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Published: March 25th 2009
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This is the blog I placed on 16 March. I removed it because I felt as if it was 'hanging out my dirty washing' but I am now replacing it because it has a time and place and I will also be able to guage my movement.
A separation - 16 March 2009 I had realised, without a shadow of a doubt that the relationship that Chris and I have been sharing during the last couple of months has deteriorated into something that seemed painfully irretrievable but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. But now, I understand everything.
I met Chris in 2006 on a training course. My God, he was bright, passionate, intelligent and of course, cute. I wasn’t looking for a man (or in his case a boy) I was there to learn extreme medical care for a trip I was taking to China, Tibet, Everest and Nepal in the August of that year. He was there to learn the same things because he was cycling from Manchester to Australia. I can’t remember where in Australia now but it’s an okay pinpoint. The course was full of interesting people, The National Geographic crew
off to Papua New Guinea, men who had climbed Everest but were there to get the teaching certificate to guide others, world expedition leaders, individuals off on extreme adventures and Chris and his dad. 84 students in all. Chris was the one who was bright, shiny, intense, studious, whereas I tried to listen to the technical issues, tried with the role plays in the rain on the hills in the Peaks and tried to understand the effects of shock and how to deal with it.
He only needed to be told once and his brain computed it all. I muddled it. The last moment before leaving, as he was walking by, I hugged him and he handed me his email. I knew of a guy who was biking in Tibet and his website was inspirational. I wanted him to see it.
Honestly, as innocently as that our conversations began. But within a week visited my home. We went to my favourite café to play chess whereupon he thrashed me without even trying and between moves he looked at me so intensely that I couldn’t breath and he didn’t go home, stayed three crazy days. I knew I didn’t
want a BOY friend. I’d been there before but he was so alive. After 3 days, he went back home for his vaccinations for his travel, I did not want to invite him back because his passion for life, his lustre scared me in a way that I had been before and did not want to revisit and I told him this. But I remember the turning point. He said,
‘ask me to come back, Use me, Bleed me, Ask me to come back’;
That would have been about the last day of May 2006. The rest is a story of self development, passion, hope, plans, aims and goals which brought us to China.
On our travels, I have felt but not understood a marked demise of the relationship due to seemingly incompatible wants and needs but what it boils down to is more than that. At first, there maybe never were compatible wants and needs but I was naïve and didn’t know it. I go with my feelings and my feelings are instinctual, guttural and spot on but recently, I have had less and less feelings. In Suzhou, we trapped each other.
20past 6, the sky is turning a pink hue.
He was trapped in his own lost world of need to be admired by his partner, have a purpose in life, be passionate and intense.
I was just plain lonely and didn’t want or need a dreamer, I need to be inspired emotionally and intellectually for me to tick. I never, if I am honest, never ticked properly with Chris.
But, the end has come rather abruptly. Filled with tears, accusations, a catalogue of found out lies, texts, emails, phone calls and now, I understand it all. In the last 3 days I have revisited conversations, incidents, matter of fact statements that have happened over the last month and find that everything from Chris has been a lie. We have said hurtful things, I have done some insane screaming and carried out some pretty horrendous irrational behaviour which you seriously do not want to know and the bottom line is that he felt lost and lonely, I felt lonely and for over a month he has been passionately living snatched moments with an 17 year old Chinese student who still lives at home, having conversations routed from knowledge he developed 2 years ago in Sheffield, walking the dogs in the sunshine, jointly learning each other's language, going dancing, having sex in the dance studio and being disrespectful towards me. I have tried to break the pattern of noncommunication, become more and more practical through necessity, worked, walked the dogs, paid for all the bills because he has not had enough work to contribute fully and although not having much work was not his fault, his time was not for playing and living a fat lie and forgetting about truth.
Last night, for the first time in 3 days, he spoke to me respectfully of the situation and understood the severity of his actions, his lies which he could not back track from and his misunderstandings of emotional development which you only learn by going through them. But he has lived it for over a month now. Me, I am left shell shocked at the reality of the situation and find myself having to pick up threads to weave an understanding so that I can move on. And, I will because life is for living although, at first I need to get some sleep. In the future in China, I quite like the idea from Virgina 'A room of one's own'
There are only these 3 pictures left, my memories are muddied, there are no more embraces but I am intact and I will move on. And I know I need to or else I will wonder why this, why that and ask questions that he really no longer has to answer. I am no longer a mentor, a questioner - the practical solution finder for two. I am me. I have friends here, real friends and I have real friends and family at home who I speak to for balance.
It is 6.35am and the sky does actually have promise of another lovely day.
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