Poor, sad Ted

By the time I was fucking poor, sad Ted- not his real name- of course, I didn’t care who I was fucking. It was sex as self harm. Sex with you though was a gateway drug: a gateway into adulthood, into maturity and primarily into marriage. After all, who better to covet as a husband than somebody who already is one, even if in fucking their 17 year old student, they’re proving not to be very good at it.

Sex with you was like reading that Sylvia Plath poem Daddy out loud: intense but fucking genius and always well over the top. You chucked me around like a ragdoll and I begged for your forgiveness. I understood the point of sex with you, you could see why they made it so compelling. You would risk your life for it let alone a baby or six. I couldn’t even be bothered to take my top off for poor, sad Ted. The first time we fucked- on his mothers ancient sofa that had actual cotton thingamees on the back to keep them clean, I didn’t take a single stitch of clothing off. He had to work around them, it was my own personal challenge to him… that and breaking into my stony, black heart. He once asked if I would take my bra off for him, and I said no- just flatly refused. You would have taken it off yourself, I remember thinking. But then that was the difference between you and him, and why he wanted to marry me and you wanted to fuck me senseless four nights a week and go home to your wife. You were a cunt and he wasn’t (although I knew who I would rather be spending the nights with, truth be told).

I could keep this up, this poor, sad Ted nonsense, and he deserves our pity to an extent. But he wasn’t wholly blameless in this. For a start when we met- well, re met, I had known him when I was a kid- I was this husk of a human. I was surviving, and that’s the right word, on booze, fags and whatever drugs I could cadge off of my worldlier friends. I was barely eating. I was a fucking mess. Also, I tried not to go out with him. I used the excuse that I was writing my dissertation for so long that it was borderline embarrassing. Newsflash dickhead, I’m taking speed with some lad I just met on the bus yeah, I’m not actually footnoting some shit about the Brontes. The dissertation excuse wasn’t entirely a fiction, I was doing an English degree (when I wasn’t busy fucking everything up) and I was writing my dissertation on the Brontes, but the way I was painting it I could have written Wuthering Heights three times in the time it apparently took me. So yeah, he was pretending not to see a lot of stuff. Also, I was still fucking Matt a bit- not like I had been and not with the intense sadness of before- but I was open that I was seeing him. Poor, sad Ted only saw that as a challenge.

What I should never have done was met him at Pizza Express that night. It was just because I couldn’t spin the dissertation excuse anymore, and anyway I thought he might buy me wine. I was right too, he did. A bottle and a half later and I literally remember thinking “Ah fuck it, might as well.” Next thing I knew, I was fully clothed on that dreadful sofa getting pounded by England’s worst shag. Sometime later he told me that he was embarrassed to have shot his load too soon. Least of your worries, pal. I was fucking dead inside.

So yeah, some people self harm by cutting themselves with glass or bits of broken mirror, some people take heroin. I self harmed by nearly marrying poor, sad Ted.