Pets so often grow to look like their owners

If I had spent the past five years having experiences then you had spent the same years actively trying not to get involved.

Whenever my mother referred to somebody as “straight” it was always a compliment… “Oh you can trust him,” she would say, “He’s very straight. No pretense.” For what it was worth, I was always a fan of the pretense, liked a bit of drama and a sense of putting on a show. You were what my mum would call straight. Dull. Willfully without pretense.

I never fancied you and maybe that was at the root of the problem. Or maybe it was that it was all too fast after him. I don’t know. All that I do know is that I seemed to get swept up in it entirely by mistake and where there had been escape routes, there no longer were any.

Perhaps it was my age but things seemed to complicate and solidify unpleasantly by the time I was 22. My life had been for the years that he and I were together, strange and unsettling, at times awful and soul destroying, but alive and something in me had been growing the whole time, even if what I had been cultivating was a kind of cancer. Suddenly I was cold and dead and worse than that I had backed myself into a corner just by saying nothing. If I was dead already then this new relationship was my tomb and I was never crawling out. You know when you cook a chicken and then almost immediately put it in the fridge? The way the fat hardens and whitens and becomes waxy? That was what I felt like now: a chicken hardening in my own chill. And I was dead. Just like the chicken.

I suppose I should never have gone on that first proper date. I had been putting it off for weeks, lying about writing my dissertation when actually I was, for the most part, drinking and crying and taking drugs. I think I went out of a sense of embarrassment really- easier to go than to stand you up again. I could see objectively that you was a nice person and that you liked me. You really liked me. I didn’t think much of myself at this point, so perhaps it was the allure of at least one of us in the room not thinking that I was a cunt.

You asked me to marry you, and I said yes. I never did marry you though, in the end you were just another casualty of him. I am sorry for that, sorry that a man that you never met but saw once, briefly, from the window of a train, ruined your life for a while. That wasn’t fair. You didn’t deserve it, but then neither did I.

The sex was abysmal. Not abysmal like there was no technique, I can’t really remember if there was or there wasn’t, but abysmal like eating a meal you don’t like the main ingredient of or listening to a song when the singers voice really gets on your nerves. It wasn’t actively like eating something you’re allergic to or hearing a song that upsets you…. The reaction wasn’t violent, it was just vaguely uncomfortable, irritating. It was on his parents sofa, in the dark and I was wearing a lime green skirt. I didn’t take it off. You acted as though this was the pinnacle moment of his life so far and that just made me feel worse, underneath all the wine and self-loathing and the irritation that anybody could believe in love anymore. Imagine entertaining the idea of falling in love with the cold, dead chicken, coated in their own waxy fat. Fool.

What a terrible thing to do, sleep with someone you don’t like to make yourself feel better and what beautiful irony that all it should do is make you feel so much worse. How awful to not applaud you for trying to make things better, how dreadful to see yourself as a dead piece of meat. For you, knowing that it made me dislike myself even more intensely may be some comfort. You hate me and I don’t blame you. I was dreadful to you, as dreadful and as selfish as he was to me, perhaps more so in the end. I was a cunt and he made me a cunt. Pets so often grow to look like their owners.