emotional amnesia

I guess I knew the moment you told me you had booked the flight and the car hire. You had decided to go to your house in France for the weekend, you had decided to do so well ahead of time and I knew that meant you were not going alone.

I jokingly asked you if I could come along, and you replied that no, you wanted to go on your own to take care of the garden because it would be your last chance to do so before the summer. You normally employ people for these things. Who - over such a short space of time - would fly hundreds of miles and drive several more just to do some weeding? That's when it struck me that something was amiss, something didn't sound quite right.

It reminded me of that time I was sitting in your car last year, and wanted to get rid of some paper. I deposited it in the door and found a sweets wrapper. "Oh", I joked, "have you suddenly developed a sweet tooth?". "Nah", you casually replied, "it must have been that woman I took to the Elton John gig". I remember my insides doing an instant somersault. I was winded. When I recovered my composure, I light-heartedly remarked that you had told me you had gone alone. "Oh yeah", the reply came, "I didn't tell you because I knew you'd be upset". Damn right. "There was no spark anyway. She was called Jane too and had three kids, funny that", you added, alluding to your previous partner of nine years, the one who dumped you unceremoniously because she wasn't satisfied with being a girlfriend every other weekend. She too was called Jane and had three kids.

You kept it touch throughout the weekend though, as you do, as we do, and even sent me a picture of the farmhouse in which I had such a magical time with you last year. A time fraught with worries and ill health but a magical time all the same, sitting at the back of the house at night wrapped in your leather jacket and looking at the pitch black sky dotted with stars I never managed to count, holding your hand and crying silently. A time when we took a walk along the seafront in Cabourg one windy day and I tied your hair into a little pony tail, suddenly realising that, despite the mess I was in, I was happy. I even told you.

Much as your presence in my life has the power to induce delirious happiness, it also occasionally throws me into a well of depression, isolating me from you and everyone else for days. Somehow, I always manage to climb out of the well and I forget it all the moment I see you again. Every time I see you, I fall in love again. Emotional amnesia.

I know what you did this weekend, you are so staid - as you readily admit yourself - that your life leaves little room for surprises. I have no doubt you weeded and mowed, that you went to the supermarket, that you had coffee with Marguerite next door - the only neighbour for miles, that you went to dinner at your English friends George and Sally's on Saturday night and brought a bottle of champagne along as you always do. But you were not alone. You took her there too, another in-betweenie to introduce, another pretty young woman to erase the memory of the one that came before - me, who erased the memory of Jane, who erased the memory of a previous in-betweenie etc...

I also know nothing happened between you and her. You were annoyed on Sunday night, she didn't shag you. She was ill on Monday morning, too embarrassed to show up.

This morning I woke up screaming, bathed in sweat, remembering every word of the argument we had. Remembering that I told you I knew, remembering that you didn't deny anything. Remembering that I kicked you very hard where it hurts, remembering that I raged I knew who she was and that I would go and find her, that "uneducated tart". Remembering that I lost control.

I am ashamed of my behaviour. You know I am not violent, you know that I am not haughty or superior, you know that I am terribly kind.

And now you also know that I had a haunting nightmare last night, but you don't know what it is about. As I write this, my head is pounding still.

As you take your morning run with her, you are blissfully unaware of the detritus my mind poisoned my night with. She has no idea that I exist.

But I hate myself for ever doubting you.