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So I'm making the most comical of sounds - like an injured beast of some sort - and then I noticed something. How it sounded. It was very funny. I thought, I'm a bit of a big lad to be making such a noise. What a silly sound. How funny it must look. And I got the giggles. Then I got upset and cried, got amused and laughed and so on for a bit. I must have found the balance between amusement and upset and it gave me a chance to start thinking a bit more clearly.
Great thinkers get around by problems by assuming that the impossible is possible and working back from it. We can't square root -1, but if we pretend there is a square root of -1, we can work various formulae. It doesn't matter that -1 has no real square root. So ok. I couldn't conceive of Caroline and I not being together, but what if we weren't. What opportunities would this present? What would I be able to do? I found a new voice in my head. Not that I hear voices, but one's own decision making or reasoning can feel like a voice and I had been having trouble dealing with the list of woes that my mind was offering about the break up. The new train of thought, which I affectionately referred to as my "reptile brain" was simple self-serving selfishness. What had I been prevented from doing? What could I get away with as a man with no responsibilities?
I think the hit list involved going to the Edinburgh Festival, preying on a city full of pretty students (Newcastle), getting back into debating and, er, having fun. I don't know. It was a beacon of hope in the misery. That's the important bit. Not bad for a man who hadn't eaten in days and who was whooping like a nutter into his pillow.
I decided to go from denial and anger (at some point I'd had the body-crushing feelings of anger, which made me writhe around in agony if in bed, and had, at some point, incited me to rush outside with a sledge hammer and smash shit out of an already broken fence panel) to acceptance. This was a quick process... good work, even if I say so myself. It wasn't that I didn't care, I just couldn't afford to go down any lower. I became upbeat. "Well, if she's leaving, then I'm going to... er... buy her a leaving present." I did. I bought her a copy of a Pink Floyd album that I knew she wouldn't take when we divided the CD collection.
Quite how it was agreed, I'm not sure. I'm sure part of it was being being magnanimous - after all, she was taking away the most important thing to me (herself), so anything else she extracted was merely trivial - and part of it was probably her making clear what she expected me to provide. Being fair, I think she'd expected that she might have to plan for the contingency of being thrown out of the house, but I'm not a monster and I wouldn't have seen her thrown onto the streets for falling in love with someone who didn't happen to be me. So we agreed. Caroline would continue to live in my house until she had packed up her stuff (to include whatever from the home she considered hers) and had moved to Ireland.
Caroline had to go to see her parents and tell them that she was about to change her life completely. She also had to drive all of her possessions across to Ireland on the ferry. She did these things alone, though she obviously had the moral support of her new other half. I did the best I could cope with, lending her my car (it was, at the time, thought of as "our" car, but I had to start thinking of my possessions as being mine) for the trips. I couldn't help too much, it wouldn't have made sense, but we agreed to be friendly about the break up and being friendly involved lending cars, I reckoned. I still had to cope with the fact that I was on my own... well, was, but didn't quite have the guaranteed solitude to go with it. It was odd when we were both in the house at the same time. On occasions when she was out of the house, I made use of my space. On the day she drove to Ireland with a car full of her things, I helped her pack the car and arranged to take a road trip on the same day (in a different car) to give me something to look forward to doing.
It was only a few weeks that we remained in the same house before she sorted out her affairs and left the city for good. It seemed to take a very long time. I took the time to explain to key friends that I was becoming single. I took pains to tell the story in a positive way and give Caroline's side - I didn't see it as an advantage to develop any bitterness about the subject. In some respects, I almost felt like I had to console some of my friends about the situation, since it was a shock to the system - we seemed an indestructible couple... but that's how most couples look to outsiders.
We managed to keep it amicable. We managed to deal with sharing the same space. I don't know how easy it was or how we did it. It's a blur now. We even went out for a meal (I paid) to celebrate the end of her stay in Newcastle. We'd come to terms with the change in our lives and hadn't come to blows. Caroline had been very brave to up sticks and put her future in the hands of a man she'd known only weeks and I had to follow suit and be brave enough to wish her well and mean it.
20 May 2004
Ashley Frieze