I don’t want it to be christmas yet. The presents sit there grand and imposing, life doesn’t wait and neither should I
Good bye.
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