I ended my summer holidays in December on a cruise. The ship left from Durban, where I had spent the holiday with my parents, and ended in Cape Town where I would start my fifth year of medical school. My parents, my brother, his girlfriend and my boyfriend were all on the ship together.
I had seen my boyfriend, Justin, two weeks previously when his mum flew me down to Cape Town to surprise him. Of course, it was an amazing surprise for me too. Lynne -Justin's mom- and I, get on famously. We have a lot in common and have become really close over the past two years. And Justin and I? Well, our relationship had been pretty much perfect. Justin had been the crazy party-person never-had-a-girlfriend guy who transformed into the most attentive, romantic creature overnight when we started going out, and he kept it up the whole way through. I received hundreds and hundreds of roses over the course of our relationship, we went away for multiple romantic getaway weekends, I met his family and extended family and even more important- we talked and laughed and never got sick of each other. It was the sort of relationship that people could be jealous of. By now it must be obvious from the past tense referral, that it's all over now. It's been just over a month since we broke up. I still don't really know how we went from hundreds of roses and family intermingling to this. And the funny thing is, I remember thinking, how silly all these flimsy whimsical relationships are. They end one night, back together the next day, new boy a week later, back together with an ex soon after that.. How silly! However this is not silly. This is not even really funny, although I have made many jokes about it all in the past few weeks.
The cruise happened only two weeks before Justin broke up with me. You would think it must have been awful, awkward, maybe even claustrophobic. It wasn't. We had so much fun. We took part in all the activities. Justin dragged me with him to dance along with some other passengers-mostly children- to "Kaptein". We played bingo, we had many a cocktail, we got sea-sick together and laughed about it, we went to karaoke and Justin sang Billy Joel's "Piano Man" while I proudly looked on and all six of us had a wonderful time. We even had professional photos printed. They were taken by the most incredible tiny Romanian woman. She had the audacity to tell me I looked at most seventeen when I myself had thought she must have been working illegally as a minor to escape the pressures of becoming a professional gymnast. However, no matter her age, she was a very good photographer and the alarming price of each photo did not deter my wonderful father who bought two photos of Justin and I. However, the first thing my wonderful father said when we broke up was "If only he'd done all of this earlier, we would have saved a lot of money, especially on those photo's!" Luckily Lynne still wants copies.
After we got back to Cape Town, we went back to university, we were reunited with all our friends and we had a million things to check off on our social calendars. We were in the same place at the same time but I feel like we hardly saw each other, or at least not enough for me to detect any change in his feeling towards me. I missed him, and the second Saturday after we got back when he asked if he could come over, I was really excited to spend some time with him. We were obviously not on the same page. He walked into my room, sat on my bed and stared at the large patch on my carpet where a leak we'd had for the past two months had left a mouldy stain. I knew that as perturbing as the leak and mould development had been, this could not be as entrancing as Justin appeared to be. I did wait and watch him for a short while, glancing at the carpet occasionally to see if there was anything particularly excited happening to our mouldy patch, but after a while, I realised this was most likely not a very good sign and demanded that he say something. In retrospect, I should probably have quietly crept out of the room and left him with the mouldy spot for long enough until he forgot why he had come over in the first place and then maybe, everything would be normal now. However, I did not. I physically shook him out of his mouldy bug-like trance and frightened him into breaking up with me. I blame the leak, I blame the mould, I blame my landlord Johan for not fixing it in time, I blame my impatient nature and I blame my being a little bit scary and even a tad intimidating when I get upset. Justin blamed something entirely different for what happened next. He blamed himself. He needed time and space and the opportunity to experience life and all of its possibilities. Of course, he needed to do this alone. Ultimately he needed this so that one day, we could get back together and he could have no regrets. There was nothing wrong with our relationship. Nothing of course, except that he felt he was missing out. This was an issue for me. I didn't want my boyfriend to feel like he was missing out by being with me. I didn't want to be with someone who wanted to be anywhere without me, so I didn't contest his decision. I cried a bit and then said we had to make it as normal as possible with all our friends. With Justin and I being medical students in the same class, with the same group of friends, we had to make our breakup as civil and normal as possible. And it was, for about six days.
On the sixth day Justin messed up. The deal was, that we wouldn't hook up with other people for a long time after we broke up and even when we did, I mentioned a specific person that I didn't want Justin to hook up with -ever. When I told my friends about this condition, they all nodded knowingly saying 'There's always "that" girl'. I did know this from previous experience. I had actually done this before. It was almost exactly the same, which is why it hurt so much more this time. I had been in a year and a half long relationship, specified who was off the kissing list and then, she was his girlfriend two weeks later. This time, I specified who was off the kissing list, was laughed at because it was such a "ridiculous" idea and then of course, it backfired. I sometimes wonder if I put the idea in his head. It happened the very first night we went out after we broke up. We were both there-thank goodness I didn't see it. He only plucked up the courage to tell me three days later, and it felt like two and a half years had been taped over with that multicoloured stripy screen with that annoying continuous tone droning on in the background. It's the same devastation as when you're four years old and your favourite show is taped over with your dad's rugby. I know because this has happened to me before. This time it just lasted a lot longer. Actually, it's still lasting a lot longer.
How I ended up in the Eastern Cape working in a hospital in the middle of nowhere will have to wait for the next post. For now, I'd rather remember a poem we read in Mrs Brown's class called "Commonplaces" by Georgie Starbuck Galbraith. I remember feeling incredibly sad whilst reading this poem. It's about a man who was jilted in his youth and didn't get over it for years. It talks about how a break up is something that everyone goes through and can be so easily brushed aside and labelled as something that is commonplace. For the person involved however, it can be so much more than that. I hope I am not this man, but I know that it isn't commonplace.
