2 posts tagged “love”

... is the name of a quick piece of flash fiction I just wrote, over on my website/main blog thing.

I haven't written much in a couple of months, so it's kind of a flexing exercise thing. It's also a love note to my girlfriend. And action movies. I'd love to know what you think, either over here or over there...

It's here: http://nixsight.net/?p=169

My girl is a beauty. She is calm and cool and funny and she has a dirty mind, and is only marginally twitchy (and only then, when I am being a truly ignorant shitheel, I'm certain). These are all traits that, if you asked me, I would have to tell you are wonderful; are what I would be after in my perfect woman. If you asked me now.

If you asked me some time in the last few years, I might say the same thing, but looking at my record, you'd think I was lying. Self-destructive choices, girls who were great but cold, groovy but married. Girls who, they would later discover, had spent most of their lives as frustrated polyamours, although I probably could have told them that from their activities during our relationships.

Sometimes, girls who were just, frankly, pureblood, stick-of-rock-through-and-through, pigfuck insane.

I love my girl. She is a thing of pure awesome, and everything that I want. Looking back at my past life, it has become apparent to me that I never really used to look for the things that I wanted in a woman. I always seemed to wait until a relatively cute one came along that seemed vaguely interesting, and vaguely interested in me, and kind of... fitted them awkwardly to the required girlfriend template. That isn't to say that I didn't genuinely fall in love over time, of course, and that some of them weren't also great ladies. Well, okay, maybe two of them.

But in this case, I saw that I liked the girl before I'd even known that she was looking in my direction. I came to the relationship wiser than before, and thought about the decisions before I made them.

Today, though, in the immortal words of madness, my girl's mad at me.

Mad is an overstatement, really. We've had a pretty intensely unhappy stretch of hours, is all, and the worst of it is over. The problem was a tiny one that started out as nobody's fault, but then, of course, through the application of my diplomacy, reasoning and charm, became much, much worse.

(It was also the application of my diplomacy, reasoning and charm that started to make things okay again, but, well, bragging about that would be kind of like claiming that you're a big hero for catching a serial killer that you let get away in the first place).

Anyway, that's not what this post is about. It's about the lesson I learned today about myself.

Apparently, I am still carrying around the ghost of my last girlfriend. "Carrying around" rather than "being haunted by" because, well, you know, that was kind of the flavour of the whole relationship. I carried her around on my shoulders, and she pelted me with her endless lunatic shit, while roundly beating me about the brow and ears.

I could go into detail about how today taught me this, but I won't, not least because part of the lesson was this weird confused veil that got drawn across the whole day, and I suspect it wouldn't make much sense.

I could talk about how I had deluded myself that I could have escaped out from under the legacy of a three-year long abusive relationship with a girl who was variously diagnosed as either having borderline personality disorder or being bipolar, and who then seperated herself from me in the most cowardly and devastating way possible when she'd taken about all I had to give, with only a few physical scars and a couple of weeks of time off work, but I feel a bit stupid about that, so I shan't.

But what I will talk about is the fact that it has given me the ability to spot ingrained madness in people...

I see tics and jitters in people that are so tiny, so fast, that only the similarly experienced or the medically trained seem to be able to spot them. I can guess at the onset of a catastrophic nervous breakdown weeks before conventional sensors register an anomaly; have gained an instinct for getting out of the way of approaching outbreaks of crazy that look set to implode and take as many close friends and relatives with them as possible. I've sussed out which kids are cutters as a temporary phase of adolescent crying for help and which are genuinely in it for the long haul of a lifelong 'cry for help' condition.

And time has borne out that this isn't just some generalised Munchausen-by-proxy state I've got myself in... time and again, it turns out I'm right. I often wish I wasn't. But I more often am.

I couldn't counsel them. I don't have the booksmarts to make a living at helping these people, and most of the time I can't match the symptom to the condition.

I just see mad people. And most of the time they don't even know that they're mad.

And you know, the great thing about it?

Nearly every woman that I've met in the last few years, either intimately or in passing? I can now confidently diagnose them as one flavour of nuts or another (I'm guessing you could say the same for guys, but I don't pay as much attention to them, on account of there's little chance of them seeing me naked. Whereas, of course, there's EVERY possibility that every member of the female population will crumble and melt at my merest suggestion.)

So, as bad as things got today? As many irritating little triggers that were left over in me from that old relationship which I carry around my neck like some invisible millstone in stripey pop-socks? As often as I have to stop myself from going off the rails because of some small memorial landmine (Oh, god, she kissed me on the nose! The crazy bitch kissed me on the nose! Just before she punched me in the face! Brace for punching!)?

I have to thank the ex.

Because if it wasn't for those horrid three years, I wouldn't be able to spot crazy from a mile away, and I wouldn't be able to see that crazy is all around us, in the easy smiles of the clinically calmed; in the practiced answers of the professionally delusional.

And I wouldn't be able to see how totally different my girl is from alla that, so that when the heebie-jeebies hit, like they did today, and I start to go all wobbly and my descent gets a bit out of control, I can still pull it together to pop a tail-spin and pull off a sudden about-face, (giving the folks down on the ground a hellofa show into the bargain) realising how goddamn lucky I am that I've got her.

So thankyou, you crazy bitch. Thankyou for the threats to kill yourself and the pets if I ever dared think about leaving. Thankyou for the thirtieth birthday black-eye that people kindly had to pretend not to notice, or that I had to explain away using cliche after cliche. Thankyou for the fact that it became impossible to tell what was medication and what was willful meanness, and thankyou for the fact that I learnt never to take the words of a crazy person as truth.

You made me smart enough to be a better boyfriend, as well as a mildly bitter one.

Yay. You rock.