ALMOST A BRIDE (Open On Annie)

2

I couldn’t have felt worse about myself if I’d grown facial warts, packed on twenty kilos and my leg went all gammy and I was forced to limp on crutches for the rest of my life.

I was devastated in that Gothic-writing, angsty-poetry, threatening-to-self-harm, shooting-up-with-Heroin, burning-black-morbid-candles and not-washing-their-hair kind of way. My days of unemployment also gave me way too much time to think.

How, what, why, when, how long, where?

But trying to make sense of the whole thing was driving me mad and some days I felt like I was one step away from a straight jacket, a frontal lobotomy and drastic electric shock therapy.

It’s bad enough breaking up with someone, but to walk in on them having kinky sex with someone else just adds a whole new layer to the detestation. It makes you doubt just about everything, especially your bedroom ability. I was stuck in a tumble dryer spin-cycle thought pattern; was I bad in bed? Was that why he went looking for it somewhere else? Did he not enjoy our sex life? Was I too boring for him? And so it went on until I was physically exhausted and a little bit dizzy.

And when I wasn’t making myself mad, other people were doing it for me by stuffing an endless stream of clichés down my throat until I was practically choking on them. My friends meant well of course, but if I had to hear one of them say, “Everything happens for a reason” one more time, I might have puked. And when they had exhausted that phrase, they moved on to “Time heals a broken heart”.

My only friend that wasn’t plying me with horse manure was Bee. She was one of those hard hitting, call a spade a fucking spade types. As soon as I’d told her what had happened, she hadn’t rushed to soothe me, rather she simply said, “I knew it would happen eventually.”

She had been very vocal when I’d gotten together with Trev. She had thrown around words like ‘arrogant’ and ‘asshole’. But I was blinded, as one is in those early intoxicating days. Through the misty haze of Dopamine and lots of sex-induced endorphins I couldn’t see any of the things she was saying. In fact, it had caused our friendship to take a bit of a wobble.

With Trev it had been that ‘love at first sight’ thing, although he seemed to be everything I never knew I wanted in a guy. Prior to him I had dated arty types, the types who look like they need a sandwich and a tan. And being at Design College there were many to choose from, considering we shared the same campus with graphic designers and fine artists. Of course there was just that one problem of working out which team they batted for. All the guys studying fashion design were gay (that was a given), but most of the fine art students, and all of the graphic design ones were actually straight. My personal preference lay with the fine arts lads; with their knitted scarves, scruffy paint-stained jeans and hair that looked like it needed a good brushing. But after a few years of dating guys like that it was like the novelty just kind of wore off. I was no longer into dating guys that seemed more sensitive and emotional than me. A strange longing for a real man – whatever that meant – took hold of me.

So, one night when I was out drinking with my friends at some fancy place we could ill afford –I saw him. It was all because my friend Gina’s brother was having a party at an expensive bar in the side of town we never ventured into. We were all still sipping the same drink from over an hour ago in an attempt to make it last longer, when Trev went striding past. I smelt him before I saw him. I’ll never forget; he smelt of sandalwood and tropical rain – a strangely intoxicating combination. And in that moment he must have seen me looking at him (gawking perhaps), because a few minutes later he was at our table.

“Can I offer you ladies a drink?” He was so gentlemanly, something I was  completely unaccustomed to. I was also unaccustomed to a man who wielded a shiny credit card with the power to buy cocktails for everyone – usually my dates would be scrounging for coins in their jean pockets and cursing because they had forgotten that this pair had the holes.