31st May 2006
That bitch. Cruel dictator bitch. She’s basically told me I have to love Paddy and I’m not allowed to love Ollie, as if it’s up to her how I feel about anything or anyone!!
It’s the most unfair thing in the world.
It feels like a tragedy. My love for Ollie has not one single tiny grain of badness or wrongness in it.
I love him for the extraordinary person he is.
There is no purer, more altruistic feeling that could exist. It’s unbearable to know that I have to spend the rest of my life deprived of him and, even worse, to think of him forever going without the endless, amazing love I know I’d give him, which he deserves more than anyone I’ve ever met.
When I think about his sheer goodness, with no trace, spot or stain of anything bad in it, I want to cry.
Ollie isn’t like most of us. He’s different.
There’s nothing tainted or compromised about him.
When I was with him and thought I might actually get to keep him, I felt my own inner taint start to dissolve.
Not that I’m a bad person, but most of us, me included, are sometimes driven not by the highest moral principles but by slightly more squalid motivations: making sure we’re okay at other people’s expense.
Ollie would never behave like that and he’s proved it.
You don’t become a firefighter if you’re as self-serving and venal as most of us are.
You have to be willing, day after day, to walk into burning buildings and risk your life in order to save others.
Ollie’s strength of character, his exceptional bravery, his kindness – most people don’t have those qualities.
And he’s so modest too, and so, so beautiful.
I’ll admit it: his beauty is part of the tragedy – that snatched-away, once-in-a-lifetime chance to have something perfect.
How gorgeous would any babies be who had him as a father?
! It makes no sense to torture myself by thinking about it, but I can’t stop.
The hardest part of this ordeal is not that he’s being forcibly removed from my life by a tyrant.
That sort of cruelty, or something equally evil, happens to so many people in this pain-filled world – they lose homes, jobs, loved ones, often not as a result of unavoidable natural disasters but because of the wickedness of a human monster or monsters.
And everyone, quite understandably, feels desperately sorry for them – but there would be no sympathy for me, even if I were honest about how I feel.
No one would understand. I could well be the first person this particular awfulness has ever happened to.
No one on this planet has felt what I’m feeling now – at least nowhere near as strongly – for someone who is forbidden to them for the particular cruel, senseless reason that Ollie is to me.
If they knew about it, people would say there’s something unnatural about the strength of my love for Ollie, and how much I want him back.
The only person who might understand my predicament is Ollie himself, because it’s his predicament too.
From him to me, from me to him, it’s the same: a palindrome of loss.
Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t feel as strongly about me as I do about him.
Not yet, anyway. But I know he would, and soon, if only we hadn’t been forcibly separated.
Ollie is a strong-feeler – unlike Paddy, whose reaction to most of life is a shrug and a ‘Who cares?’ He’s so inert so much of the time.
I’ve met stuffed toys who have more agency, ambition and vision.
Yet Paddy – the one who smokes joints all day long and keeps getting fired from one crappy bar job after another – is the one I must now somehow brainwash myself into preferring. How the hell am I going to manage it?
It’s true that I did once think he was lovely.
That was before I met Ollie, obviously, but still.
Maybe I can feel that way about Paddy again, if I try?
There was a time when I’d have said, ‘Anyone who fires him, it’s their loss,’ and ‘Who cares about a bit of weed? We’ve all done it.
’ But that was before he behaved so despicably, before his endless, callous demonstration (it felt endless at the time, though it did eventually end) of his complete and utter unwillingness to commit.
Can I revive the way I felt about him before that unforgivable display of ingratitude?
It was really the worst … let’s call it ‘Romantic Relationship Vandalism’ I’ve ever seen done by anyone ever to someone they know adores them.
Stopping describing his behaviour as ‘unforgivable’ would be a start, I suppose. The trouble is, I don’t want to forgive him. The real question, and a far more interesting one than ‘Do I want to?’, is ‘Do I want to want to?’
Every time I try to untangle the mess of all of it, a panicked scream rises up inside me: No, no, no! Don’t just accept this! Do something, anything.
What can I do, though? The Tyrant has made it very clear that I’m never going to see my beloved Ollie again.