On the edge of my antique leather chair I waited anxiously for the expert opinion that could be my last chance of life. I waited for what I hoped would ignite the healing of the innumerable holes in my soul.

Ruminating, the psychologist mulled over the contents of my heart. It was clear he had made his conclusion, now he was just considering how he was going to best deliver the despair.

All senses attentive, using the last of my optimism I hoped that the news would be good, but expected it to be bad. I hoped that there was a life to hope for.

He spoke.

“It would seem that way, wouldn’t it.”

And then, I passed away.

Why bother getting out of bed? Would make it to bed tonight? The urge to hurt myself confused me.

A simple rage rose inside of me. Everything I went though was for nothing. There was NO answer. If the psychologist didn’t know then it was for sure there was no hope. I had quit university, quit football, left home and dedicated my life to something unachievable.

My visceral pulse had stopped. Murdered because of my own pure intentions.

I just wanted to have a fucking girlfriend.

There is no point in this life, no good came of anything I did.

Fuck it all.

Eight years earlier I was 13 years old. All I wanted in life was to have a girlfriend to look after and do sweet things for. She would be of my choosing. I didn’t want anything in return, I just wanted someone to look after, someone to make happy.

Childhood was a dark place for me. I had a well off family, lived in a good neighbourhood, people that loved me and I was smart for my age. But I had, I thought, no friends. Unknowingly it was this attitude that bought rise to my social solitude. It was my social solitude that had me in tears far more than any healthy person would endure while growing up.

By the age of thirteen the patterns were set. I embraced the identity of outsider and the spiral of self sabotage spun out of control. By the time I was thirteen a girlfriend, I thought, would fulfil the fractured being that I was.

I met the girl because a nine year old on the bus gave me his older sister’s email. I added her to online messenger where she invited me to sneak over to her house to meet her friends. Ten twelve year old girls who were having a slumber party.

Fronting confidence and indifference I met with the young private school girls. They were taken by me as they didn’t go to school with boys. I was a star for the two hour flirtation I stayed for.

With one girl I made an instant connection. She wasn’t that special looking. But to me she was perfect. I had never been more convinced of anything in my life. She knew me and I knew her in a way that we didn’t know each other.

Both of us were nervous and exited to get to know each other. For the first time in my life I felt totally empowered and experienced my maiden foray into the emotion of love. In contrast to the self inflicted hate I had experienced all my life I was immediately unhealthily addicted.

She wrote me love letters and I wrote them back. We spoke on the phone for hours on end. I memorised her phone number, I bought her an expensive opal necklace for her thirteenth birthday.

We went on a date to see Moulin Rouge. I put my arm around her but I was too scared to do anymore.

She later said she was uncomfortable. I thought it was ok. But soon after the event she vaguely implied that she didn’t want to go on dates again. I didn’t understand. But by her making herself more scarce it only drove me to chase her company and affection more desperately. All I understood was that hard work would yield desirable results.

Meanwhile this was my first year at a new school. It was an all boys school. I skipped a grade so I struggled in class and was continually verbally tormented because of where I had moved from. I had no friends, and for someone to consider being my friend would tarnish their reputation in the school.

I was physically tormented and injured daily. I remember going into batting practice in the cricket nets where my teammates would line up to pitch cricket balls at me. They were successful too. I would suffer cricket balls to the head, torso, groin, where ever. It wasn’t practise, it was brutality and humour extracted from my body.

This girl who had shown me a chance represented a glimmer of hope in a desperate and turbulent period of my life.

One year passed, then two. Occasionally the girl would see me. Then she wouldn’t return my calls. Then we would go on a date, then I would hear through her friends that she hated me. All the while the cogs in my head ground together with increasing abrasion trying to figure out what it was going to take for this one hope of love and happiness to materialise. The harder I thought and schemed the deeper into the bottomless pit of misery I tumbled.

I learnt poetry to woo her. I bought her gifts. I sent meaningful flowers to her house. Sometimes she would see me in person. Other times she would shun me. When other guys in my grade were out partying on weekend nights I had nothing to do. It left me plenty of time to sit around and think about how I was going to get this girl, make her happy and complete myself.

More years passed. My internal torment spanned almost half an adolescent decade. Things worsened. I would drunk dial when I was drinking alone. I spent time with and later fucked her friend to get to her. She would stay in contact with me out of sympathy. Close enough to dangle the carrot within perceivable reach, but far enough that every time I gestured towards it, the deeper the trench would grow between her and I.

At the time of my senior formal, though by this stage I had began to form some friends, I had only one choice as to who I wanted to take with me on my night of nights. The Australian version to the ‘Prom’.

There was even a massive after party for couples to go to afterwards. I wasn’t invited.

I extended the invitation to her. To which she neither said yes or no. After all that she and I had been through we had grown close in a way. We had a sense of rapport with each other that we’d formed with no one else. She wanted to get closer, but my insane behaviour would continue to drive her away.

While others in my grade were forming tables to the school formal and organising their partners limousines I had neither a table of people to sit with nor did I have a date to get a limo for. With only a few weeks to my formal the other girls I knew had already been invited. Now I was looking at going to my formal alone. And maybe sitting alone. For weeks leading up to the event I had my own social ineptitude shove mercilessly in my face.

By the week before the formal I was in a state of mind where I expected to go alone. As fate would have it the girl’s friend was going with a guy from my school. On that variable she agreed to go with me. I was over the moon. I even secured an invitation to the after party so I could go there with her and spend time getting closer to her. Maybe, finally, something might happen between us after a magical night together.

She came. I hired and expensive limousine and an amazing diner suit. My heart beat furiously the whole night and I vomited from nervous expectations. We had dinner and we danced. We had fun with her friend and boyfriend. Then unexpectedly, half way through the night she simply left. Her dad came to collect her.

Alone and left with two massively expensive bribe value tickets to the after party I decided to go anyway. There I drank alone and watched all the other couples lovingly making out and snuggling together in the freezing cold winter weather.

Without anyone to talk to I thought to myself there must be some reason why couples are together and I’m not. Something identifiable and executable. If I didn’t figure it out what was the purpose of living? While sitting unaccompanied by any girls or friends someone threw a bale of hay at me and knocked me into the dirt. Hive fives all round.

I drank myself until I passed out in the same dirt later. I woke there in the morning when everyone was gone. You would think that someone would have tended to me? Nope.

After I graduated school the dredging efforts for the girl continued. More to salvage something from my desperate efforts than it was because I harboured affection for the girl anymore. I knew nothing else. I made friends with several of her best friends to try and get inside the workings of her head. I made friends with her parents. I wrote her long psychological letters. I even dated and fucked her best friend to see if it might spark the girl’s emotional interest in me.

Although she and I were not close personally we were always just one degree of separation from each other. A mediated relationship conducted by the people close to her. It turned out that she had started seeing some guy seriously for the first time in her life.

One of the girl’s friends was short a partner to her formal. The girl though it would be a good idea to set her up with me. The train of logic was that both her friend and I suffered social scarcity and by setting us up she would solve two problems with one wave of her logistical wand.

A few weeks before the formal was invited to hang at a small gathering with the prospective partner, the girl, the guy she was seeing and some others. Delighted and exited at an opportunity to see the girl in person I went. When I got there the gathering was pretty much a non event.

There was my prospective partner and a few others but my girl and her boyfriend were nowhere to be seen. Inside one of the rooms the Coldplay album “A Rush of Blood to the Head” was blaring giving a eerie emotional veil to an awkward situation. It was odd that such a melancholic CD could cause a physical throbbing to the structure of the house.

When I asked the host of the non-event where my girl and the object of her affections were she looked at me as if I was stupid for not knowing.

“They’re in my room, she planned to have sex with her boyfriend for the first time.”

The structural rocking of the house was explained.

Why am I being exposed to this?

Surely she would have been aware of the effect this would have on someone who was clearly emotionally dependant on the situation. And emotionally unstable. I was literally sick. Again.

This was the lethal injection.

If I hadn’t lost faith in myself and life before this point certainly now my corpse had been plunged into set and sinking concrete. Life continued to get darker and the point of it became less and less worthwhile.

A few weeks later I was out. I had lost the people I had gone out with and found myself alone and drunk to the point of leglessness. I decided to banish myself form the bar and get a taxi home.

The driver had a turban. On the drive home I addressed him racially in my state of absent mindedness. He kicked the shit out of me in the passenger seat then opened the door and kicked me to the curb.

Left to walk I barely remember getting home. The next day I found I had texted and rang abusing the girl, her parents and her friends. What I communicated to those involved was that the girl was a whore and I told her parents that she was sexually diseased. Told her friends they were fuckwits and that I manipulated and fucked them to get to the girl.

Needless to say I regretted it. But it was the final stake in the heart that was any chance I would ever have to talk to her again. Years later, I would set up two of the girl’s friends with two of the guys I played football with.

At that time the girls proceeded to tell my male colleagues all about what happened in my hideous past. They used this gossip as ammunition to rubbish my name in an attempt to drive me out of my own social circle which was my football team. By joining a football team the people you play with have to be your friends.

In light of my drunk dialling the girl left my radar. I was heartbroken in the same way you would be if a loved family member died unexpectedly. Though she was never with me, or even close to that, she was the plug in my bleeding soul.

Without that purpose in my life, the purpose of my life, life, I figured, was purposeless.

At that point in time I worked at a fruit store to pay off debts owed to my parents.

While working there I noticed a girl working the checkout who looked similar to and had the same mannerisms as the girl who had driven me to insanity over the past six years. Over the next few weeks I noticed her more and more, I would always walk past where she was working check in where she was taking her break. I rolled up my sleeves so she could see my ‘muscles’.

Over a month I watched her. While I stacked shelves in the fruit store my imagination went into overdrive. My sole hadn’t stopped bleeding black blood since the culmination of events with the girl that preoccupied my youth. I couldn’t resist my emotions that were fast seducing my brain with the idea that this new girl could be the answer to all of my problems.

What could I do? The more I thought about proposing the girl the more I felt nauseous about the very good chance she would rid me of any hope of self worth in the future by declining my advances. At least propositioning the girl would let me know if life was worth living or not. The investment of emotions that I was about to commit to the first contact with this girl would dictate my emotional stability.

I just wanted a girlfriend.

In my previous attempts to secure a girlfriend I had learnt poetry and over the last few years sent over a dozen bouquets of flowers. The only fitting first contact was going to be something noteworthy and indeclinable. I was never stupid. I had learnt more from the emotional experiences I had when I was young then most people do in their entire life. With these lessons in mind I sent eighteen long stemmed red roses and a poem to our fruit store.

It was a work of art. It was every girls dream, more importantly I knew the way I was going to treat her was going to make her the happiest girl in the world. The roses were delivered and waited on the office table for her to collect when she arrived at work. The whole workplace was abuzz. No one knew it was me who had sent them.

When she arrived at work my heart beat so fast that it starved my mind of air. Feeling giddy and sick in the stomach I waited for her to read what I had sent her. I knew that as soon as she did she would know it was from me.

As if it were in slow motion the girl approached me amongst the fruit shelves. Smiling and blushing intensely she nervously spoke to me as if she herself was scared of being rejected.

“Would I be wrong in thanking you Alexander for the pretty flowers?”

I indicated that she would not be.

With a school girl excitement she rushed forward and hugged me. She then returned to her counter to see to customers. For the rest of the day we played chicken with our eyes. My chest ached and my hopes soared as my brain spun out of clinical control. I was sick in the head. I thought about snuggling up with her, about picking her up from university and making her dessert.

I planned to speak to her when her shift finished, she finished before me. But I never got the chance.
When she finished work a guy, younger than me but bigger, approached her in the car park. With eighteen roses and two-month pay check vase weighing her arms down she awkwardly but deliberately kissed the guy.

He kissed her back and grabbed her hard.

That day, my level of faith in the world broke beyond repair. I used to question what sort of identity I had. Now, in light of this final and fatal eternal feedback, external references had cast me as a loser. At least now I knew who I was. This instance in my life inspired the actions that would structure the next few years of my life.

Now that I knew what I was I was going to be a loser to the fullest. If I was going to continue to collide with the sad reality that was my life then I was going to embrace it with fury. Hope had turned to self destruction. Sinister internal forces drove me to want to destroy myself and enjoy it.

I enjoyed it. I knew nothing else. By this stage in life I had been through enough and was smart enough to systematically and calculatingly destroy myself. I knew how to find the most brutal emotional circumstances and endure the arousing disembowelling that was my continued self demise.

Included in my poetic literature for the girl was my phone number. I soon got a text from the girl. She wanted to thank me in person and thought I might be a nice friend. She arranged to meet me. Surprised at this, I agreed, thinking meeting her in person would be an opportunity to shove me face right back into my glaring failure.

But when we met up something unforeseen happened.

Almost from the instant we began to talk and hang out in person, we literally, genuinely and affectionately fell in love.

Even though I was self hating, a failure by record and someone who identified with lack I was never naive. I had always been academically intelligent and due to the past experiences with the former girl I was very socially intuitive and a good emotional mind reader. After all that I had been through with girls and socially, after spending so much time watching and analysing I could see things that no one else could.

When we were around each other we gave mutual affection and sense of self that we had never known. She had a dark past and was in a very similar headspace to me. We instantly identified with each other. To my terror, we completed each other. We were reciprocal plugs in each others’ individually weeping souls.

One hang out turned into five hang outs. We had personal jokes that we both laughed at before we even formed them. We went on driving adventures when she should have been at uni. We ate at fancy restaurants even though we couldn’t afford it. Soon we found ourselves spending five or six hours a day in personal or telephonic contact.

She had an ex boyfriend who would continually call to harass her and a boyfriend who she would constantly bitch and complain about. But she told him she loved him.

While she and I were falling in love I monopolised her time. Her boyfriend would bombard her with calls to which she responded by rejecting them. We grew closer and closer, we began to manage each other’s time. All the while she had a boyfriend who was under the impression she loved him. At the same time she had an ex whom she would still see.

With a lot of courage and the possibility of positivity and optimism creeping back into my psyche I confronted her about her feelings for me. For both of us it was clear how we felt. How sickly we were growing dependant on each other. The feelings, we thought, were love. Really it was a mutual agorophobic fear of being left alone.

Without speaking the words of affection we knew where we stood. It was not so much that we were in love but more that we couldn’t live with ourselves without each other. She said that she wanted to be with me more than her boyfriend but that she would never cheat on her boyfriend. She just had to speak to him before anything would happen between us.

Patiently I waited for her to take action. As I waited and my expectations grew my heart and self worth flirted dangerously with collapse.

We would still hang out, each time we did I asked her if she had yet spoken to her boyfriend. For more than ten occasions we would hang out affectionately not yet acting on our neediness out of respect for her boyfriend.

One night the strain cumulated to action. We hung out the same way we did every previous day for the last four months. That night she had flaked her boyfriend to spend time with me. I didn’t have anyone to flake, but I had quit university and football to spend time with her.

Sitting cold and huddled together by the sparkling night river we talked about how we felt about each other. In a state of internal disease that had become uncomfortably familiar she and I moved closer together. With closeness and locked eye contact we spoke softly and stumbled our words. Facing the most heart wrenching rejection of my life, an acting in the face of all my fears I decided I had to kiss her.

In a moment when time stood still and the universe around us ceased to exist, our lips met.

I had never kissed a girl I loved with all my being before, I never have since. I have never at any other point in my life kissed someone whom represented my only chance for happiness in life. In my life this was the moment that held the most emotional magnitude I had ever experienced.

My head spun and the memories of the rest of the night faded to black. We kissed more. She vowed she would break up with her boyfriend so we could be together.

After dropping her home all my self hate and world loathing totally inverted. I drove around for hours singing and listening to music. Life was going to be ok after all. Tomorrow she would be single and we could be together.

When we hung out the next day she hadn’t spoken to the boyfriend. Nor did she over the course of the next ten times we hung out. We would kiss more and more and she would hate herself just as much. I began to feel more and more betrayed. The love that I had hoped for and psychologically needed was slipping beyond my grip.

At this point in my mind there was only one reason that prevented us from being together. I had to do something about this boyfriend. Since I had started seeing the girl he and his friends would call me up and threaten to hurt me. He hung with some pretty serious dudes. These threats added tension and fear to an already fragile situation with the girl.

The boyfriend would call her all the time distracting from my quest of her being with me. I took action. After being repeatedly threatened over the phone I gave the gang of dudes my address and challenged them to come and see me. Me and my roommates knew where he hung out on weekends.

We went to ‘take care’ of him.

I forget who spoke first or what happened but it ended up with him and I facing off on the street about to come to blows. Both of us were drunk and ready to kill each other. He taunted me and by telling me he was fucking the girl I loved. I was ready to throw down out of pure emotional fury before my roommate beat me to it. The guy was manhandled and frankly I think the insanity of my friend scared the shit out of him. I didn’t hear from him again after that.

One afternoon, a Tuesday, we hung out just the way we usually did. Things had gotten progressively more intimate recently. That tuesday would play a pivotal part my emotional demise.

After fooling around in my room, listening to some music, and tickling each other I bought up the topic of sex. We were in a weird mood with no one else home at my parents house during the day. We spoke about our feelings and neglected the fact she was still with her boyfriend because she didn’t have the confidence to talk to him and discontinue sleeping with him.

Under the covers she took off her pants, I did the same, and we had sex.

To be with someone for the first time and for it to be simultaneously such a non event was an ghostly and vacant feeling. On the one hand I though in my mind it should be a good thing, but it made me feel sick to think it was done for the wrong reasons with a girl who had a boyfriend.

After that event our relationship became jaded. I dropped her off that day with no kiss. She had planned to go away that weekend with girlfriends and said that now she really needed to talk to her boyfriend.

We didn’t talk all weekend which scared and heightened my insecurity. When she got back she, now psychologically and emotionally my other half, had written me a letter.

In short she said she liked hanging out with me, but it had all become too much with her having a boyfriend and her ex calling and seeing her all the time. She wrote that she needed some ‘x’ time to be on her own. She wrote to me saying that her decision not seeing me anymore either.

That night, and for the next four weeks I stayed in my house listening to Coldplay and crying in front of my computer.

I made attempts to hang out with her, but she declined. After a while I decided that I would respect her and wait. After waiting for weeks I called her crying regularly, begging her to be with me. I wanted her, no, I needed her to be my girlfriend. After a while she said she wouldn’t be my girlfriend. She said she just didn’t feel that way about me. We would still hang out daily but now she wouldn’t let me kiss her.

Every day I would spend time with the love of my life who was inches in front of me. We agreed to be friends and not be intimate. This hurt for me worse than being completely apart and me feeling sorry for myself listening to Coldplay. While we were friends we slept together. I could fuck her, but I couldn’t love her. This was the final blow to the destruction to what hope I had left.

I hated myself, I hated the world, now I hated her.

I stopped calling her. I began to drink avidly. I would drink on my own and pass out early in the afternoon. She would call concerned and worried about me. It didn’t matter anymore, all that I cared about was revelling in my own self demise. I wondered if I could fall all the way to bottom of the well?

I wondered what it would take to get myself there and what I would find. There was certainly nothing left for me anywhere else.

Out one night getting drunk and provoking police officers we took refuge in a bar. In there, on a drunken adrenaline high we spoke to some girls. At this point I didn’t give a fuck about the world, all I cared about was my own path to self demise and pleasing myself. What was an initially vicious reaction from the girls turned into a situation where I was isolated with a gorgeous brunette girl who was touching all over me.

Realising this I became nervous and drank more. When she asked for my number I gave it to her, fuck the other girl who was fucking with my feelings. I kissed this girl, she asked if she could see me that week. That Monday night I picked her up from her house.

She told me her address. Freakishly her street was the same name as my other-half girl’s last name. More so, when I asked this girl what is her favourite CD she said groove armada. My other-half girl currently had that CD of mine. I asked her second choice and she said Jack Johnson. I currently had on loan Jack Johnson from my other-half girl.

While on the date I was enraged. This girl was all around better than my other-half girl. Hotter, smarter, cooler and taller. This girl was even really into me. But all the same, I didn’t feel a thing for her. All I could think about was my other-half girl and they way she had fucked me up. I hated her. I was sick of having the shit kicked out of me, I was done with her. Fuck her. It was time to start seeing someone else.

I had been talking to a female friend a lot about my problems with this girl and life in general. This friend was the central definitive role in turning the situation around. She was older than me and ‘oracle’ wise. I had given up on anything happening with the girl I had become desperately dependant on , I had given up hope of her ever committing to me. My female friend revived my hopes by texting her.

My female friend simply texted my girl asking if she loved me. She responded yes. This was a massive eye opener for my girl because it was her being honest with herself for the first time. It had always been me trying to logically convince her that she liked me. Because things happened this way, it is true to say that it was never actually me who made the girl want to be my girlfriend. Its still true that

I simply wasn’t capable of it getting a girlfriend.

After speaking to me in person and because of my amazing female friend my girl made harmony with her feelings. When she was finally honest with how she felt she was shocked. In an emotional reaction she sent me this email:

“alexander,
thank you for even opening this.
Firstly: apology for the nature of this [being an email] I would never do this in any circumstance however I need to say some things now and I cant any other way, please read what I have to say as illogical and retarded as it may sound, please.

I hate what im doing, I hate what I have done. After you left I realised what the reality of the situation was [I knew at the time however it hadn’t quite hit me] I wish I knew where we went wrong Alex, I hate what has happened. This isn’t what you want and it’s not what I want either, so if neither of us are getting our way then its certain that both of us will be unhappy.

Alex I am beginning to realise how fucking selfish I am and I hate it, I don’t want to be that person. I have hurt you and I have possibly ruined whatever we had between us, im not sure if you remember me saying at one point this arvo that what happened on Tuesday didn’t make things better or worse or remain equal, they just became different. im not sure if im right in saying that I don’t feel for you as I did pre-Tuesday because I know that what was there is not completely dead…I fucking hate what this is Alex. im sure that you hate me more than how I hate this and im sorry to have contacted you because I am sure that it is the last thing you want me to do but if you do read this I will have had my 2 cents worth. Alex I just want to fix this because its so shit [I know your going through a thousand more things than me right now so I can only start to imagine how hurt and frustrated you must be]

Im not another failed thing for you Alex, I don’t want to be. You say that you try and try and do everything right to attempt to get what you want/need and it doesn’t seem to work, well I wish I had the chance to change that. I have seriously ruined everything and I hate myself for fucking up the best thing I have ever known with another person. you asked me last night if I have ever been closer to another person as I am to you, the answer is no and I cant get my head around the fact that we cant work as friends and will never get to try as something more only because of how i feel in august. Im not saying that Tuesday didn’t change things and feelings for me but in the whole 5 hours that have past since we said our last goodbye I know that this isn’t what we wanted [ever]. I got to work and heard about your purchase and it made me sick, I felt like I was going to vomit and I then proceeded to cry in front of my friends and the other girls. Only then [I think] I realised that you and I are no more. I have lost my best friend.
I don’t normally feel ill over other people [probably due to my self absorption] but I can’t believe what I have done to you, what I have done to us. I have always had my ideal of the marshmallow world and I know after today that no matter how much I pray and hope, that world will never exist and I have to get a grip and live in the one that does.

The only thing I really want to say is thank you for everything Alexander, thankyou you for the memories, thankyou for the awesome adventures, thankyou for always being there for me and for allowing me to mean so much to you. thank you for caring when no one else would and understanding when no one else can. I love the way we are when we are together [pre-bad events that make things crazy and tearful]. Im sorry that it has come to this.

If it is true, if time does heal things then I want to wait, im not patient but I know the deepness of the shit that is going down between us, im not sure what im waiting for though, im not waiting for you to stop liking me but maybe im waiting for the day [I know it will never happen so please don’t be thinking that im some kind of stupid girl that is being optimistic when I have dug the hole that im in] that we can be simple little companions. i know that that time is not here and not now as i feel the way i do and you feel the way you do but who knows. Fuck Alex im so sorry.

Please take care
I will be thinking of you even though I know that by now you have deleted me from your phone, removed all reminders of me and gone into alcohol mode.
Please don’t hate me and please if you ever think of me, ever, know that I meant what I said that night after the movie and they aren’t dead and buried feelings [I know this only because I wouldn’t risk emailing you this crap if I didn’t want to stress these things to you here and now] they are just in hibernation and i cant change that but i know that i dont want to live wiht the fact that i have lost you forever and ever.
x x x x its funny how an x can symbolise so much
if your up to this bit i want to thank you for even opening this because i dont deserve you, your time or your like [ i say like only becuase love sounds retarded]”

After that day everything changed. For a week we were apart, enough time for parallel soul searching.

After exploring a future of sadness alone in the world away from our other halves we came back together, and for the first time could openly love each other. She as my girl and me as her man.

From that day on we were joined at the hip and for the first time I was happy in a way that I had never even imagined. What amplified my love for this girl the most was the contrast in feelings from the dark times I had endured previously. We ate together, spoke on the phone for hours every day.

We would go on random driving adventures and have picnics. We would skip school and work to go to the beach. We would break into a private high schools to swim and kiss under the moonlight.

A week after we worked out all our issues I panned a trip for her and I to Byron Bay. She told her parents that she was staying with friends so she could stay there with me which was a big deal and first time for us. Her parents were extremely strict about her curfews and keeping track of her whereabouts. For the first time in my life I hired a hotel room on my own, didn’t tell my girl where we were going. I picked her up and drove her there as a surprise.

I had it all planned out, finally I could express the magnitude of my love, affection and show generosity in a way I never had. After seven hard years my lifelong dream had become a reality, it was the sweetest feeling I had experienced in my entire life.

I planned to take her out to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town. Afterwards for dessert I had something special planned. Before I picked her up I had packed the trunk of my 1970’s Mercedes with blankets and pillows and all the supplies necessary to sleep on the beach.

With her eyes closed I lead her to the beach where I set up a stove to cook hot chocolate and roast marshmallows. Under the starry clear night sky it was cold, but with each other and our drinks we were in our own little heaven. We laid back in each other’s arms looking at the shooting stars skipping across the crystal clear Australian night sky. I was in love. All the years of self hate and crying faded to oblivion.

While we lay there on the fine beach sand that silent night my girl whispered to me

“I’m in love with you”.

I wept. And for the first time in my life, they were tears of happiness.

For months we went on like this. Sending each other poems and giving each other gifts. We would often surprise each other where we worked and we were constantly on the phone. She got to know my family and my family loved her. Everything was fitting into the place I had always dreamed it would.

There was no other happiness like it.

But I was soon to realise being with her was like a drug. No good can come from an drug you are addicted to that is limited in supply.

There was one catch to my newfound utopia. Her parents hated me. It might have something to do with the fact that could clearly see my unhealthy emotional investment in the girl, or the fact that she was spending way too much time with me, or the fact that every week they had a new bouquet of flowers on their kitchen table.

This materialised in the way their limited and restricted my girl’s freedom. Some Saturday nights I would pick her up at 8.30 only to have to have her home by 9.25. Fucking bullshit. She didn’t even have anything to do the next day. In addition to these limitations they were neither welcoming nor warm towards me.

Because I saw her as my other half this frustrated me at first. Very soon it made me emotional and angry. We would get into arguments that would invariably have her crying and angry at me. She would get into fights with her parents about me that made them angry and frustrated at her which she would get upset at me for. Stupidly, I continued to push the issues of her freedom and her curfews.

Her parents would imply to her that she would be fatally bought down because of me as her boyfriend. The situation quickly descended into an unhealthy state and all the happiness and love that I had been through so much to realise to slowly turned to friction.

In a desperate attempt to impress her parents I moved out of home to get my own place. I thought it would impress them and inspire them to lift the curfews the imposed on their daughter. What made matters worse was that now I lived further away, she hated being at my house because she hated my roommates and my roommates hated her being there because she took me away from drunken fun times with my friends.

Living out of home I was poor. Living with friends was massively stressful because I had to work every day at four in the morning. I was always irritated by my roommates partying. What I hated the most was the fact that she wouldn’t, I thought, even talk to her parents about working towards lifting the curfews and being able to stay with me. I would g to work every day going insane doing my head in.

I loved her so much and simply couldn’t accept that the main feature of my life was compromised. She was my other half, so in my mind, I was compromised. I couldn’t live with it. We argued and cried and fought and screamed for months. I hated the situation so much that it bought out all the deeper psychological issues that had infected me when I was younger, on her.

Something had to change. I was more unhappy being with someone I loved under compromised circumstances than simply being alone and sad. I loved this girl but I couldn’t continue to expose our love to this negativity and risk losing it forever. In my mind there was no doubt that we were destined to be together, forever. This was the foundation of my logic when I made my desperate and extreme plan.

I planned to dump her soon after her birthday. I made up the reason that I didn’t love her anymore. Of course I loved her but before I could be with her I knew I needed to get myself into a healthier headspace and get my emotions under control. How could I have her rely on me emotionally, when I was aware that I was emotionally unstable and that I couldn’t even rely on myself.

The plan was I would break up with her for a year and undergo a ‘rite of passage’ I would work and make friends. I would read and work out. I knew I needed to grow as a person to stabilise and become something that others could emotionally rely on. I would work every single day so I could save up the deposit for a house. That way, her parents couldn’t not like me, they would have to respect and accept me if I had a house. And I would get a six pack, because my girl liked guys with a certain type of abs.

When I first broke up with my girl for both of us it was like our lives came to a standstill. The day I broke up with her, in anger of what the situation had come to I repeatedly hit a tree through tear blinded eyes until the knuckles of my fists were bloody and raw to the point I could see cartilage. I was fucking devastated and so was she, why did our relationship have to come to this course of action. I hated her parents. For months she tried to get back with me while I was on my mission for her.

For a time I was strong. I was disciplined about going to work and going to the gym and not seeing her. But four months after I had broken up with her for my plan I had a massive falling out with my roommates to the point where they hated me and I hated them and I had to leave the house and leave them with no furniture. When this was going on I answered my girl’s calls and I compromised my discipline and allowed her to see me. We slept together out of my own lack of willpower and neediness.

I was like a drug addict progressing through rehab getting a fresh hit. Being back with her really fucked with me. I was torn between the mission I wanted to achieve of getting the house and impressing her parents so I could be with her. Or having her there in my life at a time when I was fragile, scared, alone and forced to move back home to my parents because of the falling out with my roommates.

Instead of being decisive one way or another I would see her and sleep with her, then tell her that I wanted to move on, feigning congruence with the original reason why I wanted to break up with her.

After two months of me fucking her around and sleeping with her but not committing to her she got fucking angry and emotional and instead of caring about me anymore, she cut me out of her life.

I didn’t realise it at first as I was convinced that we were meant to be together. It wasn’t until she stopped trying to contact me altogether that the notion occurred to me that I had messed with her heart so badly that she had moved on for good.

Unwilling to accept that as truth and now in a position where my girl wouldn’t return my calls I was resigned to daily the daily grind at the box factory. I worked dedicatedly to save for a deposit on a house to impress her parents enough to let her be with me. I made the decision to stick to my original deadline of re-initiating contact and the relationship a year after we had originally broken up. That date being her birthday.

Each day I went to the box factory. All I did there was take boxes from a pallet and put them onto a conveyor belt. Previously I was at a prestigious university where I scored 100% on neuroanatomy exams. The other staff at the factory were from a labour hire company and while all were uneducated some were disadvantaged. This is where I had ended up. Dumb labour, heart break and a slim chance of hope, working in a capacity suited for disabled people.

To endure it I held on the image of my future with my girl. Now however, the thought of things not working out crept into my mind. But I delusionary refused to acknowledge them. With every box I put onto the conveyor belt I would think, ‘my girl – my girl – cherish – love – happiness – my girl- there’s still hope – future’.

That year I put tens of millions of boxes on a conveyor belt, each time I would repeat these affirmations . The thoughts of being with her kept me motivated when I had nothing else to hope for or aspire to. At the gym after work I would think to myself as I lifted weights, ‘my girl – the house – the abs – it’ll – all -work, out’.

I saved hard. The bank of Queensland approved me a loan of $550,000 Australian dollars. I had a massive deposit saved as I had no expenditures like going out to clubs or travelling. I had a six pack for the first time in my life. With a month before my girl’s birthday I was ready to re-initiate contact.

In a revelation of darkness, since the time we had broken up and through everything she and I went through I still had the password to her email account. Regrettably, and I despise myself for being so desperate to have done this, I would monitor her emails. It seemed that she had recently been seeing a tourist and was making plans to travel abroad to see him. Like yet another stake to my heart I couldn’t ignore the possibility that this girl had really moved on. Her parents were letting her travel to

Scandinavia to stay with this guy but not stay at my house a three minute drive from her. They really hated me.

Her birthday date approached. Everything that I had worked towards in her absence I had achieved. I got the loan and I had the physique. I was sure that time would have healed the wounds that my desperate and unstable behaviour had left in her heart.

I spent weeks making a double mix CD for her with our songs and a booklet with photos and words as to why each song was relevant. I bought her a massively expensive Tiffany’s bracelet to signify the ‘circle of our love’. And, once she accepted these gifts and agreed to see me again I had organised two return Business Class tickets (cheaply through hook ups from friends) for her and I to travel to Hong Kong and back during which time I imagined would explain everything that I had done and she would love me again.

So, in a little package I enclosed the note for loan approval, the bracelet, the personalised mix CD and of course some of my poetry. It looked perfect and it was perfect. This time around, the outcome of this venture really did dictate the value of my life. I had dedicated years to this girl and this was all in light of the efforts and trials I went through to be with her on top of the adolescent heart destroying marathon I had suffered with the girl before her.

This was it. I had worked so hard for her and done all the right things. Now it was out of my hands.
On her birthday I had the package, its precious contents and my acute desperation couriered to her house.

For a day I waited in my living room, lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling. I listening to more Coldplay and looked at our old photos. After about 36 hours with no response an no sleep I decided that going to the gym would relieve my psychosis.

When I got home I found the package at my doorstep. Dizzy with nervousness I stumbled as I walked towards it. I opened it to find it as I sent it. Except for two words written on the back of my note to her.

Those two words read, “no thankyou.”

It didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t comprehend. My brain couldn’t even process. I felt nothing.

I sent it back to her house.

Very soon after her friend bought it back. With it she gave me a simple message, “If you attempt to contact my friend again there will be legal intervention.”

It took me twenty four months of hard drinking, working out and soul searching to recover from the mortal repercussions of that message. Everything in life I had worked towards, for what I thought was a noble and greater good was smashed to pieces.

It was like a white hot razor cut through my soul to remove the little hope of happiness that had remained before I sent my gift.

Apart from some emails of disgust, I have never seen or heard from her since.

Years later, I drunk dialled her similar to what happened with the previous girl. Strangely, I hadn’t dialled her phone number in years. But in my blacked out state her phone number came to me from the depths of my emotional memory. Even now I couldn’t recite it for you the way I typed it into my phone that drunken night.

I left terrible messages on her home and personal message banks. Even though it was years after I had heard from her in any form I still harboured the ridiculous belief that we would get back together.

After I woke the next day and received the hateful emails revealing to me what I did and what I said only then did I realise that the girl who had kissed me and told me that she loved me would never ever be mine. It was truly over.

After having my gift returned my experience in the world was numb and lifeless. I though the right thing to do was be angry, but my emotions had simply become despondent and non functioning.

Deluded and angry I converted my savings into a cool car, a cool stereo, moved out of home into a cool place and I bought cool clothes. I decided I was going to be a player. I had an image of Darth Vader on my computer desktop. Even to this day almost half a decade on there is still a LCD impression of it ghosting my screen as a painful remembrance.

When I went out to bars to ‘score’ girls I would simply drink myself to the floor and vomit in public. I would take risks that would put my life on the line. I was arrested several times for being drunk and unruly. I wanted to be a player, but you can play when you are an empty shell of a person.

I ended up pissing away all of my money on things I thought would impress girls and on lavish and rare dates with sub standard girls. Soon all the hard earned money was gone.

I had no money, no success with girls. Even my debts were mounting and from all the partying I was doing I was getting obese.

I had no choice but to quit chasing girls and quit being sociable all together. Every social expedition was a painful reminder of my past. I was broken and I no longer saw the point in trying to fix myself.

I was truly indifferent. As far as I knew, there was no hope. Even through all that I went through, even though every experience I had endured up until that point in my fragile life pointed towards there being no hope, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was in fact a way to get a girlfriend.

If anyone knew, I figured, it would be a psychologist.

So, at the age of twenty, clinically depressed due to repeated failure, frustration and heartbreak in life I took myself to a psychologist’s office. At least if I was sure there was no hope I could accept mediocrity, not bother to try with girlfriends or friends anymore and resign myself to hiding away from the social world around me that continually and mercilessly smashed me pieces.

I explained all the events relevant to my life situation. Everything that happened with both girls and my monumental failures. I explained the failures I endured after losing the girl I loved. I wondered if there was hope.

After comprehensively telling the psychologist of all the events I had endured since I was thirteen I had distilled all my issues down into one simple question that I needed answered by what the socially conditioned world naively but understandably considered to be an expert.

If the answer was a yes, and it was in alignment with everything I had been through then I would know for sure that there would be no reason to continue hoping

I questioned the psychologist. “It seems like, in life, if I love a girl that ‘does not equal’ her loving me back?”

On the edge of my antique leather chair I waited anxiously for the expert opinion that could be my last chance of life. I waited for what I hoped would ignite the healing process of the innumerable holes in my soul.

Ruminating, the psychologist mulled over the pouring out of my heart. It was clear he had made his conclusion, he was now just considering how he was going to best deliver the despair.

All senses attentive, using the last of my optimism I hoped that the news would be good, but expected it not to be. That there was a life to hope for.

He spoke.

“It would seem that way, wouldn’t it.”

Then and there, I passed away.

Why bother getting out of bed? Would make it to bed tonight? The urge to hurt myself confused me.

A simple rage rose inside of me. Everything I went though was for nothing. There was NO answer. If the psychologist didn’t know then I knew for sure there was no hope. I had quit university, quit football, left home and dedicated my life to something unachievable.

My visceral pulse had stopped. Murdered because of my own pure intentions.

I just wanted to have a fucking girlfriend.

There is no point in this life, no good came of anything I did.

Fuck it all.

Alexander~

…..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 8:04 pm and is filed under The Alex Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.