I'm back again, twice on the same weekend. Don't get used to this.
This is less a story than it is a confession. This happened today. And, well, to protect mine and other people's privacy names and places are omitted wherever possible.
I almost feel like starting this with "Dear diary".
Blood on my knuckes
I said before that there was a certain female that deprives me from sleep. It has gotten worse since then. No further than today I broke a man’s face and my knuckles because of her. Indirectly. But that is what I intend to tell here. This is like shooting oneself in the foot to numb the pain in the chest. I write this, poke at the wound, but it somehow allows me to relieve the pressure inside my brain and maybe get some sleep tonight.
The morning of this day was terrible. I only managed a modest 4 hours of sleep before waking up at 8 am. I didn’t feel like answering questions, or having any sort of conversations with the family, so I had breakfast, grabbed my camera and drove a couple of miles to the beach. I needed to think.
It was cold. The ENE wind, some 20 knots strong was as penetrating as .45 calibre through a sheet of paper, and I could barely avoid shivering sitting by the seaside with my camera focused on the waves. It was strangely calming to see the ocean as altered as my own soul, and I even smiled when particularly violent waves broke nearby.
It is about a woman. Most stories worth telling are. This is mine:
I met Eve last summer. Eve is not her real name, by the way, but it is symbolically the “first” woman in my perception, so I think it is a reasonable enough choice. I will not go into describing her, it is irrelevant, and you may or may not share my perception of beauty. I’ll just say I was deeply impressed. She was a lot more mature than any of the other girls in the office we were working in despite being my age, but she was not accessible. A long, stable relationship with an older guy, that appeared to make her happy.
In short, there were other women that summer, but, and this might sound cliché, not for a second she escaped my mental radar, and never have I stopped being interested in her life and well-being. There was even a drunken night when the border got diluted, and I had to force myself home before doing something inappropriately regrettable.
We kept meeting for coffee and a chat a few times a month, and trust me when I say I don’t do it with many girls. Hell, I probably knew more about her than I did about my some of my girlfriends. Ever.
I got trapped in a relationship at the end of November. And I do mean trapped, as I after the initial lust was gone, there was nothing else to build on, and it was all so artificial, that we wouldn’t want to meet each other for a week after every date. Fortunately, I didn’t spend too much money, or health, and it was all over before St Valentine’s day.
Eve, on her part, broke up in November, after a 3-and-a-half year relationship. I hadn’t seen her in a while, so it was news for me when she told me, at a party the weekend before St.Valentine. That was one of the best days in my life. We danced and we kissed, and she insisted it was a bad idea because she wasn’t ready for anything to start, but she kept kissing me, and my head was gone.
We met 4 times the following week. Coffee, a pint, lunch. Any excuse. I gave up college work, I gave up games of chess or poker with my mates, even those I was winning, I gave up training sessions, all to see her. She kept insisting it was a bad idea. She said she wanted to be on her own. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t want a relationship. Of course, I didn’t want to listen. She kept kissing me as she said it, so you can’t really blame me. I firmly believed that Fate had plans for us, and it wasn’t the first time our heads were bumped together, metaphorically, and in my opinion it would be treason to ignore that.
We met again last Saturday. Yesterday. She stayed away all the time, and when I tried to kiss her she gave me her cheek and said it wasn’t a good idea. She didn’t want it to work I could copy and paste the previous paragraph, but you get the idea. I exposed her my argument about fate, I told her that it had to work, that there was no way it couldn’t, but she wasn’t giving any ground. So I did the only thing a gentleman can do in that situation: I stopped arguing with her, paid the coffees and walked her to the place she was going.
And I slept 4 hours last night. Of course, I can’t tell her that, because she will thing I’m some sort of psycho and won’t even see me for coffee. On the other hand I can’t keep meeting her as nothing but a friend and ignore what already happened anymore. It is just too painful. But it is worse if I don’t. I don’t know what to do. I can’t keep arguing with her, but she must see things the way I see them somehow. I can’t force her into it, but I’m dead without her.
In this wonderful state of mind I was sitting on a rock on the beach. In true fatalistic fashion, I decided to do nothing. After all, fate gave us 2 bells already, she would give us a third one. And when that happened, she would see it, I hoped.
I had to get into town to pick up some things, and it is a 30 minute commute on a train. On my way back, it was dark, the hour was approaching 8 pm, and there were only 4 people in the car. Apart from me, there was a girl that lived in my same town, and we went to the same college. I kept seeing her in the train several times a week. She played the violin, which she carried with her today, and that made me think of Eve again. I didn’t mention it, but Eve is a musician too. And here I was again, falling into my desperation pit. Except I was getting angry too. I would punch myself if that had helped. But I would much rather punch someone else.
Fortune must have been listening, because the occasion presented itself. The other two people in the train were two scumbags from northern Dublin, I don’t know if you are familiar with the type. One of them was wearing a matching tracksuit. White, lame, with blue stripes, he was blond, had an earring and the a horrible northsider accent. The other wore a black oversized jacked, and smelled like cheap wine from the other end of the train.
These two were sitting in such a way that the girl would have to go between them to leave the train. And here is where it all started. When the train arrives to the last stop – mine and the girl’s – it stays there for some ten minutes to ensure all the passengers are off before being reassigned to a different line or the opposite direction. There is no security or other staff at the platform this late on a Sunday. I entertained myself in getting my gloves out of my pockets as I watched the girl get the violin and walk towards the door. And then one of the scumbags put a leg across the corridor. The girl stopped, It was obvious she didn’t know what to do. Something clicked in my brain. This was what I needed. I walked towards them. Smelly was laughing at something Blond said as I pushed his leg aside with the tip of my shoe. I was still considering which one to hit first when Blond turned to me and asked “Who the fuck are you?” in the horrible slang I mentioned before. So I punched him across the face. I must have hit his teeth, because my knuckles are bleeding, but then I turned around to Smelly just to get punched in the face as he left the train. Blond had blood on his teeth as he struggled to get up, and I managed to kick his legs making him fall outside on the platform, before he ran away, cursing me throughout the duration of the episode, both of them.
I looked at the girl. She was still standing on the same spot. I left the train and slowly made my way to the exit of the station.
There was blood on my knuckles.
And I blame Eve.
