I Quit, I Quit/Because Loving You Is a Job I Don't Need

(Aka, scenes from the past four days in life of Beth.)

Friday night I attend a Christmas party given by a friend of BN2's. BN2 himself is guaranteed not to be there, as he's home with an attack of gout.

I feel spectacularly awkward being there. In my single days I accepted every party invitation I got because you never know who you might meet, but now BN2 conditioning has taught me almost to dread them. We'd inevitably have a fight at the end of the very few we actually went to, usually about my "single girl" behavior, which consisted mostly of not paying enough attention to him – or spending too much time chatting to friends, especially if the friends are male. And heaven forbid I should laugh at any of their jokes...

(Why did we go to so few parties? Well, half the time we'd have had a fight beforehand and he'd say he wasn't in a party mood, or that we needed to reconnect and rebuild before we headed out into the world. Sigh.)

My friend O is at the party. The last time I was out with BN2, he berated me for hours for spending a chunk of the evening talking to O, saying my behaviour was insulting and disrespectful. I hadn't spoken to O since. I wanted to tell him what had happened, but at the same time, I didn't want him to feel bad. (O and I do go through periods of being in touch every other day and then not for several weeks, so it wasn't a big deal.)

I apologized to O for having disappeared, and said briefly that BN2 had reacted badly to that evening.

"I could tell," he said. "That comment he made about whether the story you were about to tell could be told to everyone or just to me – what was that about? What does he think is going to happen if you talk to someone else?"

"He seems to think I am this stunning vixen who leaves a wake of men in her path," I said, rolling my eyes to indicate I knew this description of myself was pretty far off the mark.

O smiled and gave me a kiss on the cheek. "You are a stunning vixen who leaves a wake of men in her path."

***

After a horrible run-in with him Saturday, I return from the gym Sunday to find two texts from BN2, saying he is leaving for Christmas Monday night and I need to collect my stuff or he'll leave it outside, and wouldn't it be a shame for it to end up for sale somewhere in Archway? He notes there is some "valuable stuff" there. He also texts that he's leaving his Christmas present for me beneath the doormat, and asks that I wear it as a reminder of "two people who loved each other, but one kept flying away." It is, I know, a Catherine Weitzman locket I love, with a bird at its center.

I text back asking about logistics, and thanking him for the locket. He calls while I'm in the shower.

But in the 20-or-so minutes between when he's texted and when I responded, he's apparently also called O to get him to relay the message to me. I am slightly irritated by this – he himself used to not respond to text messages for hours sometimes, and I don't get 20 minutes before I'm deemed to be ignoring his messages? Honestly, though, I am too exhausted by all of this to be very angry.

O – who is in a strange position here, as he has known me longer than BN2, but is best friends with BN2's best friend – says both he and his girlfriend will come with me to get my things. O has never said anything bad about BN2, but this time he says: "Beth, this has been a nightmare for you. This has been going on for too long. Get your stuff, don't ever sleep with him again, and get on Guardian Soulmates and have a good time." (O was at one point the most popular guy on Guardian Soulmates dating website. I like to think this – and the lovely woman he met there who's now his girlfriend – are at least partly because of the profile I wrote for him.)

I call BN2 and it isn't about logistics, despite his promise that that is all he wants to talk about. It is about why I am leaving, and how if there were even a 1 percent chance this could work why can't I stay through Christmas? The conversation goes on for an hour, and I am alternately sobbing and stamping my foot in frustration. I can almost see how he is trying to argue me back into the relationship – that if he can win this argument (and he wins every argument) I will crumple and crawl back. It has worked before. I know I can't allow it to work this time.

He asks me to come on my own at 4:30 pm. This time is not at all convenient and also means I'll have to be in a cab at the height of rush hour Christmas traffic, but I decide, as I so often did with him, that I'm not up for a battle. Basically, I think I've endured so much hurt and pain that another hour (I'm planning on booking the taxi to arrive for 5:30 pm) can't really, um, hurt.

But it does. Oh, it does.

--

I dread the meeting all day. It seems important to do before Christmas – a clean break. I don't want to still be dealing with the wreckage of 2009 -- my own annus horribilis -- in 2010. Plus, to be fair, if the situation were reversed I wouldn't want to be living amid all of his things.

I think how I won't miss this journey to Putney – all these hours and hours of my life I will get back, as my own flat is very central. I wonder what he's going to say or do. I think of ways to say: "There is no chance of us getting back together," and hope that I won't have to. I think of the Ramona Quimby books I loved as a child, remembering an episode where Ramona's mother helps her pack to run away, deliberately making the suitcase too heavy for Ramona to lift.

I walk up to his house as he's packing the car to leave for his parents' once I've gone. I see all of my things piled in trash bags in the entryway. I thought he'd wanted me to go through some of the bags – he said something on the phone about how he could just leave me to it – but there doesn't seem to be anything to do.

He gives me a long hug and says: "I'm not sure what I can say, so I'm going to offer you a cup of tea." He's wearing the cologne I have always loved, and which is something of a joke between us. I wonder -- in a brief moment of detachment -- if it would have had more of an effect were he not also wearing a shirt that was last year's birthday present from a woman he slept with while we were going out. BN2 always hated how observant I could be.

His 3 1/2-year-old daughter is there, and she wants to know why he's crying. He says he'll tell her in the car.

I go upstairs to the bathroom and see he's taken down a photo of us from a ball we went to the day after my birthday in 2008. In the bathroom, I see he's clearly packed everything I ever touched – there isn't so much as a ¾ used tube of shower gel left. For some reason, this makes me feel very sad and guilty. I have caused him pain.

When I come back down, his daughter says: "Why can't we take Beth to Grandma and Grandpa's with us?"

BN2 (to me): "I didn't put her up to that." (To his daughter) "You'll have to ask her yourself."

I say I don't know how to answer that. He says something about how if I don't, he certainly doesn't.

He gives me my Christmas present, which he has wrapped because he knows I love anything wrapped.

"It's a phoenix," I explain to his daughter.

"It can be any kind of bird you want it to be," he says. Maybe because the air is thick with so many things unsaid, this comment, too, seems teeming with a meaning. What exactly, I'm not sure.

He is tearful, holding my hand. Sitting in his kitchen – that familiar kitchen – it would be shockingly easy to forget all the hurt and just surrender to him. To go back. To say, when he asks, that I will come to Devon for a few days. (I have a sudden image of him packing me in the car against my will and speeding down the motorway.) But I know that I can't. I tell him I'd cry the whole time (which is true), and he says he will be doing the same thing, so what does it matter.

He asks me if there's anything he could have done, and I say no. I'm not going to open that one up. He says he fears his love for me will turn to hatred, and I say I hope it doesn't, but that if it does I will have to understand. He says something I don't quite process about my need for self-preservation being so strong that I have to ruin everyone's Christmas.

It is snowing, I'm to be O's guest at a dinner at 7.30 (I knew I had to arrange to see a friendly face), and more importantly, I'm not sure what there is to say – or at least, what there is to say that doesn't spark anger, and I don't want to be angry. Or hurt. Or resentful. Or tired. Also, this is so sad I can hardly bear it.
He says he has this fantasy that we will be snowed in – that I will have to spend the night. I don't say that that is my nightmare. It isn't, exactly, though it is an outside fear.

I know he's hurt that I'm checking my phone for notification that the cab has arrived, and that I'm worried that I don't seem to have any mobile service. (Another thing I won't miss: How isolated I felt there, partly because my phone had such crappy service. Must keep reminding myself of things I won't miss.)

The cab arrives and we throw the bags in the car. He tells me to ask the cab driver to wait for a couple of minutes, and I don't argue. I don't have the heart.

He gives me a proper kiss goodbye, which is odd, and then he prompts me to say goodbye to his daughter, a behavior that has always irritated me – that constant being told how to behave. I hug him again and say something like goodbye and -- because this is me, and I can't help it -- I know there's also an "I'm sorry" somewhere in there.

In the cab I check my phone. BN2 had said to me in his kitchen that I was well-loved, and for the first time in an age, I really feel like it -- thanks to a handful of supportive messages from friends. BN2 often made me feel so unloveable, and yet there was written proof on my phone to the contrary. I thought of my sister saying how the world would be full of possibility if I just did something about this relationship. I pictured myself in a Technicolor world that looked like a cross between Mika's album cover and the Wizard of Oz' yellow brick road. In the cab, we pass the spot where -- after a fight about my not looking up directions that BN2 claims was about my dishonesty -- he pulled over the car and told me to get out, leaving me to walk home 45 minutes in the dark and freezing cold.

***

It takes two and a half hours in the snow to get from BN2's to mine, so it is 8 pm before I leave my flat for a dinner that started at 7:30. This is a wound from BN2 that may take a while to heal: I am so freaked out about being late and how that ruins the entire rest of the evening with BN2 that I send O a couple of crazily apologetic texts.

"No problem!" he writes back. (I am particularly appreciative of the exclamation mark, which -- in my overanxious, BN2-addled mind -- means it really isn't a problem, as opposed to the sort of sullen "no problem" it could be without the punctuation.) And it really isn't a problem. I arrive at 8:30 and nobody, least of all O, particularly minds. (In a classic case of sod's law, I did bump into BN2's best friend – who lives in my neighbourhood -- en route to the Tube.) They just look happy to see me.

We have a proper three-course Christmas dinner – smoked salmon followed by turkey with stuffing, bread sauce, roast potatoes, the works. I eat it all, including the Christmas pudding with custard and cream. I'm eating perhaps a bit quickly, and I can't help thinking perhaps I shouldn't eat it all, but I don't really feel in danger of bingeing.

This is O's writers' group and apparently there's a Secret Santa. Ooops. O smiles and says: "Don't worry, you bought some really bad wine." He's even wrapped it in a Sunday Times supplement. I end up with the most creative Secret Santa present I think I've ever received: A fossil. It can be used as a paperweight.

After dinner, O and I walk for at least a mile in the ice and snow and I fill him in on what happened at BN2's. "Just forget you ever knew him, inasmuch as that's possible," O says. "I don't think you ever need to see him again."

Just downstairs from my flat I stop and buy a pint of milk.

"Hello darling," says the guy at the counter. I inhale sharply, as if something hit me. BN2 calls me darling.

I think briefly – OK, not so briefly – about texting him to let him know I'm thinking of him, and that I hope he's all right. But I know I can't make it OK for him, and in fact, the harder I try to do that the less OK it is for me.

And I'm trying to be OK with that.