Last night i had a dream. I dreamed i was in my garden. I was in my garden and my garden was flowering as it is now, all cow parsley and cherry blossom, and honesty, and bluebells and forget-me-nots, it was coloured white, and purple-pink, and blue, and green, green, green. There was darkness in the dream, perhaps night falling or a storm cloud passing over. I am me, but i am also a younger me, a me with a baby, my third and my two older children are children as they were when my youngest was born. And my mother is there as she is now. And two police women. The police women are benign figures, comforters not disciplinarians, they are there to help. One is more distant, but one is talking to me, trying to understand some deep problem that i am trying to unearth. They are talking about depression. I cannot get past my words, after a while fall silent. When words cease to be useful communication they are not worth uttering. The police woman asks if she should talk to my mother to hear her story. The problem seems to go back to when my older two were very small and i was left alone to fend for us and we really did not come out of that situation unscathed. My younger one knowing no other life was less disturbed but my daughter and i learned feral ways, survival instincts that perhaps no longer serve us but which are ingrained in our being, as marks and stains and scabs and scars and still open wounds and ticks that we are barely aware of. But all is not bad. While the police woman talks to my mother, and the other is stood closer to the house by the lilac tree, which is covered in unopened flower, determining from a distance and held in a patch of light, I go further up my garden with my two older children and we begin digging around a rose bush that Jon and i planted. We are digging the rose bush up, not to kill it but to tend to it. As we dig we discover new buds forming on the roots, masses of of deep red sprouting shoots signifying new life and abundance. This is where the dream closes.
Dreams, i think, are born out of felt knowledge, knowledge that is obscured and ambiguous. They rise like steam from a cauldron of soup emitting mixed scents that act as sensual guides. I had a dream the night before last too, that dream was not like steam. Some dreams are meant to be recalled and some lurk as dark ghosts. The dream i had the night before last was more disturbing. I dreamed i heard an intruder, the cellar door being opened. I dreamed i was frightened and went downstairs. When I went downstairs i could hear people in my garden and see the light of a fire, i was scared of the people and did not want to confront them for being in my garden, drinking beer and lighting fires and talking in loud aggressive tones, taking ownership of my space, i did not want them to see me, i went back upstairs and made myself wake up and go back to sleep. That dream felt like opening a jar of darkness and fear and waking up was like quickly closing the lid, was an "i don't want to know, i cannot stomach that yet"
Listening to someone else's dreams is rarely as interesting to the listener as it is to the teller because the teller has the back story and the listener is given too much and not enough. Apologies, I am guessing that reading dreams is much the same but i am going to allow myself to wallow in self absorption and speak of a month of dreams i had last summer.
If you've read my blog for a while, and i'm not really assuming anyone does, or that anyone gets much beyond the first couple of lines before they drift off to more interesting things. But if you do then you'll maybe recall my month of being a sculpture at the Waveney River Sculpture Trail last year. This was a change of foot for me, a new way of making art, of creating dialogue about art. It was also a coming into being, my being, a natural passage, but not an expected one, from the piece i had made for Cley '17 that I called Love is a Long Road, in which i tried to depict my experience of unconditional love, of loving unconditionally and allowing myself, maybe for the first time, to love myself without conditions, to love my self as a whole rather than cherry picking the acceptable bits and refusing to acknowledge my flaws, my fails, my ugly, allowing myself to see them and understand that i too am imperfect and yet still maybe lovable. Trust me, give this a try it is really hard to love yourself unconditionally.
Strange things happened over the summer. of 2017. They maybe didn't feel so odd until after Jon's death but afterwards they have haunted me. Peculiar connections were made and creatures crossed my path or made impact, different creatures, a humming bird hawk moth, a swift, a hare. Forgive me if I am giving too much weight to common occurrence. My relationship with Jon had a fairy tale quality and encounters with creatures are significant in fairy tales. As are certain encounters with people. And there were dreams that summer too. I cannot remember the story dreams, maybe i blogged them maybe i didn't, but what i can remember is night after night waking up to banging on my door, thinking "it's Jon at my door", it wasn't Jon, it wasn't anyone, it was me dreaming that Jon was banging on my door, i put it down to wishful thinking then. I wonder now if it was deeper runnel of quantum energy, a secret flow that ran between us whether we wanted it to or not.
Over last summer, from April in fact, i had made myself give up on Jon. He had a new (maybe not so new) companion and I figured she would be better able to build a relationship with him if his stupid ex was out of the way. I was a bit jealous. And he was being nasty about her, and to me, and goading me to fight. I didn't want to fight with him, i loved him. And i thought that if what made him happy was drinking and sleeping with women he claimed not to care about then maybe i had to let go and let him be happy. To back off, to withdraw. I actually paid myself not to make contact with him, like you'd bribe a child to be good with stars on a chart, or how you might give up smoking by putting coins in a jar every time you don't have a fag when you want one, i was aware that on some level i was hooked on Jon.
Another peculiar thing that happened was discovering that a stranger-friend on facebook, a blogger i used to follow, was actually the partner of Jon's ex-wife. That was a very odd moment i wondered if he had known who i was but just because i read someone's blog doesn't mean they read mine so likely our closer-than-comfortable connection was unknown to both of us until that time. It was another fairy tale twist. I wonder if they told Jon that I had said he was the love of my life and that every day without him was pain. I doubt it somehow. The blogger told me to "move on" his words still echo through my head.
I'm talking about Jon and maybe it seems like after visiting his grave in Gozo i should now wrap up, say nothing, let go, move on. And moving on isn't a choice. Moving on is inevitable. Layers of life accrue. Initially coming home from Gozo i felt as if i'd tied up some loose ends. Arriving in Malta airport i hit up against hard rock emotions, regret, pain, ifs, and this continued for several days until the day that we went to see Jon's grave and the village he lived in for the last few years of his life. After that i was curiously more at peace. I wasn't sure if the grave i'd given flowers to was his grave as it had no headstone and it was conceivable that his family had given me the wrong "address" but i said goodbye anyway to the man i loved and saying goodbye seemed to help.
We stayed in Xlendi which was the place Jon had holidayed in just before we broke up. Our choice of residence had been determined by price and chance, but staying there allowed a circle to close. Jon had asked me to come with him but my focus was on my degree. I thought, wrongly, that we'd have plenty of time after.
I wondered when we arrived if i had gone with him in 2013 if things would have turned out differently, if in a new space we would have recovered our well being, who knows it wasn't what happened and reality was something our brief trip allowed me to encounter. The reality of Jon's death, the reality of physical rather than imagined existence. Walking paths and streets that i knew from his emails that Jon had walked, in Xlendi, in Victoria, and Xaghra and also Ramla Bay afforded me a glimpse of the life we might have had, the life he actually had and how far imagination falls short. To hear the birds and the bees and the sea, to see the flowers and butterflies and quick lizards, to feel the warmth of the sun and talk to locals, to meet the light, and the sound of the wind and thunder and lightening and rain, to try living a little as Jon would have lived, initially as a holiday maker, then as a new arrival full of expectation, and then later still as an inhabitant was too much experience to crowd in to one week. And no one knows what another experiences, shared experience offers connection. But this was something Jon denied me. Maybe that denial was a kindness. I came home from Gozo feeling like i'd found a part of me i'd lost years ago, a piece of me that maybe Jon had kept safe for me by taking it away, a piece of me i found with him, in his company when we were beautiful together. Going to Gozo to see Jon's grave opened up a treasure chest of memories. I will never see him or speak to him again and that hurts but i was lucky to have the time i did with him. And maybe his leaving was the only way those memories could be held intact.
Also, and this is perhaps something i should have begun my blog with, going to Gozo made me feel loved and thankful. Firstly to my daughter who took time out of her life to be with me and make sure i was ok, she was kind and patient and super organised and got us from one place to another with very little fuss, i am quite timid and a bit flittery and delicate, her sure-footedness was much appreciated. Also my lovely ex-husband drove us at the crack of dawn to Gatwick and picked us up just after the rush-hour from Heathrow. And my youngest son looked after my cat. And my mum paid for our air fares which were more expensive than i'd hoped and she didn't even wince when i told her the price. And friends who have troubles of their own messaged me to wish me well. Kindness makes a big difference.
Perhaps this is some of the new growth on the roots of the rose. I love many people. I loved Jon, i still love him, but i also love Archie, and Jessamy, and my sons, Richard and Amis, and my grandchildren Luca and Elidi, and one love does not preclude other love. And love, i think, helps the world to keep spinning.
Sunday 29 April 2018
Monday 2 April 2018
Sunday 1 April 2018
April 1st, Easter Sunday ... it is still dark outside. This is a day i've been dreading. It is a day of anniversaries. April 1st is when Jon and I got together. And it was on Easter Sunday last year that our relationship finally broke beyond repair. I think this may be a dark blog. Although i may refer to events that happened before Jon left me my aim is to focus on the four years when we were apart, sometimes unconnected and sometimes not. It may offer explanation for why i am grieving so hard. A grief that often seems foolish and incomprehensible even to me and i'm living it.
Here just for a moment i'll flick back into our time together as lovers and say that from the beginning of 2010 our relationship became incrementally worse, 60% good, 50%, 40%, until by 2013 when Jon left it was really at best a mean 10%. I held to that 10% he held to the 90% bad i think and that determined the outcome of our relationship.
In 2013 when we broke up, it could easily be said and seen that we were flogging an almost dead horse. My hope was that after i graduated we would spend time together playing after years of intense work, that we would soften into our successes, his and mine, give ourselves time to hang out, hang loose, i felt that the world was our oyster, that we could work through our problems, make new memories (jam for the cupboard), and so and so on into a benign old age that would see us glowing and happy at the end of a long and fulfilled life. My hopes were played against his reason, things had gone wrong, it was not worth fixing, it was better to bail and get a brand new life. Was he wrong ? No. My hopes were fantasy, romantic and dreamy, they required work to make them come good, but without that work they would never have come to anything. His reasons were valid, our relationship was awful at this point, if we had gone to Gozo together our problems would have surely come with us. There was no escaping the reality our relationship needed work and determination to survive. I wanted to give it time and space in the sunshine, he wanted time and space in the sunshine but he wanted it without me in the picture.
The fact is a relationship is a mutual agreement and if one party does not want to be with the other it's a pretty much done deal. This is a dance we are all engaged in all the time, with everyone, at work, at home, in our everyday lives, to a greater or less extent depending on how close we are to those we are dancing with.
So there we are, Jon's reason trumped my hope and he left in a blaze of virtuous glory, off to a new more glamorous and exciting life. I too had a brand new life because all my hopes and dreams and plans had been taken from me, i too was starting anew but not out of choice.
At first i was like a bird whose cage door is open but who quietly sits starving on the floor unable to take the freedom it has been given. I didn't know what to do. For a while i was furious and behaved very badly. I wrote emails, raging, yearning, pretending i was fine. I sent some emails, no doubt as deranged as the ones i sent Jon, to his family. Of course I wish i hadn't, they didn't reply, i was Jon's godawful lunatic ex that he was well rid of. I didn't understand. I didn't understand anything. Jon's departure from my life had wrenched my heart from it's bearings. I didn't care what his family thought of me. I wanted him/them to see me. I couldn't stand the awful cool superiority any more. I imagine it just made his family feel more cooly superior. This is a hard thing to say, but looking back Jon's leaving could be seen as an act of kindness. He let me go.
He let me go, and yet he didn't. His response to my crazy fuck-mess weirdness was magnanimous, his new happiness vindicated his decision, "you are the love of my life" he said "but things hadn't worked out". I, in my heat, thought "damn you, if i am the love of your life and you are the love of mine, why aren't we together loving each other". I wanted to know that all the other women in his life had been called the love of his life so that then i could discard the notion, put it in the box marked "empty words". Who knows what the truth behind those words was, maybe one day i'll meet one of his ex-partners and they'll say "oh yes, he said that to me too, it's just a string along phrase he threw out to keep his options open".
And so and so and so on. I drive myself mad with my round and round thoughts. I don't really know where i'm going now. There are parts of the four years when Jon and i were apart where our stories do not link. Our lives went their separate ways. I know my life but the details of his that i know are few and sketchy. I know that at some point between our parting and our reconnecting he began to drink again. I don't know when it became problem drinking but i'm guessing it was a fair time before he and i reconnected in 2015 because he was hospitalised not long after we began a fragile exploratory friendship by email in early summer that year. I think he had injured his foot which had stopped him walking, he said that his girlfriend had wanted too much commitment, his sister in law said that his girlfriend had not been able to cope with his drinking. None of that belongs to me, it is his life with another woman. But suffice it to say by the time Jon and I "re-met" he was not well.
I had continued to email Jon while he and i were out of contact but he had not answered and so i assumed that my emails went straight to his junk, or that he had a new email address. I don't know when he stopped responding maybe around autumn 2014 when i briefly was kind of seeing someone, kind of not really, walking and kissing and touching and eating together, a thing, but not a thing which lasted maybe a couple of months. Jon had informed me that he was seeing someone new the summer before which had put a full stop and a capital letter on to the end of our lives together. We were both moving on, as you do, as you have to.
But in the summer of 2015 i was burgled and Jon was one of the first people i messaged. And he got back to me. Almost immediately. At first i didn't know what to do about his emails. For so long he'd been out of my life, and i'd begun picking up the pieces. I loved him still but i was scared. I was at that point volunteering with a support group for recovering addicts led by a gentle and generous woman who in lieu of wages got her volunteers on to a host of courses about addiction. This learning was eye-opening, i'd gone into my relationship with Jon in a state of innocence. When he'd told me about his past life i took him as tabla rasa, a blank page, not realising that the rest of his life was written on the back and sometimes the pen had been pressed so hard it had forced it's ways through to the front. So it is with everyone but to a greater or lesser extent the marks on the back of us make more or less of a difference to our life ongoing. I had not taken into account how Jon's life before me as a drinker, an alcoholic, would affect all the other relationships he had that were important. Naive to be sure.
Back to the moment his name appeared in my inbox. I was grieving him. After i was burgled one of the things that i struggled with most was finding, a day or so later, the bundle of love notes he'd given me scattered and tumbled out of a draw that the burglar had rummaged through. That and the loss of my dad's camera made me feel sad everything else was replaceable. But there in my inbox was the name "Jon H" it brought me out in a muck sweat.
I didn't open it immediately, fear and longing wrestled within me. I had spent two years getting over him. Earlier in the year I had submitted a proposal to the curator of the Waveney River Sculpture Trail for a piece of work that had taken me back to the early days of our love affair, making the piece had involved me re-treading the footpaths and life that we had shared. I was still in love with him. But I was also deeply wounded. Did i want to reconnect with the man who had left me so callously two years ago. In the end love got the better of me. I opened his email and so began the next stage of our knowing each other.
He made no mention of his drinking at this point, i think he thought he could hide it. But just weeks after he fell down in the street and was taken to hospital. I emailed his sister-in-law to let her know. They didn't know. She got back to me told me he'd been ill, ill how ? drinking again, and so i found out.
So that was the deal. Jon was in hospital for a few days, i think he then discharged himself, decided to go to Venice, asked me to meet him there. I wasn't going to go to Venice to meet a drunk ex who had dumped me without care even if i did still love him. That he thought I would pick up the threads with him just like that as if nothing had happened is a sign of how out of kilter with reason his mind had become. And anyway my son Richard was once again off to foreign lands, Singapore for two years, i was making the most of his last days in relative proximity, and also the WRST was up and running and i wanted to keep an eye on my work to make sure it stayed good and to watch how it weathered. He had built a new life, and i too had built a new life.
Jon went to Venice, and came back very shortly because he got bored. We emailed. We emailed more. He made a will. Went to his barbers to get his hair cut. After his death an old colleague said that he'd said we were back together, we weren't we were just emailing but the intensity of our feelings for each other was still apparent. Our relationship had picked up, but how was still ambiguous, i asked him to come to England to meet me for coffee, for a walk, i knew my family would hate it but we had unfinished business, i was offering friendship, my trust had been broken, i loved him, i wanted him still, but i was wary, very wary, and needed him to meet me in my space.
Over that summer i'm guessing he was drinking but maybe picked up a little, we emailed regularly, did we speak on the phone ? i'm not sure, it was still all quite tentative on my part, i was there for him but i needed to know he was there for me too. By autumn i think we were likely emailing most days. Both of us often up in the small hours of the morning we would check in with each other, we'd talk about life and love, it was flirty and sweet, there was old tenderness and new tenderness too. Our relationship at this point was still rooted in our love affair. There were times we'd argue i remember but distance meant that our fights were more quickly resolved, his silences were not so commanding, and his spite more easily repudiated and what could he do that was worse than leaving me and taking up with another woman ?
I remember Jon as someone physically well. We never saw each other after he left. In my head he is still the man who left me, strong, handsome, lordly. He sent me a photograph of himself that summer, well two in fact, a selfie of him in his mirror, face obscured by the camera but wearing shorts and looking ok tho' in shadow. The other, he sent while he was in Venice, it was a picture of him on his balcony with a chameleon on his shoulder gazing lovingly at someone, not me, i didn't look at that picture long, I didn't want to see it. I thought it was probably taken by his last girlfriend and was their affair and not mine. Later when my friend David took pictures of me i didn't send those to Jon, not the good ones or the ones where i'm gurning or looking fat. My relationship with David was as friends not lovers but Jon was funny about our friendship. He was cross about me going for walks and visiting churches with David. I thought he had a cheek being jealous quite frankly.
But I skip forward. There must have been a point in our re-acquaintance when we re-connected as something more than ex-lovers catching up. That he was drinking was clear, we had occasional phone calls that year 2015 when his speech would be slurred, and sometimes his emails were obviously the hand of a drunk, mis-spelt, mis-worded, sexually gross. I had known Jon as someone very careful, sober his spirit when dark erred towards mean-ness, drunk it became base but also sometimes i'd catch a glimpse of the light that i'd known when we were first together. Lux lucet in tenebris. It was this light i sought to reflect back at him. It was a dangerous game perhaps to have entered into but not one that i thought about. Our relationship was rooted in our love affair, that we talked about sex was not weird it was part of our knowing each other, it wasn't the focus, i would flip him pictures and songs and articles, names of bloggers i liked, we talked about books, films, life, walking, art, poetry, Jon was very clever. I'd tell him about going to the library he started going to his library and i think this was a life saver for him. And our relationship became a meeting of minds, in a way it became deeper than it had been before, without the softness of shared physical experience, touch, taste, sound, sight, smell, we were forced into an etheric connection, a meeting of consciousness if you will. We merged as we had when we were lovers but our merging was spiritual, he'd been my soul mate before and that soul bond became more entwined. I gave him my light, he gave me his darkness. Sometimes i gave him my darkness and he gave me his light.
All this time he was drinking heavily, he said that he was living on vodka and milk. We emailed every day, quite often i emailed several times a day, not long emails, images more often not, not stuff that required a reply just nudges to let him know that someone was thinking about him and cared if he was alive or dead. Later after his hospitalisation in 2016 he said that my emails had kept him going, that otherwise he'd have had no human contact, and likely be dead, he said he was eternally grateful but Jon's eternally grateful never did last long.
After his hospitalisation he seemed to plateau. He was still drinking, sometimes a lot, but he seemed to be out of his hole. I knew that the last hospitalisation had come after he'd given up drinking cold turkey, and i knew from the courses i'd done that he could easily have died and that he hadn't had been a lucky chance. After his death i read the term kindling which is used to describe the effect of these near misses, each time they happen the nervous system gets more broken and the chances of survival slimmer. Dark matter.
But there, so Jon did survive that hospitalisation, that was the one where his family told me not to bother them again and that it was up to him to stop. I had thought that if only we could have pulled together and got him into rehab i could have got him long distance walking to take his mind off things, maybe that was my saviour complex kicking in. Maybe Jon needed and wanted to die, maybe he had stopped coping with life. He said when he left me that we couldn't fight our demons, i was cross with him about that i thought "i'm fighting my demons lets fight off our demons together" but maybe he knew that his had got him and that he needed to leave life as he he had led his life prior to our knowing each other drinking and sleeping with women who gave him no mental distress.
I'm diary-ing. Am i being very boring ? I think i may be. But I'm getting out of me that which i am no longer able to carry, or carry alone, releasing by recording, and in so doing giving space in my being to life after Jon. There is no way i can set down the whole of the ten years we knew each other or put on a page the intensity of our connection, the page would burst into flame. But the little i set out may one day serve me as a memory jogger when the life we shared is trod over, invisible and overlaid by new experience.
I had begun this blog with the intention of taking it up to Easter Sunday last year which is when we lost contact again. But I realise that the events that led up to our losing contact are still too close for me to give form to. I suppose in all truth i am thinking of the year and half before he died really, from his hospitalisation in 2016 to Easter Sunday 2017 and then to his death later that year on October 11th. I have three unopened emails from Jon. One from Easter and two from about a month before he died. And an unheard voicemail on my phone. The emails sit ticking in the folder marked Jon, buried under the mountains of emails i have sent him after his death and the emails i made myself not send him and so sent to myself in the months between Easter and the time i knew he was dead. Will i ever read them ? will my regrets and my sadness ever be soft enough to let me witness the last few scraps of time he gave me ? The email from Easter is likely to be unkind. The two from the month before he died charming and sweet, tho' I cannot be sure of that. All of them will hurt i think. I have a feeling that one day i will hear the voicemail by accident and that it will drop me to my knees. RIP Jon. RIP Fella.
It is gone 11am now
Here just for a moment i'll flick back into our time together as lovers and say that from the beginning of 2010 our relationship became incrementally worse, 60% good, 50%, 40%, until by 2013 when Jon left it was really at best a mean 10%. I held to that 10% he held to the 90% bad i think and that determined the outcome of our relationship.
In 2013 when we broke up, it could easily be said and seen that we were flogging an almost dead horse. My hope was that after i graduated we would spend time together playing after years of intense work, that we would soften into our successes, his and mine, give ourselves time to hang out, hang loose, i felt that the world was our oyster, that we could work through our problems, make new memories (jam for the cupboard), and so and so on into a benign old age that would see us glowing and happy at the end of a long and fulfilled life. My hopes were played against his reason, things had gone wrong, it was not worth fixing, it was better to bail and get a brand new life. Was he wrong ? No. My hopes were fantasy, romantic and dreamy, they required work to make them come good, but without that work they would never have come to anything. His reasons were valid, our relationship was awful at this point, if we had gone to Gozo together our problems would have surely come with us. There was no escaping the reality our relationship needed work and determination to survive. I wanted to give it time and space in the sunshine, he wanted time and space in the sunshine but he wanted it without me in the picture.
The fact is a relationship is a mutual agreement and if one party does not want to be with the other it's a pretty much done deal. This is a dance we are all engaged in all the time, with everyone, at work, at home, in our everyday lives, to a greater or less extent depending on how close we are to those we are dancing with.
So there we are, Jon's reason trumped my hope and he left in a blaze of virtuous glory, off to a new more glamorous and exciting life. I too had a brand new life because all my hopes and dreams and plans had been taken from me, i too was starting anew but not out of choice.
At first i was like a bird whose cage door is open but who quietly sits starving on the floor unable to take the freedom it has been given. I didn't know what to do. For a while i was furious and behaved very badly. I wrote emails, raging, yearning, pretending i was fine. I sent some emails, no doubt as deranged as the ones i sent Jon, to his family. Of course I wish i hadn't, they didn't reply, i was Jon's godawful lunatic ex that he was well rid of. I didn't understand. I didn't understand anything. Jon's departure from my life had wrenched my heart from it's bearings. I didn't care what his family thought of me. I wanted him/them to see me. I couldn't stand the awful cool superiority any more. I imagine it just made his family feel more cooly superior. This is a hard thing to say, but looking back Jon's leaving could be seen as an act of kindness. He let me go.
He let me go, and yet he didn't. His response to my crazy fuck-mess weirdness was magnanimous, his new happiness vindicated his decision, "you are the love of my life" he said "but things hadn't worked out". I, in my heat, thought "damn you, if i am the love of your life and you are the love of mine, why aren't we together loving each other". I wanted to know that all the other women in his life had been called the love of his life so that then i could discard the notion, put it in the box marked "empty words". Who knows what the truth behind those words was, maybe one day i'll meet one of his ex-partners and they'll say "oh yes, he said that to me too, it's just a string along phrase he threw out to keep his options open".
And so and so and so on. I drive myself mad with my round and round thoughts. I don't really know where i'm going now. There are parts of the four years when Jon and i were apart where our stories do not link. Our lives went their separate ways. I know my life but the details of his that i know are few and sketchy. I know that at some point between our parting and our reconnecting he began to drink again. I don't know when it became problem drinking but i'm guessing it was a fair time before he and i reconnected in 2015 because he was hospitalised not long after we began a fragile exploratory friendship by email in early summer that year. I think he had injured his foot which had stopped him walking, he said that his girlfriend had wanted too much commitment, his sister in law said that his girlfriend had not been able to cope with his drinking. None of that belongs to me, it is his life with another woman. But suffice it to say by the time Jon and I "re-met" he was not well.
I had continued to email Jon while he and i were out of contact but he had not answered and so i assumed that my emails went straight to his junk, or that he had a new email address. I don't know when he stopped responding maybe around autumn 2014 when i briefly was kind of seeing someone, kind of not really, walking and kissing and touching and eating together, a thing, but not a thing which lasted maybe a couple of months. Jon had informed me that he was seeing someone new the summer before which had put a full stop and a capital letter on to the end of our lives together. We were both moving on, as you do, as you have to.
But in the summer of 2015 i was burgled and Jon was one of the first people i messaged. And he got back to me. Almost immediately. At first i didn't know what to do about his emails. For so long he'd been out of my life, and i'd begun picking up the pieces. I loved him still but i was scared. I was at that point volunteering with a support group for recovering addicts led by a gentle and generous woman who in lieu of wages got her volunteers on to a host of courses about addiction. This learning was eye-opening, i'd gone into my relationship with Jon in a state of innocence. When he'd told me about his past life i took him as tabla rasa, a blank page, not realising that the rest of his life was written on the back and sometimes the pen had been pressed so hard it had forced it's ways through to the front. So it is with everyone but to a greater or lesser extent the marks on the back of us make more or less of a difference to our life ongoing. I had not taken into account how Jon's life before me as a drinker, an alcoholic, would affect all the other relationships he had that were important. Naive to be sure.
Back to the moment his name appeared in my inbox. I was grieving him. After i was burgled one of the things that i struggled with most was finding, a day or so later, the bundle of love notes he'd given me scattered and tumbled out of a draw that the burglar had rummaged through. That and the loss of my dad's camera made me feel sad everything else was replaceable. But there in my inbox was the name "Jon H" it brought me out in a muck sweat.
I didn't open it immediately, fear and longing wrestled within me. I had spent two years getting over him. Earlier in the year I had submitted a proposal to the curator of the Waveney River Sculpture Trail for a piece of work that had taken me back to the early days of our love affair, making the piece had involved me re-treading the footpaths and life that we had shared. I was still in love with him. But I was also deeply wounded. Did i want to reconnect with the man who had left me so callously two years ago. In the end love got the better of me. I opened his email and so began the next stage of our knowing each other.
He made no mention of his drinking at this point, i think he thought he could hide it. But just weeks after he fell down in the street and was taken to hospital. I emailed his sister-in-law to let her know. They didn't know. She got back to me told me he'd been ill, ill how ? drinking again, and so i found out.
So that was the deal. Jon was in hospital for a few days, i think he then discharged himself, decided to go to Venice, asked me to meet him there. I wasn't going to go to Venice to meet a drunk ex who had dumped me without care even if i did still love him. That he thought I would pick up the threads with him just like that as if nothing had happened is a sign of how out of kilter with reason his mind had become. And anyway my son Richard was once again off to foreign lands, Singapore for two years, i was making the most of his last days in relative proximity, and also the WRST was up and running and i wanted to keep an eye on my work to make sure it stayed good and to watch how it weathered. He had built a new life, and i too had built a new life.
Jon went to Venice, and came back very shortly because he got bored. We emailed. We emailed more. He made a will. Went to his barbers to get his hair cut. After his death an old colleague said that he'd said we were back together, we weren't we were just emailing but the intensity of our feelings for each other was still apparent. Our relationship had picked up, but how was still ambiguous, i asked him to come to England to meet me for coffee, for a walk, i knew my family would hate it but we had unfinished business, i was offering friendship, my trust had been broken, i loved him, i wanted him still, but i was wary, very wary, and needed him to meet me in my space.
Over that summer i'm guessing he was drinking but maybe picked up a little, we emailed regularly, did we speak on the phone ? i'm not sure, it was still all quite tentative on my part, i was there for him but i needed to know he was there for me too. By autumn i think we were likely emailing most days. Both of us often up in the small hours of the morning we would check in with each other, we'd talk about life and love, it was flirty and sweet, there was old tenderness and new tenderness too. Our relationship at this point was still rooted in our love affair. There were times we'd argue i remember but distance meant that our fights were more quickly resolved, his silences were not so commanding, and his spite more easily repudiated and what could he do that was worse than leaving me and taking up with another woman ?
I remember Jon as someone physically well. We never saw each other after he left. In my head he is still the man who left me, strong, handsome, lordly. He sent me a photograph of himself that summer, well two in fact, a selfie of him in his mirror, face obscured by the camera but wearing shorts and looking ok tho' in shadow. The other, he sent while he was in Venice, it was a picture of him on his balcony with a chameleon on his shoulder gazing lovingly at someone, not me, i didn't look at that picture long, I didn't want to see it. I thought it was probably taken by his last girlfriend and was their affair and not mine. Later when my friend David took pictures of me i didn't send those to Jon, not the good ones or the ones where i'm gurning or looking fat. My relationship with David was as friends not lovers but Jon was funny about our friendship. He was cross about me going for walks and visiting churches with David. I thought he had a cheek being jealous quite frankly.
But I skip forward. There must have been a point in our re-acquaintance when we re-connected as something more than ex-lovers catching up. That he was drinking was clear, we had occasional phone calls that year 2015 when his speech would be slurred, and sometimes his emails were obviously the hand of a drunk, mis-spelt, mis-worded, sexually gross. I had known Jon as someone very careful, sober his spirit when dark erred towards mean-ness, drunk it became base but also sometimes i'd catch a glimpse of the light that i'd known when we were first together. Lux lucet in tenebris. It was this light i sought to reflect back at him. It was a dangerous game perhaps to have entered into but not one that i thought about. Our relationship was rooted in our love affair, that we talked about sex was not weird it was part of our knowing each other, it wasn't the focus, i would flip him pictures and songs and articles, names of bloggers i liked, we talked about books, films, life, walking, art, poetry, Jon was very clever. I'd tell him about going to the library he started going to his library and i think this was a life saver for him. And our relationship became a meeting of minds, in a way it became deeper than it had been before, without the softness of shared physical experience, touch, taste, sound, sight, smell, we were forced into an etheric connection, a meeting of consciousness if you will. We merged as we had when we were lovers but our merging was spiritual, he'd been my soul mate before and that soul bond became more entwined. I gave him my light, he gave me his darkness. Sometimes i gave him my darkness and he gave me his light.
All this time he was drinking heavily, he said that he was living on vodka and milk. We emailed every day, quite often i emailed several times a day, not long emails, images more often not, not stuff that required a reply just nudges to let him know that someone was thinking about him and cared if he was alive or dead. Later after his hospitalisation in 2016 he said that my emails had kept him going, that otherwise he'd have had no human contact, and likely be dead, he said he was eternally grateful but Jon's eternally grateful never did last long.
After his hospitalisation he seemed to plateau. He was still drinking, sometimes a lot, but he seemed to be out of his hole. I knew that the last hospitalisation had come after he'd given up drinking cold turkey, and i knew from the courses i'd done that he could easily have died and that he hadn't had been a lucky chance. After his death i read the term kindling which is used to describe the effect of these near misses, each time they happen the nervous system gets more broken and the chances of survival slimmer. Dark matter.
But there, so Jon did survive that hospitalisation, that was the one where his family told me not to bother them again and that it was up to him to stop. I had thought that if only we could have pulled together and got him into rehab i could have got him long distance walking to take his mind off things, maybe that was my saviour complex kicking in. Maybe Jon needed and wanted to die, maybe he had stopped coping with life. He said when he left me that we couldn't fight our demons, i was cross with him about that i thought "i'm fighting my demons lets fight off our demons together" but maybe he knew that his had got him and that he needed to leave life as he he had led his life prior to our knowing each other drinking and sleeping with women who gave him no mental distress.
I'm diary-ing. Am i being very boring ? I think i may be. But I'm getting out of me that which i am no longer able to carry, or carry alone, releasing by recording, and in so doing giving space in my being to life after Jon. There is no way i can set down the whole of the ten years we knew each other or put on a page the intensity of our connection, the page would burst into flame. But the little i set out may one day serve me as a memory jogger when the life we shared is trod over, invisible and overlaid by new experience.
I had begun this blog with the intention of taking it up to Easter Sunday last year which is when we lost contact again. But I realise that the events that led up to our losing contact are still too close for me to give form to. I suppose in all truth i am thinking of the year and half before he died really, from his hospitalisation in 2016 to Easter Sunday 2017 and then to his death later that year on October 11th. I have three unopened emails from Jon. One from Easter and two from about a month before he died. And an unheard voicemail on my phone. The emails sit ticking in the folder marked Jon, buried under the mountains of emails i have sent him after his death and the emails i made myself not send him and so sent to myself in the months between Easter and the time i knew he was dead. Will i ever read them ? will my regrets and my sadness ever be soft enough to let me witness the last few scraps of time he gave me ? The email from Easter is likely to be unkind. The two from the month before he died charming and sweet, tho' I cannot be sure of that. All of them will hurt i think. I have a feeling that one day i will hear the voicemail by accident and that it will drop me to my knees. RIP Jon. RIP Fella.
It is gone 11am now
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