Break Up Fantasies #415, #632 & 273

Break Up Fantasy #415

The first sign that something’s off is that you can’t stop blushing. Ordinarily, you never tend to blush; you’re pale by nature. But your friends notice it first, teasing you for getting hot under the collar at nothing. Then your boss asks jokingly if you ran to work, gesturing at your bright red cheeks. Now you’re conscious of it all the time—twin flushes, permanently flowering on either side of your face. 

You’re not a skincare guy, but you resolve to get to the bottom of this. You stand in your bathroom, all the lights on. You fill the basin with cold water, dunk your face in, and then examine it immediately in the shaving mirror. All clear, at first; smooth and white, as is the norm. And then something peculiar happens. 

If it wasn’t for this moment of heightened attention, focused entirely on your face, the skin over your skull, you might not even have noticed. But there it is—a sting, faint and sudden, across your left cheek. A rising bloom. Then a second sting across the right, and the mark to match. Instantly, you think of me. 

We broke up a week ago. You told me you’d slept with my cousin; I slapped you across the face. Left cheek first, then right. Tonight, as you fall asleep, you think of my hard hands, and how beautiful my dark hair had looked, swinging with the force of my anger. Your face on the pillow is red.

The next sign is the phantom texting. Every morning, you wake up sure that I’ve messaged you in the night, certain that you remember half-waking to read what I’ve sent you. Sometimes the texts are spiteful, sometimes tender. Every morning, you look at your phone before your eyes have fully opened. The inbox is empty. But the phone is warm, burning even, as if it’s been buzzing all night. 

Ghosts of slaps and ghosts of texts, these things together are almost nothing. The third symptom of your haunting is far more convincing. A month or so after the break up (a month of bright cheeks and imagined correspondence) you start flirting again. My cousin’s long gone, so these women are mostly strangers you meet at bars, or parties, or online. At some point in the conversation, naturally, you’ll say something imperfect. Of course you will; everyone does! It’s a bad line, a weak joke, or a misjudged tone. It’s the misstep that every conversation contains, and which you could normally smooth over with little trouble. But now, as soon as it falls from your mouth, you can hear me laughing. High, throaty, mocking. It rings in your ears until you can hear nothing else—until you have no choice but to back away from the bar, the party, the date, hands pressed to your ears, starting to run.  

This can’t go on, of course. You come to see me at the flat, to beg me to put an end to it. I don’t answer the door when you knock, but you let yourself in with keys you haven’t yet returned. You climb the stairs, trying not to look at your crimson face in the hallway mirrors, and find the first floor corridor is strewn with my clothes. You pause, try to discern voices. You hope fervently that I’m alone.

“Gareth?” I say, stepping out of the bathroom. I’m wrapped only in a towel. My legs gleam with bathwater, my dark hair dripping.

“Lauren,” you sigh. 

As soon as you see me, it’s clear how ridiculous this errand is. You know that I’m not haunting you. Not just because a haunting is unlikely and implausible, the stuff of fantasy. But because it’s obvious, from my face (radiant) and limbs (glowing) and even the way that I say “Gareth” (confused, impartial), that I haven’t spared you a thought in weeks. 

You rush out of the house, mind racing with thoughts of rosacea, aural hallucinations, the scented steam rising gently from my body. Back at home, you can’t help yourself. You masturbate, thinking of the steam, the slap, my dark hair. Before you can come, a chill descends on the room. The promise of release disappears. You hear a high, mocking laugh. 

Break Up Fantasy #632

Your distinction was in being the tallest man I’d ever dated. Four years ago, on Caitlin’s balcony, your height had been the first thing I’d noticed; we walked your dog together the next morning in Richmond Park, and I couldn’t stop noticing it: your head, battering at the horse-chestnuts. 

Today, it’s what gives you away, hulking over the bins in the passage at the side of my house. No one can be that tall and discreet. You’re not squeamish about it, no dainty thumb and forefinger—you swing open the bin lids with a full open palm and begin to pull out their innards. You start with the food waste caddy, which only illustrates how low you’ve sunk. Digging through grains of orzo and the woody ends of asparagus, (pausing for a second to consider how well I seem to be living), you parse the muck for relics and clues. Towards the bottom, you come to the small compostable bag that I use for my bathroom bin, and your eyes—those grave black eyes, those eyes that I loved so much—light up. 

You unknot the bag with gentle fingers, shake it out. A knot of brown hair falls onto your lap. The hair that I’ve prised out of the plughole. You card it through your fingers like the lock of a saint; you press it against your cheek. The hair is soft and, against all odds, smells amazing. You knew it would.

You’re not expecting much else from the food caddy but you keep going until you hit its slimy end. Right at the bottom, a bundle of short green stalks, too thin to be more asparagus. You realize that these are the ends that I snip off flower-stems before I put the flowers in a vase; it makes them drink the vase-water better. You should have brought me flowers, you think. Who’s buying me flowers? 

You wipe your hands on your trousers and crack your back before moving onto the recycling bin. It hurts to crouch for so long, a giant like you. Still, you return to your hunch and start shifting through my old receipts. At first there seems to be little of use; empty packaging, junk mail, magazines. What you’d really like is a photograph. 

Instead, you find a letter. Dear Lauren in familiar cursive. It’s your letter. You’d written it about a month ago, just after we broke up. Too late, of course, too late by years. I used to beg you for affection, for a sweet word; you always said it didn’t come naturally and so I’d suggest you write something down. We must have had the same conversation fifty times since that first morning in Richmond Park. Now, you pick your letter out of my recycling bin, and see my handwriting on the back of it. Your heart races, until you understand that what I’ve written is a shopping list. Worse than that—worse than a shopping list on the back of your open heart—is that these are the ingredients for a meal that I only make for someone I’m having sex with. 

Your handsome head rings with the flower stubs, the groceries: proof of someone new. You rifle frantically through the remaining recycling looking for details. Two tickets for an exhibition. A lover’s map of Bristol. You’re going at a rate that gives you paper cuts; you’re bleeding on a post-it that says “I had a great time last night x.” You begin to put an image together of the man that I’m seeing now. You see something else with his handwriting on it; you’re learning how to spot his Greek Es. He likes art, you guess, and orzo. He drinks riesling, apparently. You roll the neck of the bottle across your trembling palm.

It’s shady in the passage by the side of my house, the house we used to live in. Still, you notice when a new, chiller shadow falls over you. You look up, hoping to see me at the window, fingers tightening around the lock of hair in your pocket. It’s not me. It’s the new man, the man who likes art and riesling. You stare up at him from the bins. 

It doesn’t matter that he’s only visible from the waist up, the rest of him hidden by wall and window-sill. It’s obvious anyway that he’s taller than you. 

Break Up Fantasy #273

It’s a couple of days after Christmas and we’re both back in town. We meet up by the docks to exchange gifts. It’s cold and the water below us is moving fast. I look fantastic. 

We kiss. You’re holding a large wrapped box, and there’s excitement all over your handsome face. “Me first,” you say and I smile, take my hands out of my jacket. I tear the wrapping off slowly, folding it up as I go along because I know being green is important to you. “Look at your face. Expectant pleasure much?” Expectant pleasure is what you call the way that I look at your body before we have sex. 

Inside the box is a silicone strap-on and a set of dilator plugs. They’re so I can peg you, pursuant to a conversation we had in November when you told me you wanted me to peg you. My Christmas present is getting to fuck you. 

I stand very still; a diving bird drops into the grey waters. I know that you think we have unbelievable sex even though the number of times you’ve made me come is in the single digits. You think that we have unbelievable sex because I am constantly, nonchalantly acquiescing to the new things that you want to try. They’re things that make you look cool and open minded, which makes you think that you’re treating me, but they still revolve around your stimulation and pleasure. You’ll let me put a finger up your arsehole and think we’re being adventurous, but won’t go down on me for more than three minutes at a time. The bird comes up for air some way away from us. 

My present for you—Italo Calvino’s Six Memos (!)—burns in the inner pocket of my handbag, wrapped in red chiyogami paper. I can feel my eyes filling up with tears. The cold helps. 

The wind whips your face as you move towards me. “Lauren, baby, what’s wrong?” 

“I can’t do this anymore, Donnie,” I say. My gaze is dead and beautiful.

I take the strap-on out of the box and hold it for a second over the side of the dock, gripping it firmly by the phallus. Without breaking eye contact with you, I drop it in the water. I shake the dilator plugs in after it. The current carries everything away. 

For a second, you consider jumping in after them. 

“I’m sorry. It’s the only way I can properly end this. You know that if I didn’t just throw all of that non-biodegradable silicone into the sea, you’d continue to wonder if this could work. You’d text me, call me, write me letters. You would write my initials in margins, sometimes with your initials above them. We’d sleep together sometime in February after seeing each other again at a mutual friend’s party; it would be terrible. The only way to finish this once and for all was to hit you in your soft spot (by which, of course, I mean your overriding love for the planet), to do something so environmentally unforgivable that you could never question whether or not the end of our relationship was for the best.”

You look back at me. Still handsome; devastated by understanding. The silicone penis bobs downstream, imperishable.