Broken Summer
Throughout life there are days that don’t really mean anything, interchangeable days where you change nothing, do nothing; days that don’t serve any real purpose beyond getting you to the next one and adding just that tiniest shred to your total experience. There are days too, even if you don’t realise it at the time, when a single action, a misplaced word, sends ripples out across your life, irreversibly altering your future. The fifth of June 2008 was one of these days.
The one year anniversary of my girlfriend Ally and I getting together. Our relationship had suffered some setbacks over previous the twelve months, mostly the result of my moving away to university over a hundred miles away. In the three months before that we had been seeing each other several times a week. After I moved away, we were only together on holidays and for a weekend each month. Still, in a few weeks I would be back for summer and we would have endless days to spend together; days walking in parks, driving down to the coast, going out, staying in, watching films, baking cakes, having barbecues and being in love. It would have been just like the summer before, only better because, a year later, we knew each other so much better, were so much more comfortable and happy.
The day before, June fourth, was the day I was supposed to meet her. She would have been waiting for me at the train station, we would have gone back to mine together, spent the night in each other’s company, and woken up next to each the following day, all ready to celebrate being together a whole year. That didn’t happen though; I felt tired, didn’t feel like meeting her that day and said I would see her the one after. She was disappointed, annoyed even, but only demonstrated it with grudging acceptance. I went home alone.
That night my friend came over. We talked. I somehow got it into my head that I wasn’t happy, that I wanted a change, something new. That I was tired of travelling so far to see my girlfriend, that maybe it was better if I ended it. I’m not really sure what my reason was now, it was really just a series of minor inconveniences and some erroneous notion that I would be happier alone. Whatever the reasons, they grouped all together formidably enough to create a doubt about my relationship. My friend told me not to rush into anything.
The following day I awoke in a strange mood, alone in my bed. I knew I had to go see Ally, but I delayed it; I needed time to think. Sometimes I like to be alone. Unfortunately that day was one of those days. In the afternoon she sent me a text, asking if I was avoiding her, or if I was coming to see her. She suspected something was wrong, but I told her I wasn’t avoiding her and would come see her a bit later.
I drove up to her house that afternoon. It was awkward, walking in, sitting in her room. We didn’t talk much. I didn’t know what to say. Then we left, to drive around. I didn’t know where to go. Eventually we drove out to some remote spot and she asked me what was wrong. I told her I wasn’t sure if we should still be together, asked her what she thought. She turned away and started crying. She said it didn’t matter what she thought. It had been a genuine question, but I suppose I already knew the answer. I knew too that, with that said, there would be no going back.
Later we were sat somewhere else, by a park, in my car. After a long silence we started talking, even joking a little, as if nothing had happened. It felt good to be like that. It felt as if nothing would change, and everything would be like before, only, somehow, better. I said it was a good round number, a year, almost poetic. I don’t know why I said that, I think at the time I was scared of life passing me by: still with the same person from a year ago, still hanging on to someone back home when I didn’t live there any more. It never crossed my mind that some relationships get better with time, that people become better when they’re with the right person, I was just worried of stagnation, of settling.
When I dropped her home that night I felt a strange disconnect. I remember she was holding onto me, crying into my shoulder, telling me she didn’t want me to leave, and I was just staring at the brick wall of her house. It still felt like a good idea then, though I never wanted to hurt her. And so I just stared at that wall, became lost in the rough, pock-marked pattern. I didn’t even feel the warm body pressed against me until she said something. Just a few words. It brought me back to the moment, choked me up. I couldn’t stay. I kissed her on the cheek, tasting salt-tears on my lips, and pulled away.
Naively I thought she was not taking it as badly as I had worried she would. I thought she, like I thought I had, would have gotten used to me not being around because I was away so much. Of course, I wanted to be there for her as well as I could, even being the cause of pain. And we talked, and we stayed friends, and she seemed, if not happy, at least okay. And I felt okay. I missed her, though, intensely sometimes, while others I told myself I had made the right decision. I had my friends to keep me distracted, and I had a sort of optimism that this would be the start of a new me and a new life.
The weeks dragged past. June turned to July and I left university for the summer. July lasted an age before turning to August. I thought that the summer would pick up with August, that I would spend long summer days with friends, like in the summers of a couple of years ago. But everyone had moved on, had moved away, gotten jobs, wanted to go out clubbing and drinking, rather than indulge the simple pleasures of standing outside and eating charcoal-cooked meat. Ally moved on too, and the further away she got, the more I began to miss her.
She met someone as August came to a close, built up a long friendship with him over the weeks and finally spent a day with him. I suppose it was this that finally got to me, just like those words she said outside her house. I suddenly realised how much I missed her. Suddenly everything was a reminder of her, as if the summer had never happened and I had gone back to the last year, when I would come home and she would always be here, waiting for me, and we would go out on long drives and collect conkers and eat cake and lay together, just drinking in each other’s warmth.
It wasn’t just jealousy that drove me; it was a fear that I had needed her more than I realised. Back in the last September, although I had had to leave her to go to university, and had worried about what it would do to our relationship, I had had that warm security of knowing she was there back home for me, to support me as I went into the unknown so that. No matter what happened I had known, even without thinking, that there would be someone at home waiting for me, caring about me. Now I would have no one like that; no one to send text messages to each night, no one to look forward to coming back to, and no memories to keep me warm at night when I lay alone.
These feelings, these fears and this anguish, these regrets and this loneliness, all built up inside me, catalysed by the worry that, now that she had met someone else, I had lost her forever. I knew I shouldn’t bring them up, especially not now when she was moving on, because they would hurt her as well, and mess up this new life she was building for herself. I did though, I couldn’t keep them in, I ended up telling her everything about how I felt. And she just took it all in and reassured me and comforted me. And I just kept on, and eventually she told me this was how she had felt when I had broken up with her. She told me about the days she had sat with nothing to do, not wanting to do anything, even as her friends, her family tried to spur her on. She told me how her friends had hated me for what I’d done, but how she had just waited so long, for weeks and then for months for me to change my mind, but had finally accepted she had to move on.
She said all this without bitterness, without any hint of malice. She stated it all as simply as fact. But in all the times we had talked over the summer, she had never mentioned any of this, she had never whined or complained, or asked me to come back. She had just quietly endured. And even as I brought all my self-inflicted grievances to her, even as I whined and complained, she never turned away, never snapped at me or took on a tone of superiority. Instead she replied that it was me who had caused this, and, since she had endured it and gotten over it, I would now have to do the same.
It broke my heart to hear those words, it hurt me in so many ways. In the first they meant that not only had I lost what I had, but I had given it up. They meant too that I had hurt her so much more than I realised, and, though I had only just realised it, I had hurt myself just as much as well. They meant that, even despite all this pain, despite what her friends said, despite that she just didn’t need me any more because she had learned to cope without me, she still wanted us to be, and still considered us to be, very good friends. Finally, what not only her words, but everything she had ever been to me, meant was that it would take a long time for me to find anyone as good, as nice, as sweet and understanding as her.
I barely slept that night. It’s been said before that it’s not the things you do that you regret, but the things you don’t do. There were so many things that Ally and I had never done together, but should have and could have done if only I’d given us a little more time and had a little more faith. It was then that I realised that, like the scar on my elbow from when I fell off my skateboard, or the first girl that I truly fell in love with, this pain and these regrets would always be a part of me. Even in the years to come, with all the happinesses and the losses they would bring, long after I had found and lost other loves, I would still look back on this summer, this broken summer, and feel a small twinge of sadness for the girl I hurt and the days I wasted.
Tags: 2008, break-up, Fiction, nostalgia, original fiction, regrets, relationship, summer
