It is rare that I have the time to sit and unravel my thoughts fully. There is always something to do in London. Rush, rush. But I still want to explain more about the situation with my ex-flatmate.
One person who read my posts which refer to him said he sounded like a total…well, I won’t repeat the expression he used. But that made me feel terrible. I have recorded what happened in isolated incidents in some of these posts.
But I don’t really want you to think that of him. You see, I don’t think that of him. I cannot talk about him with my family or close friends. They seem to despise him. I do not. I am just bewildered by him.
There is more to come…it just takes a lot of emotional effort to sit down and write about him. So I am having fun with other posts so I don’t become weighed down with thoughts of him. But he is interwoven with the theme of this site – he crushed Caramel, he knocked all her ideas about the word love out of the ball park – she is trying to learn what real love is again.
For the past few years my family and friends (friends who have been loyal to me and were never fond of him anyway), have been telling me what they think of him…what they think I should think of him. It is other people that labelled him a bully and forced me to take a sober look at what he was doing. I can see what he has done was wrong. I can see I was bullied – taunted by hundreds, cruel jokes and rumours spread by thousands, perhaps more. Yes, I admit, he caused me trouble on a scale I have never had to deal with before.
However… nobody has been able to overturn my thoughts regarding him. I have just had to keep them quiet, as I know everyone who cares for me would despise my feelings for him. I can’t talk about him to anyone who loves me. They just think badly of him, they won’t allow me to promote cordiality with him.
I need to allow my mind time and space to work things out more. There are more posts to come which will paint a clearer picture of my ex-flatmate so nobody has any misconceptions of what it is that I think of him. You see, what he has said and done to hurt me has not dampened what grew in me after the conversation we had together in our kitchen (explained in Would You Like A Cup Of Tea?).
But, before I find the words and emotional energy to convey what went wrong, let me make it clear that HE…TO ME…IS SUPERIOR TO ALL OTHER MEN I have ever known – except my Dadda, but that is different.
There we go, I am going to spread it out like butter on hot toast, right to every crust edge and into the corners and let it soak in: I LOVE HIM!
I love him more than any man I have come across in my existence. I love him more than I loved my childhood sweetheart. I love him more than I love Goldfinch. I have endured so much and sacrificed so much for him that I will never be able to forget him. HE IS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!
Yes, he behaved poorly with me, he was rude and unkind, he spread gossip and cruel lies about me. I can now see he was bullying me. I still don’t understand why he did that. Everyone who was close to us, came to the conclusion that he thought I had rejected him and was jealous of my friendships with other men I knew. But he has never admitted that, and I don’t see why he would confess to that now.
I spent a lot of time with single men. I went out a lot with men. Played basket ball, went running, went out for drinks, and meals and even to concerts and shows. Truth be told, I did not have any romantic connection with any man after the day I met him, because he somehow had my heart almost from the moment he sat opposite at breakfast. The way he looked at me – it disturbed me deep down and I never saw that in any other man’s eyes.
Since then, I have had a problem. My heart has pretty much been beating for him ever since. He is both the best thing and the very worst thing that ever happened to me. The one I’ll never forget.
I was surrounded with single men who paid me lots of lovely attention, but I compared every man to him…and I still do. After meeting him, the next man who touched me was the stranger who sat next to me on the bench in the park that night. Strangely, that was something I have had more success at dealing with mentally and emotionally. It was awful, but it doesn’t haunt me. The lid is firmly on the box and it stays high up on a top shelf where I don’t choose to retrieve it.
Since then…well, you don’t need to know about my love-life…but now I am in love with Goldfinch. I dearly love Goldfinch. But I know that one of the reasons why it is going so well with Goldfinch, is
that my heart knows he is leaving. He is going home. Goldfinch is going to fly away home. Yes, I will miss him profoundly, but I will forget Goldfinch, eventually. I won’t ever forget my ex-flatmate. Goldfinch is not trying to make me love him more than any other man. Which is a good thing, because he would fail.
My ex-flatmate – I love him more than any other man despite everything. I defy any other man to even dare to supplant him in my heart. I have never given up my own self and all I value to this extent for anyone else. I have never sacrificed so much of what I hold dear, I have never endured so much, carried so much pain around inside for anyone.
I am not saying he has not been an idiot. My biggest disappointment is that from the moment I was found in the park and sent to hospital – he has not found a kind word to send to me. Over three years! A card, a text, an e-mail, he does not have to speak to me face-to-face, but something, a little something to show he regrets his hostility towards me and the rumours he spread which have caused so much damage.
How complicated can it be?…he just needs to convey something that appears like sorrow for what happened between he and I. I would have been content with a little scrap note or a text message, saying “SORRY”. I am not expecting an elaborate explanation and in no way do I hold him responsible for what happened to me in the park. I think all possibilities of a romance have long ago been blown to smithereens. It is completely beside the point that he is the only man I have ever thought I could be married to.
His silence is disturbing – it does tell me deep down there is something wrong with him. But some of my friends said that after I went missing he stopped eating and he looked lost. He has recovered. Some of our friends have told me, he knows that when he does next see me he needs to have something remarkable to say, but he is still baffled about what that something will be. I can just about grasp that if his feelings for me swung, from regarding me highly, to becoming intensely jealous…what would he say to me once he learnt I had been found battered and bloody…and then fled from London because I could not face any more cruelty from the people I saw each day?
I put that out of my mind. I love the man I was friends with, the man I lived with, the man I admire and respect and think the world of. I would give up anything and everything to honour him.
People don’t understand why, I don’t talk about my feelings for him because they would not understand. It makes the people who love me most angry. It matters not. Hearts are complicated. It is all rather complicated in the case of he and me. But…here is love, nothing matters to me. What happened to me does not matter, all that matters is peace with him. It is so easy to let go of everything that happened. Yet, while I have no evidence to indicate that he is not just as hostile in his thinking towards me as he was back then, well, everything is fresh in my mind and heart. Everyday, he taunts me in my mind. I long for peace with him so I can have peace of mind.
I don’t think he is capable of loving me the way I love him. It is not even a case of unrequited love. My friends tell me he thought I had rejected him, that he was jealous, which is why he became hostile and spread rumours about me. I find it hard to believe he could be jealous. Partly, because I am not special, I am not worth all that trouble and nonsense. Also, he could have had his pick of women – why me?
He does not seem to have any idea of how much I love him, so it is not a matter of unrequited love. If he has no idea that he to me is the only man on the planet who I could love with loyalty until my last breath. He is my True North. He is my Home.
A few months after I was the victim of the crime I have referred to, I heard of something my ex-flatmate had done that made my heart swell with pride for him. For those few months my heart had been pretty numb to him. But now pride and love were throbbing through it. I wanted to tell him or show him. But I did not know how to. So I did something that was not particularly balanced. But my emotions were understandably unsettled after what happened to me. To go from numbness to 
surges of love and adoration was bound to produce a drastic effect. I took half of my savings out of my bank account and stuffed it into an envelope. I wrote a card and disguised my hand-writing, the message was not too emotional – it said something like “Well done – proud of you!” and I signed it G.L.H. Which are not my initials – they those letters do stand for something but I did not think he would remember. In fact, I was counting on it. If he knew the money was from me, I don’t think he would have been able to accept it. It was a stupid thing to do really. He does not need my money, but I would give the other half of my savings gladly, and everything I owned to feel at peace with him.
I know his faults, goodness, I lived with him and he was hard work! I know he is a noisy, messy pup. I know he seems to believe in the magic bin fairy. But life has never been the same since I moved out of that flat. To clean up after a man who is rude to you and to still love him…aaaah – I would give anything to be able to wash his dishes again!
When I say love – I don’t just mean sentiments, emotions, hormones. I have made huge sacrifices for him. I could have made a lot of trouble for him. Instead, I pleaded with his superiors not to reproach him. I claimed he was under great pressure and did not know how to handle a situation that had grown beyond his ability to control. I looked his directors in the eye and begged them, tearfully explaining if anything hurt him it would be agony for me.
All I want in the whole world is peace with him.
They saw I loved him. They said he is not worth it, they said I was sacrificing too much for a man who only cares about himself. He is worth everything to me, every tear, every heart-ache.
I know I will never love like that again…not Goldfinch, or any other man. Because when it comes to genuine self-sacrificing love…I have given up everything for my ex-flatmate.
I WILL FIND A WAY TO COMPLETE THESE POSTS AS MY HEART PERMITS ME…BUT I HOPE I AM STRAIGHTENING OUT A PERCEPTION OR MISCONCEPTION I MAY HAVE UNINTENTIONALLY LED YOU DOWN. I LOVE HIM, I CAN’T IMAGINE NOT LOVING HIM. I DON’T BELIEVE I WILL EVER BE ABLE TO LOVE LIKE THAT AGAIN.
Caramel 