My Demons

I'm not honestly sure how things are right now.

After Oli's visit the day before yesterday, I went to bed and slept for fourteen hours. I typically sleep for five or six hours a night, with maybe another two or three in the evening when I nap (if I'm lucky) so for me, that's huge. I woke up yesterday with a sleep-and-sex-hangover and basically muddled through the day with a goofy look on my face, smiling every time I felt the sore muscles in my thighs (and between them) or glanced in a mirror and got a glimpse of the bruises on the left side of my neck from where he sucked and bit me. I went to the garden center with Mom to find a rose for the soon-to-be newlyweds. I stopped in at the gym, only to find that my body wouldn't obey any of my commands, and even the stretches that I always start off with were difficult. I ended up stretching, doing about 15 minutes of cardio stuff (pathetic - my every-other-day workouts have now morphed into 20-30 minutes stretching, then 45 mins - 1 hr weights, then 30 mins cardio, maybe more) after which I gave up and went to sit in the sauna and steam room for a half hour before showering and heading home to bed. I took a bath, since I got caught in the rain between showering at the gym and getting home. I read some Mills & Boon. I slept for a couple of hours.

All in all, it was one of the laziest days I've had in a long time. But not lazy in an, "Oh, I'll curl up in bed and take a day off to read and be comfy all day" way. It was simply that my body and brain refused to work for me. The brain fog I'm used to some days, but I don't usually get the body and brain stuff together. Even walking was like I was trying to move through treacle.

(Thankfully, today was a lot better - but more about that in a while.)

Then I talked to Oli last night. And I honestly don't know what went wrong. He's the sweetest guy, and I know he would never in a million years say or do something to hurt me deliberately. But even with that knowledge, sometimes he says something that should be totally innocuous and I just take it the wrong way, and totally overreact, and it pulls me down into this state of misery. Last night it was about finding out that now he's back at his parents' place, he's not able to come and go as he pleases. Naive as I am, I figured he'd be able to come visit whenever he wanted, and stay over if he wanted, without having to answer to anyone. Turns out that he CAN stay over, but he has to give them advance notice. And since he's just got back, he doesn't really want to rock the boat at the moment by staying at a girl's house.

And I should understand that, I really should. The logical part of me does. I understand that not all families are alike - hell, I've lived it. (At my mom's, I bring guys home all the time, or stay at friends' houses whenever I want. At my Dad's, I'd never dream of doing such a thing.) And I understand that there's a culture difference, and things that seem normal to people born and raised in Britain aren't always acceptable to people born and raised in other countries - Nigeria, in Oli's case. (Actually, my mother is more permissive than even the average British or American parent.)

I should just shrug and accept this, because I know there's nothing to be gained by being upset about it. And really, it's not a huge crisis. It shouldn't be, anyway. There is no logical reason for me to feel the way I'm feeling.

Which is basically miserable. Self-pitying. Not good enough.

I know what I'm doing, of course. The practical part of my brain that I'm always able to set above the rest of me to keep an unbiased, objective eye on my behaviour, realises that what I'm doing is shoving all my Richard-issues onto my relationship with Oli.

Richard was my Ghanaian boyfriend when I was 17-18. He started off as my mother's lodger, and a couple of months after he moved in we became a couple. We had problems to start with - too young, too inexperienced, neither of us good at communication, he was a typical over-sensitive Virgo and I'm a typical cold and sometimes thoughtless Aquarian, plus when I met him I had a thing for my friend Curt from college - but after a year of screw-ups and arguments and apologies (as well as friendship, love and incredible sex) everything had gotten a lot better. Things had settled down, and we were happy - at least I thought we were. I was no longer thinking about Curt, he was no longer thinking about the girlfriend who cheated on him right before we got together. We loved each other, and we were getting better at the communication. I was learning to think before I spoke, and he was learning not to take everything personally. He had finished college and needed to stay in the UK, and we (or I, at least) thought that we wanted to build a life together. So we decided to get married.

And then his mother came to visit. And it all went to hell.

I never actually got to meet his mother - the day she came to meet us, I was in Bristol, celebrating my best friend's 21st. But when I came home, Richard was different. More quiet. More sad than usual. When we sat and watched TV, he'd hold me so tight I sometimes couldn't breathe, and when he kissed me there was a sort of desperation in it. He spent every night for a couple of weeks in my bed, under the pretext that it was cooler in my room (it was an incredibly hot July and August, 35-40 degrees in the daytime and not much cooler at night) even though previously he'd only shared my bed at night on occasion, since he was paying for his own room. And when we made love, he'd hold onto me afterwards, refusing to let me go, burying his face in my neck and wrapping his arms tight around me, instead of rolling over onto his side and letting me spoon him the way we usually did.

He never told me what was wrong. I thought it was just his normal depression, which was something he'd struggled with since his father died a couple years previously. He'd been mostly better for a couple of months, since we'd worked things out, but I figured it was coming back, the way depression does. He'd lost his job recently, so I thought that could have been the trigger. And then one day, he just left. Told me he had to move in with his uncle in London in order to find a job, but he'd be back to see me in a couple of days, and that we'd work things out. And he never came back.

That's when I started getting the phone calls. Hang-up calls, but not the type where the person hangs up immediately. Nor were they pervy breathing calls. The caller just called, and then never said anything. If Mom answered, they hung up pretty much straight away. If I answered, they sat there, listening but not saying a word. I'd hear them breathe (not in a panting, perverted way), and eventually I figured out who I thought it was, and started talking to him. I'd sit there, talking about my day or my life in general or basically anything I could think of, to a person who never introduced themselves or said one word. Sometimes he'd call twice a day, every day, for a couple of weeks, and other times it wouldn't happen for a month. Sometimes I'd talk for only a minute or two before he hung up, and other times it would be a half hour and I'd just keep on rambling about the dream I had, the donut I ate for breakfast, the three-legged dog I saw when I was walking to the mailbox, the yellow Ferrari that was parked at my neighbor's house. Random, everyday things. It never seemed to matter what I said, really, as long as I kept talking.

Mostly the calls would come between lunchtime and dinnertime, although sometimes they'd be later in the evening. And very occasionally, I'd get them late at night, and when I picked up I'd hear someone crying on the other end, never saying a word, just breathing hard and making that noise a man makes when he's sobbing and trying not to show it. Those were the calls that really broke my heart.

I thought about changing my number, but in the end I couldn't go through with it.

Richard left me in August 2003. Five full years he's been gone now, and I still get the calls now and then, although they don't come often anymore. Mostly I don't get them for five or six months, and then I'll get a cluster of them, every day for maybe two weeks, and then nothing again for months and months.

I never had any proof it was him, but I know, in the way you sometimes just know things, deep inside.

Most of the time I don't think about him much. I can't, because I have to move on with my life, and if there were any way he could come and get me, he'd have done it already. I know that it isn't going to happen. But when I get the calls, I get this mixture of sadness and rage. 80% of me wants to curl up in bed and cry, both for me and for him, but 20% of me wants to hunt down his mother and smack her for what she did to us. For what she's done to him, really. Because I eventually found out, that was what went wrong that weekend I was away. As a host family for her son, she liked us a whole lot, and she thought it was wonderful that we were taking such good care of him. But as a girlfriend and prospective wife, I was Not Suitable. She didn't even have to meet me to make that choice. I was too young. Too western and liberated. Too English.

Too white.

And good Ghanaian Christian boy that he is, he would never disobey his mother over something like that. So he spent that last month with me, wrung every bit of time and love out of it that he could, and then left. No explanation, because he knew there was nothing he could have told me that wouldn't have hurt me. I guess he figured it would hurt less if he didn't tell me the truth.

Most of the time I've moved on from this. It's Richard I hurt for, because he's the one who has to live with it all the time. Me, I have a pretty happy life most of the time. I've had plenty of dates, a handful of boyfriends, and now I have Oli - who's like the sun to me.

But clearly I bear my own scars from it, ones that I didn't really know about and are just coming out now. Now I have another love, a best friend rather than a boyfriend and fiancee, but a love all the time. And he's from a similar culture - Ghana and Nigeria are pretty close on the map, and Ghanaians and Nigerians, though they don't always get along, are very similar in a lot of ways - and here I am, projecting all my Richard-issues onto Oli, letting a stupid thing like him needing to keep his parents informed of his plans, get me down. Because I'm terrified that the same thing's going to happen again. That Mom and Dad are going to rail against the idea of their son being with a white English girl.

I have no real reason, aside from my paranoia, to think this would happen. Richard's Mom lived in Ghana, and rarely came to visit. Not to mention the fact that she was upper-class and close-minded the way the upper classes (of any country) often are. Oli's parents, on the other hand, have lived in England for years. And even if they hadn't, I would still have no real reason to think they would react the same way. One person is not the same as another. One person does not think the same as another. Assuming that they will, purely because they come from similar parts of the world, is totally illogical, not to mention more than a little offensive to them.

But the terror is still there, and with it the overreaction and the tendency towards bitchiness, the way I always am when I feel under attack. I have to keep reminding myself to be nice, to not throw little barbs at him, because the last thing I want to do is make him hurt or worry. Because I can't tell him about this. If I did, he'd feel bad. Likely he'd feel guilty, when he hasn't even done anything wrong. None of this is his fault, it's all me.

So I'm managing to be nice, most of the time, and pretend like nothing's wrong. But he knows me. He knows my speech patterns, the way I know his. We're just that close, just that attuned to each other. He knows something is up with me. So far I've managed to pass it off as PMS and preoccupation with my computer viruses.

I know in a few days I'll feel better. He's only been back for a few days, for pete's sake. Things will improve, and we'll settle into a routine, and my insecurities will put their fangs away and just settle into the background and eventually disappear. Actually, despite this depressing entry, I feel a lot better tonight than I did last night. I had a great workout at the gym - so much better than yesterday, it's not even possible to compare the two. I'm finally settling into the crosstrainer, managing to spend 5 minutes jogging on it without having to take a break, and I've pushed my time on the treadmill and bike up to 10 minutes each, with no breaks. And it actually feels good. Or at least it did today.

It's just hard not to have him here. I've only seen him once since he got back to London, and already I crave him all the time. But I doubt that I'll get to see him this week. Today he went to the British Museum with his sister. Tomorrow and Friday are the only days my mom gets off work, and we have to do last-minute wedding preparations. Wednesday Oli's going back up to Liverpool to collect the rest of his stuff from his room there and bring it home, and Thursday he'll probably be tired from the long trip, even assuming that he doesn't stay up there until Thursday. And Saturday is the wedding, and Sunday will be recovery day. Maybe he can come on Sunday, and we can nap together. He promised he'd teach me how to play chess next time he visits.

But man...I wish he were here now. My bed feels so cold and empty without him.