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Harrod David added 10 new photos — feeling heartbroken with Vân's Cool's and 4 others at Blackheath, London.
HEART-BREAKING FREE
(or How To Destroy The Only Man Who Can Make You Happy Forever)
She was extraordinarily pretty. Not in any ostentatious sense that would turn every man’s head as she strolled around Richmond; hers was a more subtle, subdued, even a latent allure, and certainly an unassuming, though nonetheless an intense, urgent one.
And it was one which she possessed the capacity to regulate, just as he felt certain she often regulated her moods despite her own claim to be a victim of them, in the way that those Tourette-Syndrome “sufferers” he had worked with as a volunteer while studying for his master’s degree in psychology research methodologies had admitted to him, in private moments, that it was frequently very convenient to be able to let off steam under the umbrella afforded them by their illness. For sure, when she wore one of her darkest countenances –or when she chose to wear one of them, as he suspected was more likely the case– the prettiest, sweetest face in his world morphed into profound plainness. Moreover, he was unrepelled by that plainness, and was given to letting her have her space during those leaden-atmosphered periods, desperate to comfort her with silly, heartfelt catchphrases such as “Darling, sweet honey bee, I accept everything you are and everything you do.”
And so here was a young woman who was tormented by the awful events of her traumatized, tortured childhood. He wanted to support her, and watch her grow wings more than any other patient he had ever been charged with caring for. Because she was different to them. Because they hadn’t made him love them. Quite whether her diagnosis was Borderline or Narcissistic or Bipolar, he was unable to guess, and anyway he had long ago abandoned any faith in such labels as he had acquired an awareness that they described only a tiny part of any of the beautiful, extraordinary individual persons onto whose foreheads those words were rubber-stamped. He preferred such labels as “special”, “unique”, “undiagnosably, weirdly lovable” – that last one in any event was his diagnosis of this woman who –still, implausibly– shared his bed and instructed him, every night, to stay with her whenever he would dutifully start taking blankets out into his living room, intent on sleeping on his sofa, in observance of her insistence that their romance was now dead and that she wanted them to be ...he always struggled to spit out that awful “f”-word in reference to her. She wanted him, nightly, to stay by her side because she needed to cuddle and be cuddled back, to be reassured that she was loved, and lovable, even while she relished withholding, then reaffirming, then tearing away again her own declarations of undying love for him.
The first time they had made love –which took him some hours because climax was never a good enough reason to quit cherishing her physically, just as he cherished her in every other way– he had appreciated the vindication of his skills in her open-mouthed, loose-jawed, “shocked and awed” expression, which communicated to him (whether she was faking it or not – and he fancied not) that no man had ever done this to her before. He had even allowed himself to imagine that there was nothing, now, that he could do wrong that this sweet product of Ha Long Bay’s breathtakingly, staggeringly delightful natural charms, with the countless, perilously jagged rocks of its awesome archipelagos, would not forgive. Little did he know then, while he was provoking those looks of astonishment on his sweetheart’s face, and shunting out those sweet, grateful grunts as her knees and elbows and ankles and wrists tightened their grasp on him, that her grasp would indeed loosen and tighten, over and again, inexplicably, many times during the coming weeks; and that her own beauty was as serpentinely portentous as the lovely rocks of the Bay that had yielded her.
“Don’t call me that,” she complained, tonelessly, with an anger that was as understated and restrained as was the prettiness which had suddenly abandoned her deep, dark eyes. She bore into his heart with the look of hatred that she shot him, while not ceasing for a moment to continue with her task of lovingly preparing apple, beetroot and carrot juice for them both.
“Don’t call you what, baby girl? ‘Darling’ or ‘Sweet honey bee’?”
“Neither of them. And don’t call me that other thing, either,” she fumed. “It’s weird.” And then she paused briefly before pressing the button, having plopped all the chunks of carrot, beetroot and Apple into the blender. She turned, dramatically, to face him. “I hate you, and I don’t care what you think.” And with that, she punched “blend”, shredding the sinews of his heart, just as surely as those ingredients of her ABC juice would never be their old selves again.
He struggled to get a grip on himself, smiled incongruously. “You hate me, Linh?” He didn’t believe her words, but he loved her too much to contemplate mocking her or failing to take her seriously in anything she might ever say to him. “You loved me this time yesterday – so much that you declared you were going to defy your mother and be with me even if she doesn’t approve. You liked me the morning before that, when you’d decided definitely that our romance was over, but that you wanted us to be friends and would ‘never abandon’ me. A week ago, you told me that even though you deeply wanted to be with me, there was no hope any more for us – that was the day after you gushed that I tick all your boxes, including boxes you didn’t even know you had. What’s happened now to make you want to say something as awful as what you’ve just said, Linh? Help me to understand, please.”
She cranked the blender up further, mashing away at the roughage and ripping it apart leaving only the bloodlike, drinkable goodness in the jug. She poured, drank and passed her ex-lover his cupful. “I don’t need you to understand anything, Dave. I don’t need you for sex and I don’t need you for money. When I leave your flat next week, there’s no reason for us to ever see each other again.” Those words ripped their way right through him.
What was left of his heart, from that moment on, was a shrivelled, wounded, powerless mound of useless flesh. And he would need to break free from this, his painfullest-ever heartbreak, by, once Linh had finally abandoned him –which she would in a few days do, to rejoin with the man whose bed she had also been intermittently sharing on the nights when she had been absent from Dave’s home in that seemingly safe, gated community in Stoke Poges– seeking out Linh-substitutes to make fall in love with him, so that he could crush their souls as mercilessly as Linh had systematically trampled his.
And so, once she was gone, he made one final gesture just to be absolutely certain that her leaving him was not merely another abrupt downturn in mood, and that there truly was no upturn to wait foolishly around for. Linh didn’t disappoint him. He arrived at her new home, in Blackheath, at 9am two days after she’d vacated Stoke Poges. He hadn’t wanted to be too early for he knew she loved her lie-ins, but equally he didn’t want to arrive too late and risk that she might be out and about, to return home who-knows-when. And his visit, with the bouquet of a dozen fresh, fragrant red roses nestling in his right arm had to take place that day – because it was his birthday. If she can turn me away with sharp looks and cruel words on a day like today, Dave calculated, then I have my proof, my reassurance, that (just as she had falsely said two days into their three-week affair, retracting her words hours later) “There is no hope.”
“Xin Chao, Linh,” he said cheerfully, lamely. “Ban khoe khong?”
She just looked at him with her pitiless, black shark eyes.
“Come on, you say your thing, then I can reply ‘Toi rat khoe, cam on.’”. He might just as well have been speaking a foreign language for all the impact his words were having on this hard-hearted, hard-bitten Venus flytrap.
All she would say, as she reached across with only one arm to collect her roses, her other delicate-skinned, pretty, pink painted-nailed fingers still holding the front door half-shut, was, emotionlessly, “The flowers are beautiful.”
“Well, just don’t hold them so close to your face, though, Linh, otherwise nobody will appreciate just how lovely they are.” Again, he might just as well have been speaking in Vietnamese.
And she took them inside, shooting a menacing glance Dave’s way as she said: “Now go away. I can’t talk right now, it’s not a good moment. You’re making an awkward situation. My boyfriend’s upstairs in my bed and I want to get back and cuddle him.”
Then the door shut, ever so gently, forever.
© Glitt O’Rourke, 2015
(or How To Destroy The Only Man Who Can Make You Happy Forever)
She was extraordinarily pretty. Not in any ostentatious sense that would turn every man’s head as she strolled around Richmond; hers was a more subtle, subdued, even a latent allure, and certainly an unassuming, though nonetheless an intense, urgent one.
And it was one which she possessed the capacity to regulate, just as he felt certain she often regulated her moods despite her own claim to be a victim of them, in the way that those Tourette-Syndrome “sufferers” he had worked with as a volunteer while studying for his master’s degree in psychology research methodologies had admitted to him, in private moments, that it was frequently very convenient to be able to let off steam under the umbrella afforded them by their illness. For sure, when she wore one of her darkest countenances –or when she chose to wear one of them, as he suspected was more likely the case– the prettiest, sweetest face in his world morphed into profound plainness. Moreover, he was unrepelled by that plainness, and was given to letting her have her space during those leaden-atmosphered periods, desperate to comfort her with silly, heartfelt catchphrases such as “Darling, sweet honey bee, I accept everything you are and everything you do.”
And so here was a young woman who was tormented by the awful events of her traumatized, tortured childhood. He wanted to support her, and watch her grow wings more than any other patient he had ever been charged with caring for. Because she was different to them. Because they hadn’t made him love them. Quite whether her diagnosis was Borderline or Narcissistic or Bipolar, he was unable to guess, and anyway he had long ago abandoned any faith in such labels as he had acquired an awareness that they described only a tiny part of any of the beautiful, extraordinary individual persons onto whose foreheads those words were rubber-stamped. He preferred such labels as “special”, “unique”, “undiagnosably, weirdly lovable” – that last one in any event was his diagnosis of this woman who –still, implausibly– shared his bed and instructed him, every night, to stay with her whenever he would dutifully start taking blankets out into his living room, intent on sleeping on his sofa, in observance of her insistence that their romance was now dead and that she wanted them to be ...he always struggled to spit out that awful “f”-word in reference to her. She wanted him, nightly, to stay by her side because she needed to cuddle and be cuddled back, to be reassured that she was loved, and lovable, even while she relished withholding, then reaffirming, then tearing away again her own declarations of undying love for him.
The first time they had made love –which took him some hours because climax was never a good enough reason to quit cherishing her physically, just as he cherished her in every other way– he had appreciated the vindication of his skills in her open-mouthed, loose-jawed, “shocked and awed” expression, which communicated to him (whether she was faking it or not – and he fancied not) that no man had ever done this to her before. He had even allowed himself to imagine that there was nothing, now, that he could do wrong that this sweet product of Ha Long Bay’s breathtakingly, staggeringly delightful natural charms, with the countless, perilously jagged rocks of its awesome archipelagos, would not forgive. Little did he know then, while he was provoking those looks of astonishment on his sweetheart’s face, and shunting out those sweet, grateful grunts as her knees and elbows and ankles and wrists tightened their grasp on him, that her grasp would indeed loosen and tighten, over and again, inexplicably, many times during the coming weeks; and that her own beauty was as serpentinely portentous as the lovely rocks of the Bay that had yielded her.
“Don’t call me that,” she complained, tonelessly, with an anger that was as understated and restrained as was the prettiness which had suddenly abandoned her deep, dark eyes. She bore into his heart with the look of hatred that she shot him, while not ceasing for a moment to continue with her task of lovingly preparing apple, beetroot and carrot juice for them both.
“Don’t call you what, baby girl? ‘Darling’ or ‘Sweet honey bee’?”
“Neither of them. And don’t call me that other thing, either,” she fumed. “It’s weird.” And then she paused briefly before pressing the button, having plopped all the chunks of carrot, beetroot and Apple into the blender. She turned, dramatically, to face him. “I hate you, and I don’t care what you think.” And with that, she punched “blend”, shredding the sinews of his heart, just as surely as those ingredients of her ABC juice would never be their old selves again.
He struggled to get a grip on himself, smiled incongruously. “You hate me, Linh?” He didn’t believe her words, but he loved her too much to contemplate mocking her or failing to take her seriously in anything she might ever say to him. “You loved me this time yesterday – so much that you declared you were going to defy your mother and be with me even if she doesn’t approve. You liked me the morning before that, when you’d decided definitely that our romance was over, but that you wanted us to be friends and would ‘never abandon’ me. A week ago, you told me that even though you deeply wanted to be with me, there was no hope any more for us – that was the day after you gushed that I tick all your boxes, including boxes you didn’t even know you had. What’s happened now to make you want to say something as awful as what you’ve just said, Linh? Help me to understand, please.”
She cranked the blender up further, mashing away at the roughage and ripping it apart leaving only the bloodlike, drinkable goodness in the jug. She poured, drank and passed her ex-lover his cupful. “I don’t need you to understand anything, Dave. I don’t need you for sex and I don’t need you for money. When I leave your flat next week, there’s no reason for us to ever see each other again.” Those words ripped their way right through him.
What was left of his heart, from that moment on, was a shrivelled, wounded, powerless mound of useless flesh. And he would need to break free from this, his painfullest-ever heartbreak, by, once Linh had finally abandoned him –which she would in a few days do, to rejoin with the man whose bed she had also been intermittently sharing on the nights when she had been absent from Dave’s home in that seemingly safe, gated community in Stoke Poges– seeking out Linh-substitutes to make fall in love with him, so that he could crush their souls as mercilessly as Linh had systematically trampled his.
And so, once she was gone, he made one final gesture just to be absolutely certain that her leaving him was not merely another abrupt downturn in mood, and that there truly was no upturn to wait foolishly around for. Linh didn’t disappoint him. He arrived at her new home, in Blackheath, at 9am two days after she’d vacated Stoke Poges. He hadn’t wanted to be too early for he knew she loved her lie-ins, but equally he didn’t want to arrive too late and risk that she might be out and about, to return home who-knows-when. And his visit, with the bouquet of a dozen fresh, fragrant red roses nestling in his right arm had to take place that day – because it was his birthday. If she can turn me away with sharp looks and cruel words on a day like today, Dave calculated, then I have my proof, my reassurance, that (just as she had falsely said two days into their three-week affair, retracting her words hours later) “There is no hope.”
“Xin Chao, Linh,” he said cheerfully, lamely. “Ban khoe khong?”
She just looked at him with her pitiless, black shark eyes.
“Come on, you say your thing, then I can reply ‘Toi rat khoe, cam on.’”. He might just as well have been speaking a foreign language for all the impact his words were having on this hard-hearted, hard-bitten Venus flytrap.
All she would say, as she reached across with only one arm to collect her roses, her other delicate-skinned, pretty, pink painted-nailed fingers still holding the front door half-shut, was, emotionlessly, “The flowers are beautiful.”
“Well, just don’t hold them so close to your face, though, Linh, otherwise nobody will appreciate just how lovely they are.” Again, he might just as well have been speaking in Vietnamese.
And she took them inside, shooting a menacing glance Dave’s way as she said: “Now go away. I can’t talk right now, it’s not a good moment. You’re making an awkward situation. My boyfriend’s upstairs in my bed and I want to get back and cuddle him.”
Then the door shut, ever so gently, forever.
© Glitt O’Rourke, 2015
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