She Was.

There’s a delicately patterned blue bowl sitting under the faucet in the kitchen sink. Water is drip drip dripping slowly filling it, gracing it with a whisper of purpose.

I was always going to be the one to lose wasn’t I? Me with the leaping and the jumping and the feet firmly planted. You knew it too didn’t you? The tears, the chest thumping, you knew. For all the lies and deception, for the neglect and the pseudo-fucking, for the loneliness and the confusion, for the overfuckingwhelming loss, for all of it, I can’t bring myself to blame you. I blame me. And you knew that too, you knew. And that, finally, finally, is why. Your freedom, your place to hang your hat, your stupid trite reasoning, your worthless muttering, your inconsequential stupid love, your cheap shirt that wipes up no mess, your intercontinental banal reassurances, all of it, for all of it I blame me. You blame me. We blame me. And only one of us, the stronger one, the one who loved less, you fucking lying bastard, only one of us is free.

Mainly I’m quiet. Silent. Getting through the days. I don’t really get through the days. They pass. There is a difference. I started work a week after being home. Work that came about through kindness, perhaps pity and kinship. Definitely kinship. I’m a service girl in my uniform of tight black jeans and wristband. I serve. It feels fitting. It feels appropriate. And when I clean up at the end of the night I’m sticky wet face flushed nauseated. It feels good to be nauseated – to feel – even if it’s just revulsion. That’s the worst part of all of this – the not feeling. The quiet. The heaviness. The silence. Friends call and I watch the phone, blankly, waiting for the room to fall back into silence. Afterwards I don’t bother checking my messages. Somewhere I feel guilty. She calls. I miss her so much. I don’t answer. I can’t speak to her. I don’t know what to say. She wants me to be better and I’m not. I don’t want to tell her that I feel quiet inside. I want to be good for her. To sound bright, to ask about her life, to sound like I am coping. I’m not. Every now and then I smile to myself – so this is what a broken heart feels like. This is what love feels like when it ends. And I am sure, sure I will never love again. I will never feel again. I’m just fading into the background, whitewashed, without light. And I’m so fucking scared.

Last night, he smiled at me, and when I smiled back my heart thumped. It didn’t flutter, it didn’t race, it didn’t even pick up the pace, but it most definitely thumped, and for now, for this broken service girl – that’s enough.

I want to be brutalized with the truth.

I want to know my stranger.

I want to hear the story fall from his soft, whiskered lips. I swear I’ll watch quietly as it lands on my broken lap, hold myself perfectly still while it explodes there. I want to feel the heat spread from his tongue and slither up my held open thighs. I promise not to moan as it crawls up inside me. I wont shiver as it struggles its way pushing through me. I wont breathe at all. I’ll let each word hook itself up inside me, plant its tethers in my skin. My organs will obediently rearrange themselves around each syllable, my heart will contract full.

I’ll hold your story deep within me, swaying safely in my veins. And when it hurts I wont purge it, I promise not to say a word. I only want to know it from the inside, I just want you to feel less strange.

I am damaged.

I am an island girl that never learnt how to swim. I am your bird without wings. I am artifice – her lacquered fingernails. I am helpful and knowing. I am your pillowcase and your mirror. I am the cat that sits at your feet. I am your sweet girl, your good girl, your open, willing, playful little thing. I am your smart girl, your brunette, the small hand in yours. I am your friend and your confidante and the thighs you grip at night. I am your tomorrow and your past and your forever and your regret. I am the one your parents miss. I am brave and you are proud and I am the voice inside your head. I am lies and I am betrayal and I am love and I am company and I am slick and I am naive and I am belief and I am sick. I am fun and I am serious and I am all you hope that I will be. I am to be taken seriously and to be fooled and to be kept and to be used. I am boring and I am horrid and I am the disappointment that chokes you thick. I am now and I was then and I will never cease to be. I am wet and you are hard and I am ready and I am denied. I am yours and you are yours and they are yours and she is yours. I am your blank slate and you are my puppet strings.

Triangles are the ugliest of shapes, all sharp corners stick your fingers bleed. I much prefer circles, igloos, the blue-white heat repetitiveness, safety. Cocoons. I’m too much like an ostrich and by the time I spat the sand out I was impaled on your angles.

More than anything I want to be fucked. Hard. Degraded. Demeaned. I don’t want this new vocabulary. I don’t know if I want to be you, stretched out, exposed on that table or if I want to be her, paid for and bought. I want to feel what you felt, and I want to see what she saw. I want to be privy to that conversation, I want you on my useless hands. I want to slip into the warmth of her body, feel her mouth tight around my cock. I want to look into your face when I touch you. I want to repeat her store bought lies. I want to feel the mattress hug my body as it sags beneath my weight. I want to be inside your head. I want to think your thoughts. I want to know if I was there. Did the thought of me make you cum harder? I want to be held down, bound, violated again and again. I want to hurt. I want to beg. I want to silently cry. I want to see me through your eyes.

I’ve been “home” since Wednesday. Back. Here.

We stayed together right up until the last heartwrenching moment at the airport departure gates. I don’t know how I willed myself to walk through those doors. I remember telling myself not to look back, to just keep moving forward, to breathe. I remember handing over my passport and wanting to scream when the customs officer stamped “departed” on the 28th page. Because I am weak, I turned back, one last time, tears clouding my vision. I panicked when I couldn’t see him through the crowd. I know I waved. I remember him hands on hips, black tshirt, tears streaming down his face, eyes red from crying for the last 24 hours and I remember dying just a little.

I have no words to say how much I miss him. I’m crying but there are no more tears, just muffled sobs and dry eyes. It hurts to think. He rings me. I ring him. And I think that I shouldn’t, that we shouldn’t. I think that I need a clean break. To readjust. To being here. Without him. But he won’t let it be. And, if I’m honest, I don’t want him to.

I pictured coming home a hundred thousand times. I pictured the ocean, the rolling green hills, the dog at the gate, my great big bed. I tasted a thousand pies and listened to gently strumming guitars in smokeless pubs. I went on countless walks through this city, I danced and made love by a waterfall. I went to museums and galleries and festivals and the opening nights of countless arts shows. I walked arm in arm at twilight and at dusk, sipped red wine by the river and watched children on paddle boats laughing in the sun. So many fucking times I did this. In my head, at night, lying in bed in Athens, sitting on the couch as another documentary on Australia mocked me on the tv. And the thing is, the fucked, awful, heartbreaking thing is that I never did this once – alone. It was always with him. I came home with him. Every single moment, every dream, every fantasy, every day – with him.

And now I’m here. Back “home”. Alone.

And I think my heart is not so much broken as it is floating in pieces, lost, somewhere in the crystal blue Mediterranean. Back home. Alone.