The devil in her eyes Part 2

Mutilated and Discarded

I tore the pages out of my diary in a fit of cathartic nonsense while living at Harrison Street with Justin in the first year of our relationship. We moved in together really quickly. We did everything really quickly. Making love on a futon in the shared house I rented on the beach I said, “I love you”.

He paused, “did you say that you love me?”

“I suppose I did.”

But what I really meant was, I love that you love me. It wasn’t long after that I realised I wasn’t sexually attracted to him. He was skinny, had a futile tuft of hair in the middle of his concave chest and had a chip on his shoulder.

But in that first year we had fun. We were broke, very broke. But we were happy. I was 19 about to turn 20.

I was so happy in fact that I shredded my diary on a sunny ceremonial afternoon. Some 20 lovers, there stories mutilated and discarded. I sincerely believe that I mutilated and discarded more than a diary that day. I discarded part of myself.





The devil in her eyes Part 2 - The devil has a conscience.

A weak one but a conscience all the same, Mick and I saw each other regularly, under the noses of our partners, for the next two years. There were some close calls, but we got pretty good at the deception.

I left Justin for 1hour and 15minutes. I couldn’t keep it up. I told him I had been seeing Mick, he was less angry about the betrayal and angrier that it was Mick. He wasn’t stupid, he knew how horrible our sex life was. He knew it was a matter of time before I did something like this, he was surprised that I hadn’t done anything earlier. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t have done anything because I was in love with Mick. In a very unhealthy way, I was loyal to Mick.

Begs the question, why did I stay?

I loved Justin very much. But we were like brother and sister, sleeping with him made me feel sick. Eventually, we stopped having sex altogether. Its incredible really, how well a relationship based of companionship can function without it.

Justin cried, screamed, threw our outdoor furniture over the fence and into the neighbor's back yard, threw up in the bougainvillea and pleaded with me to stay. I can’t live without you, he begged. I cried, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have strong enough conviction to leave. It takes a lot of courage to end a relationship that needs to end. I wasn’t strong enough.

Justin was strong enough. In our sixth year we had relocated to Sydney for work and a change of pace. Mick disappeared once I moved, he called me a few time not long after we got here, I deleted his number, I had decided to make a go of this asexual middle aged relationship I had.

Justin disappeared for 22 hours. He left to go to a party the night before and he never came back. His phone was off and none of our friends had seen him. I was calm for the first 6 hours assuming he had just passed out on someone’s floor, which wasn’t uncommon. He enjoyed a drink.

As the hours passed I became increasingly frantic. I started to practice the speech I would give his mother, explaining that her son was missing. He had never done anything like this before so, of course, the last thing I thought was what actually happened. I thought he was dead, had been beaten, raped, tortured and stuffed under the floorboards Johnny Wayne Gacy Jnr style.

I called my father in panic. I disconnected Justins’s phone before realising that was a stupid thing to do and reconnecting it again. I cried. I screamed. I paced. I drank. I lay in a foetal position on the floor and felt helpless, I felt hollow. I thought I was going to die. My dad drove up from the central coast to be with me. At this stage I had no idea if Justin was going to come back at all and I didn’t want to stay in my flat alone.

The last thing I did, which should have been the first thing I did, was checking the traffic on our credit card. There was, $587.30 spent at the Jack of hearts, an Asian specialty brothel on the corner of our street. $714.20 spent at the Marlborough hotel. $1000 cash advance. He had spent our mortgage repayment on hookers and $180 per glass Glen Fiddick and god knows what else. I think he even came back with a manicure and new shoes.

This was my penance. This was for Mick. It was my birthday in a week. I was about to turn 26.

When I did turn 26, I was a very different person.

I needed to remember, who I had been before, I wanted to be her again. She was strong. She could handle this. I needed to remember my diary. My diary was the key to being her, to surviving this.