I got a reprieve. I got a re-match. And had a beautiful weekend. And one of the most romantic days of my life. A stream, a picnic, a blanket and seclusion. Just the two of us. (And an occasional lorry that went by with comedy-moment precision timing, but eventually left us alone.)
And then.
This week came the unavoidable truth. How do you tell someone you loved (do I really mean that use of past tense? I don't even know...) that you've embarked on another relationship? How do you tell them you've taken that leap of faith, even if only on the basis of BTO's 'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet', that: "any love is good love, so I took what I could get"?
Oh the pain. All over again, the self-questioning, the analysis, the apologies, the tears, the sense that I'd betrayed him... And yet we both knew that that wasn't the case and that this is what one is supposed to do, if you want to regain some kind of mental health and see a future ahead of you. Does that make it easier, knowing that it's allegedly 'good for me'? Absolutely not.
Late nights and no sleep and all the crying, the sense of loss all over again, all in waves of emotion; it's been exhausting. I need some simple things now to help me through. I need magazines and chocolate cake, a lonely piano in an isolated location, silly DVDs and more chocolate cake. I need a scene from the film with Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis in 'La Fille Sur Le Pont' where he takes her to a department store and buys her a bunch of make up from the posh make-up stalls and she comes away with all sorts of top quality cosmetics to experiment with. I don't know why I wish I could have this, why I feel the need to lock myself in with such silly things, but I feel like I need some room to patch myself up again after an incredibly traumatic week.
And I know he was shocked too. I can't tell him everything. Nor can I tell the architect everything. I have to keep some things entirely to myself and find a way to either digest them or just live with them, even if they cause continual pain.
I was reading some extracts from a book I got in Paris full of writings from Marilyn Monroe's notebooks and letters and I found this:
"Only parts of us will ever touch parts of others -
One's own truth is just that really - one's own truth.
We can only share the part that is within another's knowing [...]
perhaps it could make our understanding seek another's loneliness out."
(from 'Fragments' ed. Stanley Buchtal)
That's certainly one of the things I connected to with the architect. Our mutual sense of loneliness and loss that had gone before. But it was that very sense of loss that almost broke him, because he could tell it wasn't easy to eradicate. The things we share with others must not only be things within another's understanding, "another's knowing", as Marilyn puts it, but also within their pain threshold. I suppose I have discovered just how high my pain threshold really is. And it's clearly a lot higher than most people's and a lot higher than I had previously given myself credit for.
