Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

with me and certainly nothing to do with me and him. This isn’t a convenient psychological dodge, a flinching away from the light so I can stack my guilt and regret neatly in dark corners. This isn’t a belief that he doesn’t love her, not really, hasn’t touched the softest bit of her thighs in years. My obsessive imagination doesn’t think about those moments beneath their sheets, the fact that they share sheets. She never intrudes on my mind. Sometimes I try to see her, force myself to conjure her from wool and fingernails and hair. See her hand in his, the joining of warm, familiar skin.

I believe he probably does love her; in fact, I’m sure he does. Just as I’m sure that his hands still find her body, pull her close in the middle of the night with an ache of tenderness and stab of desire. It’s irrelevant. We exist elsewhere, as something else. There’s no name for it, no words that can adequately articulate what and who and how it is.

The first message arrives out of the blue, but with the feel of an old friend, one that belonged to another time, another you. We make an arrangement, the very first one: we’re to meet in a pub with flowers tumbling around the front door. And as I wait for him, knees tightly clenched, jaw set, I know, even though I can’t possibly know, that this man has stained me. It starts to spread, tendrils pushing outwards, probing the holes and spaces in me.

He walks into the pub. The familiarity in the wave of his sandy hair and the arch of his blue eyes makes me ache. The first thing I feel is a sense of shattering loss that pulls my kneecaps tighter still. The loss of myself, of who I am, had been. Never has so much altered in so few seconds. On either side of a blink sit the old and new versions of me, of my life. After a second blink, I’m cascading over the other side into an unknown that feels known. The details of that first meeting are a blur: what we say, what we drink. Do we laugh? I’m steadfastly concentrating on keeping the loss to myself, but it’s everywhere – splashed up the walls, walked into the carpet, soaking through the cushions. It seeps back in through my skin and what will become a cycle begins.

When I sit, I think of him. When I sleep, I dream of him. When I walk, he’s in my stride, in the bend of my elbow as an arm swings. He’s invaded my brain and I can’t get him out. I don’t want him out. He’s a stranger whom I know every inch and crack and crease of. The familiarity hums in our DNA.

There are more meetings packed with heat and longing; more dreams, texts, emails scratched out in the agony of absence. I gladly offer up my jaw as the yoke is fitted around my neck. I feel so in love and so insane. So desperate and deranged. Every sound is loud, bouncing uncomfortably off my ear drums; every colour I see burns through to the back of my eyes, turning the sockets black. I read about a woman who has her tear ducts cauterised, scars forming over and closing the pinprick holes shut. I want to burn my own to keep all of him, the chaos and ecstasy, inside me.

What can we do? What can be done? We can’t be together – he says he’s unable, unwilling to leave his relationship – but the very thought of the alternative tiptoes around a spiral I fear. The madness, frenzy, builds and builds, and just as all seems so desperate and lost, I’m offered a job back in New York, the city I’d left just weeks before. A job that I couldn’t have sketched in my wildest of dreams. And just as I knew that if I stayed in New York, worse would happen, I know now that if I stay in London, worse will happen. To him, to me, to us.

I have to leave. I know I’m doing the right thing, am utterly convinced I am, but everything about it feels wrong, feels desperately like I’m doing something that will never ever be undone again. The hand at my back continues to push me away.

We decide to spend the weekend together before I leave. On Friday night, we meet in a pub where we think no one knows us. I spend the blurry hours and days before imagining the moment he walks in, the shot of endorphins hurtling through me, the electric shock that runs up my spine, makes me arch my back and bare my neck; I rattle on the wooden stool.

Then, as if I’ve summoned him from my imagination by chanting his name over and over again, he’s there. The air escapes from the room through the open door and then he’s by me, on me, fingers in my hair, his mouth on mine, fitting exactly as I’d remembered but still couldn’t believe it ever did. The room swims and spins; lights blur and whirl and settle somewhere around the lines that sit in the pouch of skin between his thumb and first finger. I push my lips, my tongue inside, need the taste of him to take me away, away, away.

The next night, I wait for him in a hotel room, put on my favourite black dress that I hope is his favourite too, smooth it down, look at myself in the mirror, still shocked by how different I feel, look. Who is she? Where is she from? He knocks on the door, comes inside with a kiss. I keep opening my eyes to see if he’s still there, still real. I can’t believe he’s a person in my hands; I touch him, constantly, trying to make him stay whole. But as I fill out beside him, he’s disappearing next