What you asked for.

This is where it starts and where it ends. This one moment. My hands cupping a mug of lukewarm green tea. Take a look around. Examine my face. This isn’t a moment I expected to signal any great changes. It was just another normal Sunday up until now.

The green tea denotes my attempt at another lifestyle change for the better, one that is ultimately doomed to failure (but I don’t know that at the time, infused as I am with a sense of purpose that I kid myself will last forever but ends up being three weeks – a personal best as it happens), sat in a big old green armchair that I got for free and cover with blankets to stop it grossing out any callers to my humble abode. Sat opposite is my friend, who is on a sofa that I also got for free and also covered in blankets but just because I hate the real colour of it and can’t afford/be bothered to have it reupholstered. My friend who, at this moment, cannot meet my eye, my friend who often treats me with a mixture of weary indifference and utter awe and loves me but doesn’t always know how to show it or even if she actually feels it because she’s just as fucked up as me, albeit in wildly varying ways.

It’s not a place in time and space that I expected to signal the dawn of something new and the crushing pain of something ending. But nonetheless, this, right here, is where it starts and where it ends.

A few days before I’d been sat in a pub. One of those proper pubs you know? Like, the sort of pub with an old man in the corner who never moves and judges the other patrons silently but steadily whilst continuously supping from his pint (which never seems to get empty and yet you never see him getting a refill), and there’s a dog that doesn’t belong to anyone that roams around just sniffing everything but is not too bothered about saying hello, and it’s got faded flowery wallpaper and still the carpets and seats feel a bit grimy with ash even though it’s been against the law to smoke in there for over a year now? A place like that yeah? That’s my favourite sort of pub. A pub with history and regulars and a dart’s league. Anyway, that’s where we all sat, me and my friends and some of their friends and a load of other people in groups who we didn’t know. All sat around a big screen watching a bunch of blokes running around kicking a ball and cheering and screaming when the ball happened to find itself at one end of the field and sighing and cursing when it found itself at the other. Everyone in that room wishing and praying for the same result ‘let us WIN’. But I was the only one who really wanted it. Who really needed it in fact. Ardent football fans may disagree with me on this point (and they’d have every right to) but I was the only one who knew the truth, who knew what was riding on this game, this was the game that would decide what happened with my heart now. I asked the universe to prove something to me. Something that I couldn’t put into words but I sent out truth probes from the bottom of my soul to the heavens above and asked for this one little thing; ‘let us win. If we win I’m finally free’.

So we all sat, these strangers and these friends and we all concentrated but I knew I was the only person in the room, in the country, that was concentrating that hard on making us win. Every bit of me focused. Every atom tingling with desire. Willing and begging the universe for just this one, small, tiny, favour: Make it so that I know I’m going to be ok. Just this one sign. That’s all.

I’ve done this kind of thing before but this was the first time I was asking for something massive from the universe and not something silly like getting text messages from inconsequential boys (although this was the first time I had learned of the powers of asking for things from the universe – it worked every time without fail – but I tried to only use it when I really had to as I knew it was the wrong application of these divine powers and knew the universe had to readdress its balance in some way every time I requested something from it). It seems strange that it had never occurred to me before to be asked to be set free. I guess, at that point, I didn’t know that freedom was all I really needed. I still liked the shackles he had on me in because it felt safe there - even if it didn’t make me happy; this was for everyone who has loved someone that doesn’t love quite as much or in quite the same way in return and let that destroy them a bit.

Back to the armchair and the green tea - I should have known then, in fact I kind of did know then but I didn’t know I knew if you get my meaning. Like, when you turn around suddenly and catch somebody staring at you but you consciously weren’t aware of it to begin with and couldn’t say in the spilt second between you looking round and catching the eye of a stranger exactly why you were looking around to begin with. I just knew what she was going to say before she said it. I’d been waiting to hear those words for the last two years. But she doesn’t come out and say it right away. We dance around it and flirt with it a bit. Normally my patience gets the better of me but this time, this time I’m happy to wait. I don’t want to take the red pill just yet.

Two weeks earlier from this moment, the bar where he and I first met had burnt down, which had some kind of beautiful poetic justice. I mean, it’s sad, I’m sorry to the people who owned it but come on; how often does the universe provide such tangible metaphors? It felt both jarring and yet extremely cathartic seeing that on the news and seemed another universe sign that things were ending or about to end. However, I was still floored when she stopped faffing around telling me boring stories about people at her work that I have no real vested interest in hearing about and said:

‘He… He has a girlfriend’.

Stop.
Tape.

Freeze Frame.

Stop.
Everything.

Right there, is where it ended.

'Oh'. Breathe. Just breathe. Act normal. ‘How long?’

‘Two weeks I think, Gary mentioned about it in the car last night but even he’s not sure’

I want to know how I can remove myself from this room, this situation, without anyone noticing. I will run away to France. Or Moscow, I’ve always wanted to go to Moscow. I just need to work out how to make my atoms travel there one-by-one with the power of my mind because I don’t think I can physically move any part of my body ever again. I want the atoms to sink into the chair I’m sat on, to melt away leaving no trace. Just, please God, don’t let anyone look at me. Don’t let them see my face etched with pain and betrayal. I don’t want anyone to know what I’m feeling right now.

‘Are you ok?’

‘Fine’

‘He’s a loser anyway. You wouldn’t want to be with him, you can do sooo much better!’ She rolls her eyes and bends forwards whilst saying the ‘so’ to emphasise the point. I laugh, thinly, and this seems as good a time as any for her to change the subject. She can’t cope with negative emotions and I am glad of it because I don’t want or need to discuss how my soul has been crushed any further. As soon as she finishes her tea, she leaves. I couldn’t tell you what else we discussed that day.

Time moves along, as it is wont to do, and so do I. I eventually begin moving limbs again. I even find myself chewing food occasionally – if only out of habit than any real hunger – I stand and walk. I go to work. I lie down on my bed and close my eyes for dreamless sleeps. Every minute of this is punctuated by the thought that ‘he isn’t mine anymore’. Sometimes this will have an angry exclamation point on the end of it. Other times it will be said sadly and quietly, ending with an ellipsis. Sporadically, normally in the morning as I remember to do things like brush my teeth or hair (I do not always remember to do these things. Or I do remember but choose not to due to the monumental effort it involves), it will be said with a question mark: ‘He isn’t mine anymore?’ Like I have to double-check it wasn’t just a horrible nightmare that was a little too real at the time and is now mixed up with other memories that actually happened.

I had only myself to blame. This was exactly what I asked for. We had won that stupid football game and so, it seemed, had I. The universe had set me free, it never occurred to me that freedom would mean falling into nothingness, but that was indeed exactly what I had asked for. Wishes can come true.