What if I Wanted to Fight?

I stepped into my room and my stomach dropped as I breathed in his scent. It made me feel sick, in fact, and my bedroom reeked of his essence. There wasn’t just the scent of his aftershave which, I would like to put on record despite everything, I absolutely adored and I’d love to buy shares in their company.

When I closed the white door behind me my head flashed with the memory of the time he had sneakily tied my shoelaces together and I had tripped, and fallen, head first into the wooden door.

When I turned around I noticed a few of his things lying around the place. A half-empty bottle of his seductive aftershave stood on my brown wooden desk collecting dust. I had bought that for him on his last birthday. One of his green socks was discarded on the window ledge, a few of his many beaded bracelets dangled off the handle off my wardrobe and his Linkin Park dog-tags were nestled among the books on my book shelf.

I sighed and sat on the edge of my bed. Even my bed had his essence etched into it. My mind reeled from the memories of the long talks, hugs, kisses and the sex we had on my favourite piece of furniture. I screwed up my eyes and placed my hands on my forehead, willing the images to go away as my stomach became weaker and it hit me even more that we were over.

The thing was that I hadn’t long been back from New Jersey and the last thing I wanted, or needed, was to be greeted by the smell, and vivid memories, of my recently ex boyfriend. It would take a long time for me to get over him, to get over what he had done to me, and I resented the fact that his smell brought butterflies to my stomach. Those butterflies brought me back to the sharp reality that I still loved him even though John Seabrook was a compulsive liar and had made me feel like a fool because I believed things were okay between us.

I raised my head slowly and my eyes fell onto the photos of us together that were stuck slap bang in the middle of the opposite wall. I almost growled as I leapt up to rip the middle, and largest, photo down. The first step towards my recovery would be to get rid of him from my bedroom. I swept around the place and pulled down every poster we had put up together and suddenly didn’t care if they were of my favourite bands as well or if I ripped them.

Every photo that bore his image received an undignified separation from their wall-space.

That one green sock of his took a one-way trip into the bin beside my desk and his beads joined it soon after that.

The teddy bear he had brought for me from the seaside was thrown, unceremoniously, onto the top of my wardrobe.

I didn’t particularly want to throw away his dog-tags purely because I bought them and I thought they were awesome but to get them out of my sight they were thrown into a drawer.

My heart pounded. I started to feel sick again. I felt like the world’s biggest fool. I was starting to feel ashamed of myself for staying in a relationship with John for as long as I had. Everything he did made me wonder if all that he said was a lie.

How could he love me when he lied to me on a daily basis?

How could he think I was beautiful when he had someone else lined up behind my back?

What right did he have to stab a knife through the trust that had, supposedly, taken him (and me) months to build up?

My skin crawled at the thought of every touch, every kiss, every hot breath on my neck, every gaze into my eyes, every time he was inside me, every “I love you” and every time he had breathed the same air as me. At the same time I wished I continued to live in denial because I really had loved every minute we spent together.

‘But he lied to you and he’s lied to his friends and all his previous girlfriends. He’ll never change!’

I got angry as that thought ran through my head. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had finally hit the lowest of the lows, especially with my choice of man. I felt like I had broken my toe in three places as I aimed a hard kick at my bedroom wall in anger.

I grumbled to myself and limped back over to my bed before sitting down heavily on it and allowing gravity to drag me into a laying position.

“John Seabrook, you’re a big fat cock!” I hissed hoping maybe he’d heard that and I let my thoughts wander to Frankie and Gerard as I wondered if they were holding up better than I was…