Well then, here we go then, onto part 5, continuing on from the point where I have finally gotten Eleanor as my girlfriend!
So, six weeks after all that, Elle tells me that she wants to break up. As this was without warning, I hadn't really had much time to try and do anything about it in advance. In fact, I didn't really have much time to get used to the concept at all! A shame, I was kinda liking her sending me mails that started like this:
"Yes that's right I'm just emailing you to have a moan again! Sorry! Well who else is there to take out my stresses on other than my boyfriend huh?"
Yeah, her boyfriend! ME! A boyfriend! (giggle)
I DID enjoy actually having a partner. I told my friends and family, and she even told HER friends at uni (though still not her family, darn it!). She came to see me and she walked hand in hand with me when I was with my friends, and again I felt like a normal guy... it was worth so much!
But as far as actual stories of our time together as partners are concerned, there is only one of any note, and that was Valentines. Now, this may seem like a rather TYPICAL story to the rest of you, but it was rather novel for me!
Elle had very well defined opinions on romance and all things romantic, which is that she hated them. She told me stories of previous boyfriends who had hideously embarrassed her by attempting romantic gestures and had continually ordered me to ever attempt anything of the sort!
To see exactly how she tended to issue those orders, take a look at the bottom of this page:
http://www.killermovies.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2540&perpage=15&pagenumber=3
Which, I think you will agree, leaves little room for doubt! Seriously, read that one if you have not been reading the others, it is important.
Now, I have a small tradition in that I buy cuddly rabbits for girls I like. To be more precise, I had done it twice. One was as a birthday present for a friend of mine who was the girlfriend of a friend of mine at school. I actually got it to her, beleatedly, at the Leaver's Dinner for my school, big grey fluffy thing it was, which I had named 'Happy Bunny' which was kinda a running gag between us... long and silly story. Now, Tracy was there (remember her? Girlfriend of a friend, first girl I kissed, one I messed things up with by saying I loved her?), and that was the night we started to get on great, and she saw me give the toy bunny to Liz and asked where HER one was.
And so I had gotten a brown one for her a few months later, that I called 'Joyous Bunny'. My Mum then also got jealous and I bought her a smaller one for Christmas that year called Mini-Bunny... anyway, it might have only been for two girls I wanted to MAKE it a tradition, and so several times I had asked her about getting her one, and she had absolutely forbidden me to under any circumstances. Meany! Without success, I had tried again to bring up the subject for Valentine's. I mean, come on! She was my girlfirned, we bith knew we loved each other, and it did not matter a damn how cheesy Valentine's was, I wanted to buy a fluffy bunny for my girl! But still she insisted no, nothing at all, I had to IGNORE Valentine's at all costs.
Can you guess what is going to happen?
A few days before Valentines, shortly before she was due to come here again, she told me she had gotten me a card after all.
ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! I had gotten her NOTHING! OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod! How EMBARASSING! Was I supposed to have guessed? Is this some boyfriend/girlfriend thing that I didn't know about? OhmyGod! PANIC!!!
But I did manage to get a concession out of her- now she had opened the Valentine's floodgate, she was damn well getting her cuddly toy! She agreed on one condition- that it not be a rabbit, she preferred farm animals. I knew Elle loves cows so I suggested a cow but she said she had loads already. Gah...
I staggered into town for 30 minutes shopping trying to find as many places that sold cuddly toys as possible. Farm animals... farm animals... now cows, so I had in mind a sheep, or maybe a horse. Do you get cuddly horses? I had no idea. I went around in big panicked circles for a while before I FINALLY spotted something in the same shop I got the bunnies from, about the same size, that I could just about afford. It was a pig. I mean, pigs are farm animals, right? For a few moments my brain blocked out the information from me, before finally giving me the affirmative.
Nervously, I handed her the pic that weekend when she came to see me. And she was overjoyed! YES! I got it right, thank God... the only trick was coming up with the name for it. She had a few pigs already named after pig meat- she had one bacon, and one pork chop, and SOMETHING to do with ham, I think. I told her that pretty much only left gammon, and she immediately cried out "GAMMY!" and hugged it. It obviously was not going to replace her favourite cuddly toy- a battered brown teddy bear named Marmalade- but she loved it enough.
Her sudden change of mind about Valentine's was shown here- along with a picture of me holding Gammy.
http://www.killermovies.com/forums/f11/t2874.html
And soon after, we bowed to the ineivtable, and in this rather touching thread I told the board that Edna and myself were FINALLY an item! No more hiding or lying or uncertainties... now everyone knew.
http://www.killermovies.com/forums/f11/t2894.html
I would like to pretend that our time together as partner was sweet and harmonious but it was not. I only actually met her twice whilst we were together, and my main bone of contention was how little we saw of each other. If I was lucky, I saw her twice a month, and I thought that was not reasonable for a relationship, and that she should make more effort to see me more. This was not a particularly sensible attitude for me to take. Things were not getting any better for Elle at uni- with friends, with life in London, with her course- all were looking dodgy. And to top it all, her boyfriend, the one she had told last month that she would NEVER have made it this far at uni without his help- was now becoming SOURCE of stress to her, not a way of helping her with it. I was desperately blind to the damage my attitude was causing. After fighting so long and hard and patiently to win her partnership, I just wanted everything to be happily-ever after now, I wanted everything to be perfect.
The relationship was only in a probationary stage anyway, Elle still being very wary of such a thing. I seemed to have ended up in a deal via which she was allowed to see other men but I was not allowed to see girls. That looks ridiculous now I write it but it made more sense if you were living it; I was happy to commit but to force Eleanor to all at once would have only scared her more, so she was going to give it some time to get used to. These large arguments were, obviously, not helping. We got over tham, as we always did; the huge one we had about it when she called me silly and selfish and planned to break it all off for the first time, when she said how it would only get worse as her course got harder and how she would have no time to see me at all and it was all pointless, this was ten days before Valentines, by when clearly we were getting on well again. But the eternal happiness I had imagined was clearly not there.
And she was worse than I thoght. I knew she had been having troubles, but the night of that argument she revealed how bad they were. I had said some bad things to her, it was a nasty argument, and she had broken down.
"I know mike i know how hard it is for you. I wasn't trying to brush that aside at all. The way i am is totally different. I constantly ache, my back has never properly healed, i can't remember the last time i wasn't ill simply because i don't have time to let myself get better! And when i think i have a moment to relax, that is when it all hits me and i have lying in bed at nights because i end up in tears, depressed by how much i hate my life!"
The conciliation was more pleasant:
"Thank you mike so much! I love you so much. I should have told you how i've been feeling. Some nights i would do anything just to have you to cry on! I hate it!"
But the fundamental problem was unavoidable
"I hate it. I have feeling like this. I just want it to end. I want my life to in back to how it was. Back at school my old friends. I was happy then! And it's worse when i an unwell. It's horrible. I just lie here and cry for hours! When i get depressed like that, i just want to curl up in bed and cry and feel sorry for myself! Anyway i love you so much! Night night!"
I was no stranger to depression, of course, but that was always meant to be MY side of things! I had had no idea how bad she was, I really did not. When I first met Elle she had been, whilst shy, an almost unstoppably happy girl, upset only by the typical teen things- boys and failed driving tests and so on. She loved life, her school, and her friends. Now after six months of University life she hated everything. She loathed life, her course, her routine, London (where drivers at night had started to mistake her for a prostitute) and everything assoicated with her life down south. And I could not seem to help her any more. I wanted to help her so much- I loved her so much!- but all we could do was argue! I am not saying that we would be still together if this were not so- there were far more fundamental problems that I will talk about much later- but there is no denying that probably things would hev been far less unpleasant if poor Eleanor's life had not been so badly ruined by her time in London.
And so that is the background in which when she came to see me in early March that year, as we climbed into bed together at the end of the day, I casually asked how she thought things were going, and she said "Not well." An icy chill passed through me, and it was a few minutes after that that she said she was breaking up with me.
So first, came the argument. That was nasty. It started with words of false promises and betrayal, and love and what it meant and if it was real, and soon we were no longer interested in listening to each other and only making our own points and we got more and more angry, and I grabbed her when she tried to turn away from me and held her down, and she screamed out something about not restraining an astmathic as it might killer her, and half in irritation and half in shock of myself I let her go, and she crawled down to the made-up bed by my own and grabbed a pillow to hide behind away from me and cried. I didn't know what to do or say, or entirely what I had just done, but I knew that this wasn;t going to go away after some form of reconcilliation, this was really IT. She was terrified and shivering and saying how one of her friends had told her that I would turn violent again one day (which led to my normal refrain that she wouldn't even have KNOWN about the sodding coin collection frame if I had not told her! Normally she talked about that in jest but there was no humour now) and I did not know how to respond, I didn;t know anything at all, I just tried to crawl down with her and try and comfort her and at first she just crawled away, and then she was muttering apologies for everything and then we were hugging tightly.
Next, then, the tears. Elle was crying already, but the full force of it all hit me then. I am not a man who cries. I don't think it weak or silly; there ar eplenty of times that I had thought it would be very appropriate, but my body just was not interested. But now, all the emotion of a year together with Elle, all the hopes and dreams now shattered, came out at once and I cried and cried and cried and cried and cried, onto Elle's comforting arm. "It's ok," she tried to tell me. "No," I said, choking on tears. "It's not. Nothing is EVER going to be ok EVER again."
"It will," she said, holding me. "Everything will be fine, I promise." I wanted to believe her. I DID believe her. She was wrong, unfortunately, but she meant well.
And after that? You might be surprised to know that we had a pleasant night together. The situation was horrible, everything was horrible, but for just that one night, before we had to return to the real world, we could take comfort in each other and forget all about it. I still loved her, and whilst she was in my arms that night I still had her, and the future still to come be damned.
So we were ok the next morning, and in the next few days. She told me how much more she looked forward to seeing me now without the dead weight of the pointless relationship around her. And she was right, it WAS pointless, a ridiculous fantasy that would never worked, and maybe better that it was blown up rather than left to wither and die slowly. We had spent nine months as friends and loved it- we could carry on as we were before. That sounded fine to me.
It wasn't going to happen, though. I didn't know it but I was only going to see her twice more in my life (barring some future miracle). Everything was going wrong very fast and I was just as ignorant about it all as I had been when it was going RIGHT.
As to why that was... I will tell that in the second bit of Part 5, tomorrow. Forgive me, but it is late and this is not easy, I do not feel like dwelling on it further until tomorrow.
I hope this one has not depressed people too much... but you all knew it was going to go wrong some time! Thanks for your continued interest!