Travel Shorts

I had to break off a very new relationship recently. Considering what an abortion I have made of situations such as this in the past I approached the situation with logic. I did the honourable thing for one of the first times in my life; finished it early because it just wasn’t going to work. Watching the lines in his face crease up and hide his pain was hard, but won’t leave months of scarring and sleepless nights for me. He held his pain pretty well, and accepted my offer of dinner, which we ate in stilted silence. Why discuss feelings when they can be turned into facial topography? Who needs words when how we feel can be conveyed by passive aggressive slamming and avoidance of eye contact?

It occurred to me that at the end of a relationship the thing we mourn the most is the lost future; something which never really existed. It was constructed from words (those duplicitous bastards), hopes, and dreams. It was never tangible, and yet leaves a void that causes a physical pain. In short relationships these futures are almost exclusively made solely by the dumpee. The delusion of how well things are going informs their future.

In longer relationships the pain’s harder to bear as the lost future was shared in some way. The foundations were the shared hopes and dreams. The cement is the words spoken. Sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, but always shared; even conflated. And the bricks were the shared experiences that began to mount up and make the future seem more real. For me, in the last year, the bricks have deconstructed the false future as they’ve fallen on my head; teaching me lessons as they tumble.
And some of the lessons I have learnt have been from mistakes I have made more than once. Hell, some of them I’ve made for 30 years, but finishing something that just wasn’t going to work in a mature way is the product of having learnt one of these lessons. The rest of my life is something of a derelict building site. There are days when excavations are revealing and days when the wind whistles through everything, whipping up a flurry of autumnal leaves which pirouette, curtsy and settle again around me; obscuring my way.

Sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves.