Returning

Years ago – when I was young, still dreamed a Pulitzer Prize might be around the corner, and was obsessed with what people in my business call "narrative journalism" I read a fantastic book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down in my then-relentless attempt to improve my "craft." The book specifically is about a Hmong girl with epilepsy, but also about the collision of Eastern beliefs and Western medicine, since the Hmong believed the girl's soul had been shaken from her body.

This is the best description I can come up with of bingeing and its aftermath: That when I binge I feel like my soul – the essence of me; whoever that might be – has come unmoored and is floating skywards, like a balloon. That the body on the ground is a hollow shell – I'm not there inside it. From above I can see this body going to crazy lengths to fill the empty space with food. I can see it like a cartoon drawing: The muffins and chocolate and cake all whole and in lurid colors, like something out of The Simpsons, only a whole lot less funny.

After the binge there is the awful heaviness: the weight of sadness, regret, disgust, and shame; the fat-ness. And slowly, slowly, maybe three or even four days post-binge, those feelings fade, leaving a space to fill. It is then that I return. There's even a moment when I can feel myself clicking back into place. It's nothing huge and dramatic, only a tiny moment of connection. Sometimes it's when someone makes me laugh, or when I make someone else laugh. Other times it's that feeling that someone not only hears what I'm saying, but understands it perfectly. Or vice versa. Click, click, click.

I'm back.

***

Monday morning, after my plane landed from Chicago, I got an email from BN2. It said only: "I miss you." It did not have the usual number of x's, odd only because he hasn't omitted them over the past six months. It was time-stamped 1:33 am.

We haven't spoken since March, and my last contact with him was a text message wishing me a happy birthday in May. But I've been thinking about him a lot recently, in the context of my bingeing, and how (mostly) safe and (mostly) predictable that area of my life was with him. (It was the only thing I could control, and boy did I control it.) In the last year we rarely went out, and I ate (mostly) predictable meals at predictable times with predictable company.

I also was thinking about him because it was his daughter's fourth birthday last week. (For the record: I knew it wasn't right for me or for his daughter for me to acknowledge the birthday, and didn't.) My relationship with the little girl pains me both for what it was and what it wasn't; what I wouldn't and couldn't allow it to be. I was remembering how much I hated being told how to behave around her; prompted always to show more affection. I resented the poor child herself sometimes for behaviours she adopted that were his fault and not hers. I hated that he was always feeding her junk food and hated having to sit around while the two of them ate all kinds of crap at all kinds of strange hours. I hated that one out of every two weekends was all about baby stuff and that I could not escape, and that on the other weekends he'd mope and I had to listen endlessly to how much he missed her and often be berated for my lack of sympathy.

There have been a lot of significant dates over the past couple of weeks that touch off floods of memories. And damn my Rain Man memory, as O calls it, I remember them all: meeting his parents for the first time on his mother's birthday just after Cannes on the last bank holiday weekend in May; going to an Oxford ball (where I saw texts from other women on his phone and binged); the ball he went to without me last year because he'd organized it when we'd split up and then said he didn't think it appropriate for me to come (not that he admitted this, but because he didn't tell the women he'd invited that we were back together).

I didn't respond to the "I miss you" email, but this afternoon I sent him an email asking if he wanted to meet for a tea. I don't want to go back to him; don't worry. I just want to not have to avoid chunks of social events for fear that I might see him. Basically, I wanted to face him.

He wrote back:

Good to hear from you, but the transition to occasional tea acquaintance is just torture for me. It's my problem I know, and you've been perfectly kind and reasonable so please don't take this as a criticism. I'm just not over you, and still not able to connect meaningfully with anyone else I've met despite my best efforts.

Seeing you last time reminded me what a wonderful woman you are, and just made my heart ache.

He signed it with the usual number of kisses.

I cried a little bit – sadness, regret, and probably some other things too. Relief.

I left him six months ago tomorrow, and it's o-v-e-r. Finally.