"why did you and mel break up?"

“why did you and Mel break up”
million dollar question or more...

I can't explain how degrading it feels when the person that you love and have dedicated your future life to holds you down and punches you in the face, proverbial or otherwise. I still can't work out if because I hit her first and because I've hit her many times since, am I the abuser, or the victim? Or both? Violence begets violence.

She'd hit me before, and that first time when I went to work I was praying Andrew would notice the dark mark beneath my eye but it looked more like tiredness and crying then anything and that he was already used to. That first time she had been shocked but she never told me she wouldn't do it again and I knew she would. And predictably I thought I probably would deserve it. I knew what sort of person she was. Like when we watched once for warriors and I said "well she shouldn't have been so lippy". In a sick way I was waiting for it to happen. She used to yell at me for flinching when we argued. But I knew. I defended her for the first six months, honeymoon sweet, to her and my friends alike and said it wasn't like that. But I flinched all the same. Realistically she only hit me 3 times. I have hit her repeatedly, tried to (if very weakly) strangle her. But not once, not even when she, a woman twice my size was cowering on the floor in the kitchen scared of me, did I ever stop being afraid. All the while I felt like what I was doing to her was mostly in show, at the end maybe so there was some passion between us: but when I first started breaking and having these strange violent outbursts, where I felt almost possessed by her rage, I wanted her to feel what I had felt.

She came in to my parent’s house and lay next to me. We were both drunk and I was hurt, abandoned (a feeling that would stay with me until our relationship finally ended) and she thought I had made a fool of her. I had made a scene. She didn't want her new, exciting work friends to know she was gay and I didn't want her to keep hiding me like I was something to be ashamed of. So I had drunk too much beer, cried and been rude, and stormed home. Lara had had to lend me money because I wasn't in charge of the money and with my childish 'I'll just walk home!' episode it was probably best someone organised a cab for me. The next morning when I checked my bag it was empty, Mel had taken the change from the taxi for god knows what and I'd had to work out some complicated scheme to pay Lara back without confronting Mel.

Apparently Mel had been trying to call me but my phone had died. So she showed up and told me that she'd been in this fight on Greville St, the police had come, and it was all my fault. And then that she'd picked up some other girl while she was out, and she said it so casually as if it was completely fitting punishment and my heart snapped and I hit her. I'd never hit anyone before. Not like that. Not and meant it. She grabbed me pushed me against the pillow and started punching me in the face. She held me down and pushed my legs apart and tried to touch me 'this is what you want isn't it? you fucking slut' I was crying and must have muttered something like 'please dont do this please dont rape me again' and she said that I was a slut and a joke and I had never been raped. And she left.

I didn't go to work that week. My face was badly bruised and swollen and the white in my eye had turned bloodshot red. Even I, the centre of drama and attention was too embarrassed to face people with that. It was my 20th birthday. I'd stopped seeing most of my friends so I had no one to celebrate with or remember my birthday really. I told the couple of friends I was speaking to I was sick and when Mel was in the shower or asleep I went in to the toilet, shut the door and texted Andrew to let him know I wasn't great, there was drama, but I'd be back soon. We were planning to go to the R&R event at work that friday together, had rallied hard to be able to go so we could get drunk and just hang out. It was during work hours so Mel wouldn't know. I half hoped she would go away for the weekend so I wouldn't have to lie about drinking or any of it. I didn't go any way.

Srangely the people who I was beginning to let down a guard with at work, accepted and were sympathetic to my refusal to give out my number (at mel's request) and were not offended, rather endeared, when I told them I couldn't be their friends in real life. They were concerned when they saw me break after break crying to Mel on the phone, but they never pushed. They just waited.

When I saw my family at my birthday dinner and when I returned to work I told them all what a clutz I was, I had tripped over my adorable new kitten and right in to the corner of the coffee table! Can you believe that?! And they did. Everyone laughed at how it was nearly as funny as if I'd said I'd walked in to the door! And I laughed with them, a funny cynical hard laugh that soon accompanied a lot of truths, the haha that followed most things I said about Mel and my 'insane haha' relationship with her, and later about my feelings towards Andrew. ('one day you'll fall in love with me haha')

Mel told me she would leave me and I begged for her to stay. She said she was bad for me and I howled and screamed and told her I'd do anything. It was all a mistake and it was all my fault, and I really believed it was. I thought, if I'd just done what I was supposed to, if I just didn't keep making mistakes, we would be ok. So the rules came in to place and things became more and more cornered, for my good and hers apparently. For us to work. It was that night that I had first taken that yellow post-it note with Andrews number on it out of my secret pocket and had texted him, nothing important. Maybe she somehow knew that I didn't want the rules any more. But I kept messing up and lashing out and bit by bit I was hardening. I was terrified, bitter, and a loose cannon in all respects.

This time she told me she would never hit me again. She hardened too and distanced herself from me, and though when we fought it was mostly one sided, now the love seemed mostly one sided now too. When we fought it was as though we had changed places through the mirror, now it was me irrationally waving knives and lunging at her with mimiced threats of rape and suicide (I remember thinking how odd I would say all those things, feeling like her, and not understanding a moment of it) and her just sitting there. Motionless. As I had. Things weren't so bad though. I thought maybe she had reached her peak and it had shocked her in to submission. I was finding it hard to control my growing rage, but she was keeping hers at bay so at least there was some balance.

I couldn't work out if I was making it all up. We fought made up fought distanced fought space fought. We tried to work things out. We reset the rules. She DID want me to have friends and did want me to be happy, and I was overreacting. I was going crazy. Everything was voices and fast and loneliness and a terrifying kind of manic and blood again. But she was supposed to be helping me. It was hard to determine what was real and what wasn't. I wonder if I'm still over reacting. Right before we broke up, she on the couch in the living room and me trying desperately to stop crying or wanting to die in our bedroom I couldn't find my way out. I physically couldn't find the door. I had no idea where I was, I just couldn't locate it all. When I think about it, I wonder if I just had my eyes closed. But she DID want me to have my own life. It's just, some rules still needed to be in place. Some how, because I really thought I needed her, I believed that giving her 4 weeks notice (or was it six?) was a reasonable compromise for me to do things with out her. Probably a long enough time anyway for me to get scared, and cancel on the friend before I did anything anyway. Enough time for me to cancel repeatedly on friends. Cut the very few I had left out of my life, the ones we had made together, when it was soon determined they were not a good influence on me either. Which meant, really, she wanted to have her own life.

When we got back from south east asia we joked with another couple, how we hadn't fought "that much HAHA except for those couple of times where I was locked in the bathroom scared you were going to kill me or because you told me I wasn't allowed in the same room/slut/HAHA and you told me being overseas made me realise you could have anyone/why waste time with you/slut/i will bash you when we get back to that roomHAHA" laughed too loud told the story too often, because it all just kept stinging and I knew what the right thing to do was and I couldn't leave but I couldn't let it go either. And I actually believed we hadn't fought that much. We'd had quite a lovely time really. And took some beautiful photos and got some funny stories to tell too. Besides, it's all just experience isn't it? Haha.

At some point layed out on the bathroom floor in ko phangan I'd sent my only text message to Andrew from Asia, and I'd told him-the first time in a long long line of messages and emails to follow that I would have to break up with Mel. I don't even understand how we made up. She called her mum. She asked did I want to come with her to have lunch. She told me I shouldn't act the way I did to her and it wasn't nice. My heart didn't rip this time. It just sort of froze there. I admitted defeat and accepted it was over. I just didn't go anywhere. But I accepted it, when she didn't kiss me for 3 months. I accepted it, when she no longer invited me places with her, when she stopped introducing me as her girlfriend, and when there was no discussion of us spending christmas together. I changed my flights just in case, but I wasn't part of her life any more. I accepted it, when on New Years (after a year of begging her to THIS year "stay with me promise me you'll stay with me") at 10pm she announced she was leaving to spend the evening-and the year, with her more exciting, fabulous friends. I already knew it was coming.

On our second last fight, probably the most dramatic of them all, I watched it all happen. I saw the knife and crying and screaming like all of our fights speeding up in to one and I figured either one of us was going to die that day, or we were going to be like that forever. I told her I loved her and kissed her and told her I couldn't leave her. Completely detached (like her) I accepted that this was the life I had chosen. I knew what she was like. I couldn't expect any more or less. This was what I had chosen.

A week later I moved out.