I've been ordered, in no uncertain terms, to get off my arse and resume blogging. Meet arse, getting off it now.
Remember Adam, Adam who smoked heroin but wasn't a true addict because he didn't inhale didn't inject, had never stolen anything and still took regular showers, whom I drove to the rehab centre and had the great pleasure of watching peacefully sleep the drugs away in a diaper, whose unleashed hell lasted far longer than our relationship because HOW THE FUCK HAD THAT HAPPENED TO ME, and HOW COULD HE?
Bitch detour. The Bitch gained her nickname when I found out something so sordid and astonishing I'm still trying to understand why someone would ever choose to be portrayed like that. When Adam and I first became a couple she acted like she was overjoyed but kept bringing up his ex, their old songs, bringing out pictures of all of them together, it was very perplexing. Yes, being an idiot, I found it merely perplexing and didn't realise till later that she'd been jealous. It all sort of came together when Adam confessed it'd taken him 2 days to kiss me because he was afraid since, you know, I was very promiscuous. Or so it'd seemed.
Flashback to about a year earlier, my home, 3 girls and 2 boys playing Trivial Pursuit. We wanted to have a full War of the Sexes thingy but lacked a male so Bitch rang Adam, who was unavailable. This was what happened on our end - or so I thought. Adam's version: So the Bitch rang me and said... Well, she said you were all at your place and you were going to have a, ahhh, well, a bit of an orgy but you lacked a man so she was wondering whether I was available, and so you see why it took me a while to be able to kiss you, I had this whole idea of you as someone who organises orgies when the parents are gone, for fuck's sake, and then I met you and it didn't seem like you at all and I needed a bit of time to sort out which one was the real you because You, I want, Orgy You not so much.
God. Honestly, words fail me. I rang my other girlfriend who'd been there that night and told her about it in utter disbelief and she said There must be some mistake, maybe he misunderstood. Right, the man was afraid to touch me because he thought I was a highly advanced whore, surely he'd misheard the request. Gosh, orgy, board games, I can see how he might have confused the two, they're almost interchangeable. Unsurprisingly, I cut off my ties with her. Surprisingly, she was very hurt, how could I. Indeed, who wouldn't want to establish a rep as some sort of vaginal garage where everyone is welcome to park his junk?
A few months after the breakup Adam and I met for dinner. It was stilted at best, I was raging mad still, he took it all. I do rage well and I had no inhibitions, and he just took it all. He kept taking it all, in fact. Throughout the years he'd invite me to his place for dinner and I'd go, we'd end up talking about us, I'd invariably lash out at him and he'd accept it all. I think we met at his place by unspoken agreement. I've never done drugs, never had any interest in them, but I wouldn't have minded if someone smoked a joint in my flat before that, who cares. I certainly didn't. But things have changed, I could never cope with it now and Adam, bless him, who's been heroin-free for over 10 years, still smokes joints like there's no tomorrow. What he does in his home is his business; not ever will I suffer watching someone do drugs in my territory. Besides, the man is mellow. Meeeeeeellooow. No surprise, considering how much he smokes, more of a surprise that he can actually stand upright really. Anyway, late dinner invitation, good food (he can cook), mellow mood, mellow music, mellow enough conversation till it all briefly went to bloody hell, then back to mellow, this was our pattern for years.
I do give him credit. He never stopped using the nickname he had for me despite my protests, he never stopped trying to be in my life, even if it was just once a year or so, and he never once yelled out "Enough already!!" Because he never did, we were able to remain in contact and establish a relationship in the wake of all that trauma. If he'd ever tried to justify or minimise it I'd have been gone in a second, for good, the same way I will if he ever relapses. Selfish it may be but he knows I cannot go through that again, not even as a friend. Still, I cannot imagine how hard it must be to be under attack for years without feeling the need to retaliate yourself. Man is mellow, true, and always stoned, which is bound to help, but it requires some sort of self-control I would certainlly not have were our roles reversed. I think the guilt alone would kill me, he doesn't seem to suffer from it though. I think he just accepted this is what he did, this is how things are, can't be changed so accept it. At any rate, our mostly-annual dinners became a steady fixture, as did our (mine) talking about things at some point.
I have barely any recollection of our time together, I mostly remember a few cut-scenes and the general feeling of hopelessness and despair, but not really much in the way of details. When we met in the beginning of this year he somehow mentioned the timeline. In my mind, this had all happened over a few weeks. As it turns out, it went on for over 4 months. When I realised that all it was as though all my former rage and hissy fits coalesced and I was madder than I'd ever been at him. I was so protective of that girl who suddenly found herself trapped in a nightmare, who suffered so much for no good reason, four whole months, forget me, how could he have done this to her?
So I hit him.
We were sitting on the sofa, shoeless, and I turned my body around and kicked him high on the shoulder, sending him clean across the sofa [white leather = good slide] and then dove for him, all the while screaming You bloody bastard, four months, four fucking months, how could you! Adam is skinny but wiry, a capoeira dancer, but he never really stood a chance because a) I was off my rocker and b) he would never hit me back, so he kept trying to immobilise me and I, being insanely, weirdly flexible, kept slithering out of his grasp and landing further blows, highly satisfying blows in a primeval way that I can't even begin to describe to you. I understood then why men and Jersey Shore women fight, physically fight, for every time I hit him, every time whatever bit of my incensed anatomy connected with a piece of his body, every time he grunted, I felt something inside me uncoil, unclench, release.
At some point he grabbed my wrists strongly enough that I couldn't slip away - bruises the next day but you should see the other guy - and lay on me, effectively trapping me with his weight but not before I managed to sneak a leg over his shoulder so I could keep squeezing the living daylights out of the fucker. I wish I had a photopgraph, I don't recall ever having been this limber, I actually had one leg down and the other one's knee was by my head while I kept his head in a vise with the angle. He could have got away but he'd have had to hurt me and he was trying to avoid that - not that I cared, I felt no pain at all. He kept asking if he was hurting me, I kept glaring at him - the bit of him I could see above my leg of steel anyway - and trying to dislodge him, at one point I almost managed to but then he applied more force and that was it, we were trapped like some sort of mutant multi-limbed entity.
I can feel sorry for him now, can you imagine? After all these years of civility I go beserker on him, kicking and punching and yelling and clawing and bucking under him like some bloodthirsty lioness. [HA!] I remember his hair flopping about and his look of utter disbelief. Like I said, very satisfying.
Eventually I calmed down enough that we negotiated a truce and he warily let me go. What the hell was that, he asked. I don't know but you deserved it and it all feels better now, I said. And how did you do that thing with the leg, he asked, I was terrified, I kept waiting for it to crack, how the hell did I not know you were this flexible, I don't remember any of those moves in bed, he said. Oh yes he did. You were a heroin addict, there was no bed, I replied. Ahh, to both win the fight AND have the last word! Bliss.
It's all felt better since. It did release something that had been lurking and poisoning me for over a decade, that underlying pissiness was gone, just gone - deliverance, I suppose. For all I know it might have been the first and last time I kicked arse but God, did I kick it! It was a good day.
