Second Choice

25 August 2003

I looked down at my feet just now when I was feeding the kitten and I freaked out. I'm wearing my trainers without any socks, and I can see my ankles poking out all bare beneath the hem of my pants. My legs feel cold. I think I'm turning into her.

She used to do that all the time. I don't think she even owned one pair of socks, and her legs were too long for her jeans. I hate that. It was one of those things that I really disliked about her, but I never really thought about it, I just accepted it as a part of the greater scheme.

I don't know why I didn't hear the warning bells sooner. Perhaps because I was so naive, or maybe I just didn't care enough. I'm one of those guys who never really thought much about relationships, just sort of ended up in them after drifting, or being pinned down. Not like - you know - I use women. Not as if I'm ever in emotional debt. I don't sleep around, is what I'm trying to say. I don't use women. I kind of let things happen to me. I'm friendly. I like women's company. My best friend is a woman. I just tend to let them make the important decisions for me.

Women do seem to be so much more aware than men. Sensitive - and that suits me, I'm a fairly sensitive guy. I go for poetry types, quiet types, deep and thoughtful types, those kinds of fuck-ups, so I guess it serves me right. It's just that some women, some of them, they're just downright evil.

Men are evil too. They're just evil in their own way. A kind of stumbling brutish way. Men don't go in for grand schemes and plots. But I'm not one for absolutes. There's bound to be a lot of crossover going on amongst the forces of darkness, I'm just saying, some women are put on this earth to prey on guys like me, and I've been burned that many times by bitches that hide things that I guess I can't trust anyone that much any more.

I think maybe I'm too placid. That's why I end up in these relationships, because I have let someone else make all the decisions, lead me along by the nose, tell me they love me, and blam! There I am involved with someone I don't even really know. Not because I haven't been spending enough time with them, but because I was never that interested enough in the person to do the brainwork and figure them out.

I ought to do more brainwork. Some people can be so deceiving. I mean - look at Jess and me. Jess is my best friend. I've known her for years. When we first met she was nuts over me. I mean, real, psychopathic I'd-do-anything-for-you nuts. I caught her following me down the street once. She even rang me up a couple of times and put the phone down. I thought she was going to boil my bunny.

She got weirdly possessive over another girl I knew, even though there was never anything going on or going to be going on. With that other girl, I thought we were on the same wavelength. Then it turns out we weren't, she was just mimicking my wavelength so I'd like her, which was a bit pathetic really. Also, she was fat and when you looked at her from a certain angle she looked like a man. So Jess had nothing to worry about at all.

But the way Jess acted, I heard warning bells. I had that voice in my head saying: she's crazy, keep away! I nearly fucked her off completely. Jess doesn't know how close I came to just cutting her dead out of my life.

Jess is married now. She got over me. Even though my ego would like to pretend sometimes she still wants me, I know she got married because she loves her husband, not to revenge herself on me or make me jealous. She got over me. End of story. God, I regret that one. Jess is the kindest, most thoughtful, creative, up-front intelligent laid-back girl I know. She's drop dead gorgeous too, and to go with that, she's interesting. Really interesting. She's an artist, a really good one. Much more prolific than me. She's always doing something crazy, has something going on in her life. I guess I just didn't recognise any of that in her when I should have. Like when she was chasing me, she'd spotted something about us that I'd missed. She knew how good we could have been together, even if I was stupid enough to miss it. I really blew it with her.

Leah on the other hand was totally different. It was me who did the chasing. At least, at the time I thought it was. The more I look back and think about it, the more I imagine a carefully orchestrated dance. She was a really interesting person too. She would just say things, make the weirdest observations, have such a different slant on the world to everyone else. She was an artist too. I was totally fascinated by her artwork back when we first met. Full of twisted grotesquery and butterflies and candy. Dark and light. Some of the things she said to me, I though they were just her amazing sense of humour. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if she was serious. Her humour was very black. Like the joke she made about killing all the stupid people because they pissed her off. Did she actually really mean that? I felt like saying - yeah, Leah, but you're a stupid person.

It did seem like I was the one making most of the effort. Out of character for me, but then, she was interesting. It was all the differences that fascinated me. Like her insistence on wearing makeup at all times out of doors, because she said she felt vulnerable and naked without it. I never could understand all the little things, but it was fun trying to figure them out. Her handwriting. It was sort of stilted, too neat, too artistically and artificially imperfect, like she was trying too hard to create a persona.

I ought to understand that about people. The way they draw layers over themselves, like coloured glass, showing the same facade but under a different light in response to the light of others. People adjust. People adapt. People are never themselves, they're constantly changing. And women do that so much, especially when they're putting on a show for a man. I don't think they're even consciously aware that it's manipulative.

All the differences. I had a conversation with Jess not long ago. I was trying to explain to her in my own fumbling, speculative way that if I got involved with someone now, it would have to be someone like me. Someone who liked the same stuff, someone who worked on the same wavelength. Another journalist. Not a damn artist, too temperamental. "But not too alike," she said, which completely took me by surprise.

It sounded like the kind of thing you would expect from someone who had decided to settle with what they had. Someone who just didn't understand the person they loved but had decided along the way somewhere that they weren't going to do any better, maybe even that the failings of the other person flattered their own ego, that that other person is someway littler than them, needs looking after. Someone who made their own genius shine through all the brighter. Those kinds of couples don't last. There's too much of a power relationship going on. Too much insecurity, too many secrets. I think Jess will be alone again in a few years time.

It's like relationships stemming from one person's crush. They never work out. Unless everything turns around and the other person starts doing the chasing, the one with the crush feels like the other just gave in to get them off their back. But the one with the crush thinks: I was never on your back. I was clinging on to your ankle for dear life, and I know you'll never love me the way I love you, and that hurts. It affects everything. Jealousy becomes this huge part of the relationship.

People make so many mistakes that way. And the way some people - mostly women but men do it too - are so damn crafty about that sort of thing. Pretending they're not interested when they are, trying to confuse you with conflicting signals, all so they don't put themselves in a position of powerlessness. I hate that. There are so many conflicts between power politics and the truth. So much manipulation comes out of it. Jess always said you should just go in there, tell them how you feel and get out. Let them deal with it by themselves, figure out what they want.

But then what do you do? You've put them in a position of ought to instead of want to. You're way up there on the wrong scale - the guilt scale instead of the desire scale. And somebody else in that person's life - somebody pretty low on the desire scale, but nowhere on the guilt scale, could well do better than you because that other person looks for somewhere to run. All because you laid yourself bare and were honest.

That wrong scale so easily leads them to hate you, to search for excuses not to like you, instead of looking at the whole of you as a person. I know how the guilt side of the equation feels. There was this girl once who did that to me. She went through all the pretence of not being interested, making out she just wanted to be my friend. But it was so obvious. Not to me straight away, but to everyone else. Jess saw it a mile away, but she didn't feel she could say anything to me because I'd interpret it as jealousy on her part.

We got to be quite close friends, did stuff together, and spent quite a lot of time together. But I did realise, at some point, what was going on. It felt like she'd been trying to worm her way into my heart. Felt like she'd been deceiving me, dazzling me with a pretence from the beginning. I started to wonder, if she was deceiving me on that level, what other levels was she deceiving me on? What bits of her personality were real, what bits were made up to impress me?

Things just never did recover after that. I just kept backing away, not trusting her. What made it worse was she was devastated. Really devastated. I felt so guilty. But the guilt gave me reasons to hate her all the more. I think all she wanted was a boyfriend. That's not such a difficult, impossible thing to find, is it? Is it? I think she only did it that way because she was afraid of being rejected. But what she didn't understand about me is that I've been deceived before. I've met women who are compulsive liars, compulsive manipulators, and however innocent and afraid that girl really was, in my head she was just like them, and when I hear warning bells, that's it.

Jess was very different in her approach to Leah. She voiced her misgivings right away after they'd met. Probably because she was married by then and felt she could comment on my life without compromising her own position as a neutral judge.

"I don't like her," she said. "The things you've told me about her just don't add up." As I recall we had a huge fight about it. "She's trying to be someone she isn't, she doesn't talk to you about the important stuff. There's things going on inside her you don't have a clue about. You've known this girl for three months now and you don't even know her. Can you tell me at any moment what's going on in her head? What sort of things does she think about? I'm sure as hell it isn't the stuff that comes out of her mouth." I think I fought with Jess just to see what would happen next, how far I could provoke her with this Leah thing, see if I could make her jealous. I think on some level she was, and I was quite enjoying the feeling that produced.

The argument degenerated into insults; "She's fat. She's ugly. She looks like a man, she's not clever, there's no logic going on in her head, it's just full of confusion, she plays with people like a fucking cat because she feels like it, she's driven to, it's like an instinct. Not because she has any rational motivation. She's all dark inside. Why the hell are you settling for someone that ugly anyway, when you don't even understand her, you just pretend you do?"

As it happened, Leah wasn't fat or ugly. I suppose some people might have found her unattractive, but it was that same quality in her that simultaneously made her beautiful. She had one of those faces that looked different in different lights, different moments, different angles and expressions. She was very tall and quite slim with black hair. Her hips were slightly broader than her breasts and that gave her a gentle pear shape. Her nose was a button nose, her eyes huge and dark.

I don't think there is such a thing as being too alike. Everyone's different. There might be another person out there with exactly the same combination of hang-ups as me, exactly the same experiences, but they'd be from a different part of the world. They'd be different in some other way. Different interests. Something. No one is that alike.

I mean – just because I've dyed my hair the same colour as hers, and I wear the same jeans, and I wear trainers without any socks. That doesn't mean anything does it? She's been dead for two years now, and I've picked up so many of her habits and mannerisms it's like I'm turning into her. I had no idea she would try and kill herself. It's only now she's gone that I realised I never appreciated what I had. I'll never be able to have a proper relationship again, because who ever I'm with, she'll always be there in the back of my mind. I'll always be making that comparison.

But I guess there's always Jess, and I can wait for her.

Copyright © 25 August 2003

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