I took the flight anyway.
I was on the plane. He told me not to come but I just had to look him in the eyes. A few years we had been seeing each other now, long distance. There was about 8 weeks in-between every visit. It was a long flight.
I was worried. Something was up, I didn’t really understand what. He wouldn’t explain it to me. I knew the quickest way through the airport to get to the bus and then the public transport to his house, with my eyes closed. Now I had to find my way to the hotel, which made the last leg of the trip more tedious. I wanted to drop off my things and take a shower.
When I was on the bus I felt my body fighting the jet-lag. There was a 9 hour difference between him and me, if he wasn’t on a trip but in his home. He would often wake me when he was about to go to sleep, or the other way around. I loved it when he did that, the best way to wake up in the morning. But he hadn’t done that in the last two weeks and in the weeks before that it had been less than usual.
I was worried he didn’t want me anymore, and that brought tears to my eyes. I would understand it, though; there was so much distance between us. I was unable to relocate to get to him, and he didn’t want to leave his company for too long. Sometimes I felt that maybe there would be more chance of us making it if I could have been closer to him.
I had to shake these thoughts or I would be crying again. I had people looking at me in the plane already. I didn’t want to keep getting looks.
Besides, he had said we were ok. That he just needed some time alone. I tried to hold on that phone call in order to keep myself together while I walked up to the reception of the hotel. The hotel was small and cheap. I didn’t care. I was hoping that he would let me stay with him if he saw me.
The shower had done me well, even though it was in a cheap plastic cubicle. I was still tired, so going outside in the sun would do me good, fighting the jetlag. I decided to walk to his house. It was a little over half an hour walk. I tried calling him on my way there, but he didn’t pick up. I didn’t expect him to, but I had to try. He would know I was here because I was calling from the local number I had for my visits here.
His house looked dark when I got there. The curtains were closed. I got up the concrete stairs on my way to the doorbell. I rang but nobody opened up. It was weekend, I didn’t expect him to be working in the office, but he might be visiting friends. I sat on the stairs, pondering my next move. I checked to see if I could find a key under his doormat, it would sometimes be there. There wasn’t. I decided to ring the bell again. He would have opened the door by now, if he were home. I sat back on my spot on the concrete.
The neighbor came home. She was carrying a big paper bag of groceries and had her keys dangling on one of her fingers. I took be a while to remember her name. Rob sometimes joked about them. At night they would sometimes make a lot of noise. So he would call them S&M. When I remembered his joke I remembered that she was called Samantha and he was called Marcus. He was from Finland, she was a local. I had been in their house, once. She had given me ideas on where to go when Rob was working. Most of the time I was working remotely during the day when he was gone, but some days I just felt like doing something fun when I was there. You don’t fly off to the other side of the planet to just keep looking at the same book-shelves all day…
“I am glad you are here!” She looked at me briefly walking up the left side of the concrete stairs, past me. There wasn’t much room, so she had to be careful. She was looking at her feet while I replied.
“Why?” We apparently skipped pleasantries.
“He is not doing well, again” The again startled me. I didn’t really want her to know I had no idea what was going on. I started to think that I didn’t know him after all. I didn’t want anybody else to realize that, that would be even more embarrassing.
“He doesn’t know I am here” I said to her. Trying to explain why I was on the stairs instead of inside.
“Just keep ringing. He will open up eventually” she said while pointing at the doorbell.
“here” she dropped a take-away box in my hands. “I think it is all I can do”
She opened her door with her keys in her right hand while balancing the big paper bag on her left leg. She said goodbye and I got the idea she was happy that she could close the door between us before Rob would open up.
I started ringing the doorbell. After a while the door opened.
“oh, it is you” The way he said hello made all the strength I had in my body melt away. My knees trembled, my hands started shaking. He didn’t even hug me. He let me in, his house was a bit dark, but looked like normal. At that moment I would not have found it strange if the whole place had been upside down. He was so different from usual!
He asked me why I had come. I told him that I was not sure what was going on.
“I told you, I need some time alone” It was what he had said to me during our last phone call, a few weeks ago.
I replied to him “I know, but I don’t understand. I wanted to talk to you myself.”
He took the container that was slowly cooling from my hands.
“It doesn’t change anything, MJ. I still need some time alone.” He took the container to the kitchen, while I followed him there. The kitchen was brighter than the corridor had been. To me it seemed he was thinner than usual. He was a bit overweight, the last time I saw him, his chubby belly was gone, now. He opened his fridge and put the container in. The kitchen was a bit messy, but that was nothing out of the ordinary again. A few of the same kind of containers, only empty, were stacked in the corner of the counter. Maybe he had just been working a lot, for some reason not in the office.
He turned around towards me.
“I just do not feel like seeing people. I want to be alone. I am sorry you came here for no reason but I asked you not to come” Now he had his hand on my back, he was slowly pushing me towards the door.
He was completely different from usual; he was a fun, smiley guy. I had met him online a few years ago. He had commented on a post by what turned out to be both our favorite band. He had posted a joke, something about the front-mans height. I laughed at the screen of my phone and kept replying to his replies. The jokes were hilarious, although probably only to both of us. I felt my heart skipping a beat when I saw his friendship request.
We had a lot of fun, even before we were able to finally meet. I did not remember him to ever been this unfriendly. He was always considerate to other people, caring, even. I was used to him asking people how they were doing before they could ask him. He was kind to other people, to everybody. None of the success he had has made him arrogant, or annoying. For some reason now he was simply harsh.
Before I could turn around the door was closed behind me.
I still didn’t get it as I walked down the street. The desperation I felt was like walking through clay and mud up until my knees. Why would he want me out of the house so badly? What would be there that he didn’t want me to see? It struck me, sharp as an arrow in my side. He was seeing somebody else. The revelation made my body feel ice cold and burning hot at the same time. That was probably why he wanted me out of the house.
He had never hidden his feelings. That made the relationship feel strong and I believed that we were meant to be. His clear intentions made me feel as though we could handle anything. For work he wasn’t in one place all the time anyway, he traveled a lot. It didn’t matter where he lived! We had a project together for a charity for a while, which I loved doing. His connections made my business grow quicker than I expected. He was supportive and I loved to challenge him a bit. He had said I made him a better man.
But the truth was, he was successful and I was not. I was lagging behind for a decade or so. And to believe that I could ever lift myself up to his level was delusional. I had kids wandering around the house most days. It made it difficult to work as much as I wanted to. Besides, he said he didn’t want children but I reckoned that with the right person he probably would have them. He was getting older but it was not as if it was impossible for him. I was too far away to do that with him.
The truth was, he was out of my league. Surely he would find somebody else at some point.
The familiar gnaw of feeling inadequate and worthless made me stop in the street and almost fall to my knees. Its teeth seemed to bite into me harder than normal. I thought I had beaten this beast but it apparently was easy for it to take its place again.
I turned back. I had to take a few deep breaths and walked back to the house.
I kept ringing the doorbell regularly until he opened up. The same enthusiasm came towards me but this time I had braced for its impact. He had kept the chain on the door. I had to come up with an excuse to come in or he would shut the door right back in my face.
“I think I left my passport here. I lost it, can I have a look?”
There came a sigh and he closed the door to open it again.
I stepped into the corridor again. He walked into the kitchen, looking around for my passport.
“I am sorry to hear that you have lost your passport, but it isn’t here.”
I confessed to him I didn’t lose anything, while looking at him. He looked tired. He didn’t look like somebody that was having fun with someone else. There was nobody else in the house.
“I thought maybe you were seeing somebody else”
“Oh, no” he said. He was a bit upset, I could see that.
“Mj, we are a team! I need you to trust me on this. I just need some time alone.”
I was tired and walked to the couch in the living room. I don’t think he saw that I almost collapsed on it.
“I am sorry for how I responded to you, I just didn’t expect you.” He sighed, than talked again. “I do not want you here because I am not my usual self. I don’t want you to see me like this.”
He responded agitated to my question. As if he had been clear and I was a student that still didn’t understand the assignment.
“Look, I get depressed. I am no fun for you now, and I do not want you to see me like this. Is that so difficult to understand?”
The cat was out of the bag. We were apart so often I didn’t realize this was something he struggled with.
“You get depressed often?” I didn’t know much about depression. Sure, I had a time when I thought life was meaningless and pointless, but that was an isolated incident, back when I just didn’t know what to do with my life. It left without me having to put in an effort, as soon as I starting moving on with my life.
“Sometimes.” he looked at me with a painful face, sighing again before continuing. ”I was depressed for over two years before you came into my life.” I could tell he was reluctant to admit that one to me.
I felt left out and cut off. He could have told me. I taught I knew him but apparently I didn’t.
“Now can you be respectful and leave me alone?” He again showed me that same agitation. He didn’t want to share this with me.
“No” There was plain anger on his face now, how he looked at me after I said it. I wasn’t going to leave his house, because he was surely not going to let me in again.
“I need to think” I didn’t want to set him off and I didn’t feel like fighting. But this was not ok with me. I needed a bit of space to realize what he had been keeping from me and what it meant to me. I needed to figure out what it was that I wanted to do with this.
He gave up suddenly on getting me to move out of the house. Like he couldn’t be bothered.
“There is food in the kitchen” he said briefly, leaving the living room. I did not know where he was going, but I needed some time to process this anyway.
Thinking about what he had been saying turned out to be impossible. It was so hard to keep my eyes open in the dark living room that I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up once that night, after a bad dream where I kept losing him in a mass of people. When I woke up the second time and I opened the curtains of the windows it was still dark. The jet-lag was bothering me. I went to the kitchen to eat. The light of the clock of the microwave was showing 04:00 intermittently. I smiled, it meant that Rob had been here at some point, pulled the plug at 23:59 to put the plug back in at 0:00. Some clocks are programmed to start the time again when they get the flow of electricity back. They will however pulsate to warn you that they have been without power. Because he would do it at midnight there is no reason to set the clock to the right time again. He would sometimes do that in a hotel room as well, once even waking up in the middle of the night to do it.
I was not sure if it was the jet-lag of simply being awake at such a strange hour but I sure did feel lonely. Why did he never tell me? Did he not trust me enough? Was he worried about how I would reply to knowing that he was depressed from time to time? Was he worried that if he told me about it I would leave him?
I did what I had learned to do when my emotions were tumbling all over the place. I decided to write the stuff down, all of it. I needed to get to the core of why I was so bothered with it and what I wanted to do next. It took me over an hour according to the clock. It had been worth it, though, I knew now exactly what to tell him later.
I tried finding a key in the cupboard that was in the corridor. I knew sometimes he would keep them in there. There was a spare key this time too! I wanted to go for a walk now, the only thing that would be an issue was when he would put the chain on the door again. For some reason I felt like he was going to be in his room for a while.
The walk had been amazing! I felt so much better and I had seen the sun come up. There had been a lot of orange and red in the sky, this morning. I found a really nice place for breakfast that I had not seen before. This city changes quickly, sometimes. The beauty of such a big city was that it never really stopped, this Monday morning started early for some people. And they needed a place to have their breakfasts and their coffees.
When I got back the house it looked the same, inside. I could not see any evidence that he had been in the kitchen for breakfast. I had brought him some muffins and I was getting ready to go up to his room. The fancy white paper bag holding the muffins creaks a little when I move the bag from my left hand to my right to hold the railing. While this part of the house is as familiar as the rest of the house it somehow still felt different today. I felt like an intruder. I know he didn’t want me to be here, he certainly didn’t want me to be in his room, but I couldn’t just leave him there. We had to talk.
His room was pitch-black. I had no idea how to do this. How do I approach somebody that doesn’t want me to be there, that doesn’t want me near him? Somebody that doesn’t want to talk to me and that is feeling at all time’s worst? I knew where he was, what side of the bed he was on, where the night stand was. We had been there so many times, together. Never was the room as dark as now.
I walked up to him, or where I thought he would be. The bag I had in my hands was creaking again. That stupid bag, he didn’t want muffins. I felt like an idiot. I couldn’t help it but I fell to my knees and just started crying. It woke him, one arm reached out to my shoulders. I was supposed to help him, not the other way around! Rob turned on the light at the side of the bed. I muttered I was sorry. He was smelly but I didn’t care. I wanted him to hold me.
I think I fell asleep for a bit. I don’t know if he was sleeping. But we were in the same position as before.
“We need to talk” I told him. I could see he agreed with me. To me it looked like he just didn’t know what he was supposed to do with me now.
“why do you want me to leave?” I had written down exactly how to start this conversation, and nowhere in those lines was this opening sentence. I had taken time to carefully craft my questions and to make sure I didn’t ask the wrong things. I didn’t want to shut him down and I did want to say the right supportive things. Now I was finally talking to him, and I just forgot what I had imagined was the best thing to do.
“I am just no fun, right now, look at me!” he had thrown his hand up in a sort of desperate motion. There was some light coming from the lamp, enough to see his room was a mess. It was clear he was sort of living in here, instead of in the rest of the house. He looked at me, and I think he saw my desperation to. “Look, we always have so much fun, and I cannot do that right now. I cannot be fun, I cannot be that successful guy that you so like. That is not me right now. I cannot.. ” He stopped, looking at me again. “I-I-I don’t want you.”
It shocked me. So he didn’t want me after all? He wanted to break up? Then I realized it; he didn’t want to have sex with me. “Oh, sex, you think I want sex” It came out on a sigh of relief.
“Yeah, you are always gorgeous and… and… willing and… euh active. I can sometimes hardly keep up with you. ” I smiled. He was right. I was in a better shape than him. I was working out much more than him, so sometimes he would just be out of breath quicker. He would blame his age, he was a bit older than me, but I knew it was just what shape he was in.
I remembered what I wanted to say.
“You know what I don’t want? I do not want to feel alone. When you decide that you do not want to share this with me, you cut me off. When you do that I feel alone.”
He looked away from me. Than told me he was sorry. “I didn’t realize. I just didn’t want to put you through this. This is my struggle, not yours.”
“Do you think I am not strong enough?” It was an honest question, but he didn’t reply. He didn’t seem to understand.
“Look, you are right. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what it means. I do not know what it does to you or what this might do to me.” I turned towards him. I put his hands on his face; it felt great to have my hands on his skin again. I had missed him, even more when I thought that I had lost him. “But it is not fair that you decide I do not get the chance.”
I saw him swallowing, but he didn’t speak.
“Can you just tell me what you are going through? Can you just let me in?” I started to cry again. I had felt so lonely. It made him put his arms around me and I hated myself for it. I was supposed to help him, not the other way around!
I dried my eyes and told him the last thing I had written on my paper that morning. “You are not alone”
Now it was his time to cry.
Usually I think about what the stories have to tell me about me and what I want from a real boyfriend. This time I do not know. I guess I want to be supportive. But it is not like I want a bf that is going through a hard time. I do love the idea of a bf that lives far away from me (that is hard enough as it is!) I guess that is because that way I feel like the relationship isn’t based on proximity. It is based on his character and mine. On whether or not we want to be together, rather than where he just happened to be born.
Any comments on my writing are highly appreciated. I am not a native English speaker so I love to hear your thoughts!
