In Which We Return From A Darker Place

Layer of Fog

by JESSICA FURSETH

The text he sent me yesterday, telling me he misses me and wants to be my friend. I respond I would like that too, but I don’t know how. We sigh, as far as that’s possible to do over text, and then do nothing.

That I’m old now, meaning I know you don’t get to be friends, not right away like this. The god of break-ups owns this time, and the deity will make you sit in the waiting room flicking through the thoughts in your head, working through every little tedious thread in the tangle. 

That I know why we broke up but I don’t think he does because he keeps asking me: “Did you leave because I’m so broke right now? Did you end it because I take drugs sometimes? Was it because of that guy you met, the one you keep meeting up with?” I feel the anger swell in my chest when he asks this, because it’s none of these things and yet all of these things, and so much more. But most of all it’s how he doesn’t hear me when I try and tell him. I spent the best part of a season trying to salvage things, trying to explain what the problem was, desperately sifting through all the words in my arsenal to find the ones that would show him how I felt. More than anything I wanted him to understand.

The moment when it started breaking. Of course I didn’t understand at the time but with hindsight I can see it: a freezing day with grey fog hanging low over the city, on a bus because the train wasn’t running. He told me something about what he believed in and how he wanted to live, some dream about communal living and sharing resources and a commitment to social activism. All things I can understand and even admire, but the opposite of everything I wanted for myself, as a fickle introvert with a bad case of wanderlust. And felt an ache swell in my chest, realising in a flash that I’d put my eggs in his basket without understanding who he really was, and how could I have let that happen? I got off the bus and went home alone, deflated. We recovered, but I slowly started to retrieve my eggs, one by one, keeping them safe in my own house again because I didn’t trust him with them anymore.

Some Humpty-Dumpty metaphor. 

That time he broke it off via text message while we were trying to work it out, sending me a missive while I was standing in a train station buying wine for a weekend away. I couldn’t even engage with what he was saying, blinded by the indignity of being dumped by text: “I am ending this because you no longer put our relationship first.” Or something like that; I’m not sure what it said exactly because I deleted it, too surreal a message to exist in the world.

What I remember is that I laughed, then shook, and then I raged at the absurdity, the humiliation of being dumped in the manner of my mobile operator informing me I’ve exceeded my monthly data allowance. When I got back there was a wall of ice between us, which melted as he came knocking on my door late at night. We spent three days in bed, in a time capsule, but it didn’t last.

The fact that I felt relief when it finally ended. Too many repetitions of the same arguments. I’d stare at him in disbelief, across the pub table or across the stream of text messages, wondering how it was possible to have been with someone for so long and have it end in such confusion. How black and white it felt, everything he said. How he refused to allow for the fact that things could change. How I was probably equally frustrating to talk to for him but I can’t see it, because when you are breaking up, you no longer are who you are.

That I’m realising you never quite finish with someone you used to love, not really. My ex and I still possess pieces of each other, even as he lives on the other side of the city where he calls another woman girlfriend and I have someone else who answers to boyfriend. See it didn’t take long; I told you the breakdown was a relief.

The worst thing about this is realising how wrong I was about him. How it took me so long to get to really know him, blind to reality at an age when I really should know better. How it makes me look at my new boyfriend with a twinge of skepticism, wondering what’s lurking under the surface, as I’ve always thought myself to be a good judge of character but maybe not. I don’t often wish things were different, but I’d give a lot not to feel this way as my new boyfriend deserves better.

That I regret nothing about my ex. Not getting into it in the first place, nor any of the things that caused it to end because when it was good, it was fantastic. And when it started to break down, it felt natural. I can never admit this to him though, because it’s cruel. But I know what it feels like to be so broken up about a relationship that you can hardly breathe, and this isn’t it. All I know is that I toss my phone across the table in frustration at yet another text message where he completely misses the point. But even as I do, I know it was all worth it.

Jessica Furseth is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in London. You can find her website here and she tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

In Which We Miss The Last Train

Berliner Pretzel, Cornish Pasty

by JESSICA FURSETH

The train terminal at Berlin Schönefeld Airport is just across the lawn of the terminal building. Since the plane to London was set to take off in less than 25 minutes, I was walking fast across the grass, but I figured there was no point in running. I mean, we were basically there, and no bears were chasing us. My boyfriend, on the other hand, was jogging up ahead, berating me for my lack of effort; he’d been stressing about the time during the entire train journey from the city. As if that would make the train move any faster, I’d muttered under my breath, as I slouched back in the train seat. I was eating the soft pretzel I’d bought from a little bakery stall after we missed the last train that would get us to the airport at a reasonable hour; it was still hot from the oven.

My boyfriend didn’t want a pretzel. What he wanted was to sit at the edge of his seat for the half-hour train ride and urge the engine forward with Jedi powers before sprinting up to the terminal building. I caught up with him in the security line, where we scowled at each other, casting quiet blame for ending up in this predicament. It matters whose fault it was, you see, because foreign travel has cost me three relationships; four if you include the one I broke up with twice.

The first time it happened the guy wasn’t even there. I’d gone to Athens with a friend who was  headed there on a business trip, which meant I often ended up on the roof after dinner, drinking beer alone while she prepared for the next day’s meetings. The night sky was black, the Acropolis was set in lights; I was bored and half-drunk and couldn’t stop thinking about some guy who wasn’t my boyfriend. Fast forward a year or so, past our resulting break-up and geniously getting back together again, and we found ourselves going on three weekend trips together in a single month.

Of course we never lived to tell the tale. Dubrovnik was the straw that broke the camel’s back; the walled city is on the World Heritage list and it was wonderfully sunny, but what I remember best is sitting outside some Renaissance church paying mobile roaming charges to call a friend, trying to put my finger of the feeling that nagged me. My parents went to Dubrovnik too, later that year, and when they showed me their holiday photos I pretended I’d never been there.

Being a catalyst for a break-up doesn’t always result in negative feelings about a place though: I have pretty decent memories of Porto still. My boyfriend and I had been travelling around Portugal for two weeks by train, pulling into Porto as a couple and departing as free agents. This is a long time ago now, but I still remember a stand-off on a street corner where we wanted to go down different roads. I will refrain from making a lazy metaphor. I ended it in the airplane, up in the clouds, thinking maybe it would make me feel lighter. Somehow it worked. Something similar happened in the clouds over San Francisco, again starting in an airport, as I was headed back to London to see my boyfriend after a month apart. I was the last to board, forcing myself to keep walking down the retractable walkway while everyone else were already in their seats. Even when I think about this now, the prevailing memory is the sadness of leaving the foggy city, not the guy.

I’ve been told you’ll know everything you need about a person by how they’d behave if you got to the airport and realised you’d forgotten your passport. I think about this every time I search for my passport at the security gate, because I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not the offending boyfriends that would have failed this test. The common link here is me. I’m the one who looks over at them, the only familiar element in a sea of foreignness, and think, do we fit, even when there’s nothing else tying us together?

There’s something menacing about finding yourself in an alien environment with someone, manoeuvering coded transport maps, arbitrary tipping rituals and hunger-induced fights in cultures that like to have dinner at 10pm. Not to mention the feeling of watching the person you love and adore lose their cool and stamp their feet like a five-year-old, because no one understands them when they read French words in a clunky English accent. If the cracks are already there, it culminates in one central, bleak observation: "We don’t belong, not here, not together."

Or possibly something more unkind comes to mind, judging from how my boyfriend was looking at me and my pretzel during the Schönefeld scuffle. I ignored him, licking the salt off my fingers. We reached the gate with a cool ten minutes to spare, and opted to sit separately for the hour-long flight home. We made up once we reached London, hunched over Cornish pasties on a freezing train station, a scenario familiar to us and one in which the two of us made sense. We laugh about it now, as it ended well. But we’ve decided to stay put in our own city for a while, just to be safe.

Jessica Furseth is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in London. You can find her website here and her tumblr here. She twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

"Call It Fate Call It Karma" - The Strokes (mp3)