August 4, 2006

It's around 12.15pm yesterday, and I'm due to see K later that day. I am officially skint - skint, that is, because I've handed over 90% of my meagre monthly pittance to pay for the spends for a holiday I was told not to go on.

I do not have a problem with this: I'd said I would help out, and I have. What I didn't expect, however, was the coldest of cold shoulders après somewhat major consumption of humble pie.

It's been a long three weeks. Very long. And as I wrote yesterday, it's been a three weeks almost without sleep, almost certainly without food, and with worry so much that I've lost three-quarters of a stone.

But I miss her.

So much.

It's a Thursday lunchtime, and she lives six or seven miles from where I'm staying. Bugger it, I think. I'll walk.

And so I do, walk and walk and walk, sweat dripping down my back and across my face, through horrible little towns and villages, across dual-carriageways, under motorway bridges, past scallies and businesses and OAPs. I walk on and on, all the way having quiet but increasingly panicky conversations with myself.

I do what we all do: I plan the conversation I'll have when I get there. I think long and hard about what I want to say; and also what I want to hear back.

Yeah, that's right: I try to construct the impossible. Like she's ever going to reply with what I'd like her to.

Still, the voices echo in my head of what I'd like to happen. "Bad angel" - I never know which shoulder he's supposed to sit on - suddenly becomes, and I know I really should know this already, me. That's what bad angel is. Yourself. Good angel is merely your conscience.

I know this, I know this, but still I plough on. Chitter-chattering to myself, trying to fix things I can't fix on my own, trying to work around obstacles I can't even see.

After much trudgery and sweat, nervous anticipation and, frankly, rising nausea, I arrive.

Following the pleasantries, this is what I meant to say, but didn't:

Where are we? Where are we exactly? How come three weeks ago we were lying blissfully asleep, wrapped up like bears, in our bubble that no-one could touch?

And what I actually said:

Hi.

And what I meant to say next:

I miss you, you know? I really do. Ages ago I told you that you make me feel ten feet tall, and I meant it. Now I feel about two feet small. And shrinking fast. I hate this feeling, even though I'm the one who's put me here.

And I actually said:

How are things?

I thought the following:

You look bloody great, K. Beautiful. And it's absolutely wrecking me that I can't just reach out and touch you. Just put an arm around you, like we always, always did. Have we really fallen this far? Really?

And it went on in this vein for 40 minutes, while K - admittedly - was busying around her youngest and her friends, and every other thing I did say got pleasant enough but banal enough replies.

So much so that, after that time, I couldn't take it any more.

So I left.

At the door, she kissed me. Held me. Told me to "take care".

At midnight, she sent me a text. Something along of the lines of "live each day as though it's your last".

Except that's what I've been doing for almost 20 years.

I don't want to live like that anymore.

I want to think about tomorrow.

A tomorrow with K in it.

I still don't know where I am with her.

I'm taking her and the kids out next week.

But maybe I'm being a mug?

It's not like I don't have form for that, after all.

Gah.

I need to sleep, friends.

Really need to sleep...