1997 part 4 - "I knew something had happened"
Now Nick or Nicola to give her her real name - which she hated - always liked, nay demanded, to be called Nick. Anyone who didn't had to suffer her little speech about how she hated her Italian boys name and preferred Nick, plain Nick. Once you heard that speech a few times you never called her Nicola again. If she was in a good mood she'd let you get away with Nicky. But only occasionally.Now Nick for the past ten years had been my best friend, my mentor, my inspiration, my partner, my lover, my travel companion. Everything. She's literally been everything to me. Maybe that's why all these events seem to have a magnifying effect on my psyche. I'm not using the word psyche as a joke. I feel a slight connection with that word as psyche was a young woman who loved and was loved by Eros and was united with him after Aphrodite's jealousy was overcome. She subsequently became the personification of the soul.
From that first day I started University to now she's been so integral a part of my life that I cannot contemplate life without her. It would have been so much easier to see what was going on and cut myself off from it. I would have spared myself so much heartache and pain. But I can't. Just can't. She's done for me what she is now doing for R. Listened.
She listened to me going on about my decidedly uncool working class upbringing in a drugged up and alcoholically violent household in the North east. My step mother was an ativan addict who had violent rages and then couldn't remember anything. She listened to me going on about my crazed brother and my fucked up and drugged up shite life. My anger, my depression, my madness, my fear. God, when I look back I think of the shit I've laid on her and I can't help crying because at the time you aren't aware of what you're doing are you?
Once I was half educated (what a freedom this bestows on the psyche) and had learnt about psychology and psychoanalysis (thank you Freud for the talking cure) and had lived on that emotional rollercoaster that is university life - a crash course in living - and once I had all that and read books with great ideas in them and had talked to smart people and had lived and loved and interacted and everything then I knew how very special she was. Nort just to me but to everyone who has ever come into contact with her, unique, beautiful personality. I think now; what am I doing to her? My jealousy is really hurting her. Why can't I stop?
Then she said it. I was scared, angry, all that stuff but the worst was how my blood froze cold and you know like in the movies when Freddy or some monster jumps out and they do that camera effect where the background suddenly moves quickly forward but the person doesn't move and it's really disturbing and scary? That's what happened to me when she told me she'd had a snog with R.
All the cliches can't describe it, from devastation to the the whole pack of cards falling in. It does affect you terribly when you live it the moment.
"I knew something had happened", was all I could say.
"It happened four weeks ago", she said.
"You changed when it happened. I noticed".
"I know you noticed, but couldn't tell you because I knew how you would react".
Silence.
"Why?" I eventually asked.
"I had to do it. It was only a snog. I had to see if there was a spark there..."
"...And if there was?"
I was hoping she would go easy on me here and lie but she didn't.
"We'd have been at it".
That cold feeling overwhelms me and that one phrase now comes into my head every time I see the two of them sitting together now.
every time.
**********
posted by DJCabbaged @ 9:12 am
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