You probably think this song is about you

July 1st. I don’t know what made me want to press this button, poke this old wound. But when I sit down in my seat on the train back home and open up Spotify I find myself typing in “Stiller”

“A”, who I affectionately called “the German”. He sent me this song, saying something about it making him think of me or some shit like that. As he did. For what ever fucking reason. I wonder, briefly now - not like before - what his motivation was. Wonder if it was just good to feel the weight of my yearning. I wonder at my own motive, wonder if I was just addicted to being treated like shit by people I thought I loved. Why did I love them? Why had I allowed myself to love him in particular for so long? Maybe that was an addiction too. It felt beyond my control.

As the song plays for the third time I scroll through my playlists briefly wondering which one I put it on, because I know it will contain more to scratch this itch.

When he moved back to Germany, half of me thought I would finally get over it. But he had this way of turning up just as I was beginning to let him go.

“Why did we never date?” He asked me, my head on his shoulder. One of many moments I said to myself - “god I’m an idiot, why the fuck am I here”

All this because of a kiss on my forehead one afternoon, out of nowhere? Because of a conversation about the possible apocalypse? Because of handwritten translations of poetry?

It was he who wanted to be seen. He didn’t see me.

The way that now I can look back and see the way I implicated myself in the game, didn’t have boundaries, nor self respect. There were times when I knew he thought I wasn’t smart, not in the same way that he believed he was anyway. Then a time I was being terrorised by my ex and asked to stay over - (he had said yes, but he was currently out somewhere) after travelling an hour on night buses, sat talking to our friend, his flatmate, he sent a text asking if I minded leaving because he was bringing someone else home. “What am I doing” I remember thinking.

Truth is I treated myself far worse than he did. Because I let it happen, isn’t that true?

There are a few songs that not only remind me of him, of that time, that girl, that aching. But they encapsulate the entirety of that brokenness I had reached. Of the complete loss of any sense of self I had.

A while later, I went to see him in Germany. After swearing I would never see him again. He played me another song, leaving me alone in his room as it played.

I pity the girl, sat on his bed. She just wanted to be loved. She thought the problem was her. My ex of three years had almost killed me and I was trying to brush over it, trying to fill up the emptiness in me with new love. Real love.

Maybe that’s it. Why I’m here. Looking at all of this. And really it’s nothing to do with him at all - not really. He’s just a deflection. He’s not the real issue. It’s the other guy. But more than him. It’s about me.

I’m into the last twenty pages of a book that parallels many of my own feelings and experiences after being assaulted. I say assaulted. I can’t say the real word. Still. But we can read between the lines can’t we?

Yeh, the real issue is not a man-child who was never my boyfriend. The real issue is the man who was. The one who stole me away from myself. Stole my safety even when I was alone. Disconnected me from my own body. Obliterated my sense of self.

Yeh, it was that guy that made me fall hard for the other guy, who, when he planted that forehead kiss on me at work one day, displayed a tenderness I so badly needed and he probably had no idea that it meant so much to me.

Or maybe he did. And that too was another game.

I’m thinking about the ways we abandon ourselves because we want softness. We want love. I don’t think I had realised at that point, at 23,24,25 that not everyone fell in the way that I fell. That it didn’t work like that. That some people were shitty because of their own shit. That it’s not possible to love someone out of their shit. That I needed to learn how to protect myself.

I needed to learn how to want to protect myself.

I didn’t for a while longer after that. Kept diving deeper into people who didn’t deserve to be studied like precious artefacts. People who needed to dive deeper into themselves before they were worthy of that attention. I thought I was capable of loving anyone and withstanding anything. I did it ferociously like I was trying to prove something, though who to I’m not sure. I think I hoped one of these emotionally unavailable people would love me back and that I would finally know the problem wasn’t me. I loved and I loved. It never happened. I learnt that love didn’t work that way, I learnt that I was not unworthy of love simply because of the people unable to love me. The hole shrinks as I need that validation less and less. But it’s an emptiness nonetheless. This deep unworthiness I’ve carried like a scared child in the pit of my belly. It’s beyond me.

Generational trauma is a subject for another time though.

For now I just observe myself, the moves I make without thought. The ones I’ve learnt to catch and intercept.

I change the song.

The book.