Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Journals have a way of knocking the breath out of you when you read them many years later. When I cast my mind back to age 32, on a TGV train hurtling through the centre of France, listening to U2 on my brother’s battered CD Walkman, I can almost physically feel the knots in my stomach as I analysed the dysfunctional relationship that had nipped at me throughout the previous 12 years of my adult life. Timothy (not his real name) was one of three young men I was introduced to in the first days of my university life by my high school friend who was studying drama with them. Of the three, I was first attracted to the one who I never ended up with – the tall goofball with the floppy hair. The second one was older, sophisticated and very good looking. He and I would end up in the first fling I had at college, as he and some of the other acting students, “starred” in my first student film, but as first flings often do, it drifted away into the ether.
I can’t remember how Tim and I got together, but even from its earliest days, the relationship was manipulative. When I examine it now, looking at the years of pushing and pulling, the dangling out of morsels of affection in a form which made love seem angst-ridden, dramatic, and hard, I marvel at the girl who believed that this was what she wanted. Even after the unutterably painful episode when he came to visit me in Melbourne, stopped talking to me after one day, and left after the weekend (when he was supposed to stay a week), leaving me a note on the floor of my flat with the lamest excuse in the book, I was again drawn into the narcissistic web of his warped idea of “connection” years later when he moved to Sydney. Again, there would be late night, last minute assignations, with a secretive understanding that the “two of us” as a unit was unique, special, that we had something that others didn’t.
The end was spectacularly undramatic, and satisfyingly final. It was a normal Thursday, as I drove to work at Fox Studios to start my afternoon shift at the Channel V studio. I was about seven months pregnant with my first child. As I walked towards the studio, sitting outside on the bench near the coffee shop was Tim. I looked at him, and for the first time, I did not feel shaky, upset or angry. Instead, the sensation of satisfaction in having found a partner who just loved me without feeling the need to inflict emotional pain was a happy, warm glow that rapidly spread throughout my body. “Hi,” I said, and looked him in the eye. Despite his usual laconic demeanour, I could see that he was taken aback. We exchanged very brief greetings, after which I excused myself to head into the studio to start work. I sat down at the desk, thought, “well, that’s it, then”, and booted up the computer. Who knew it was this easy to say goodbye?