Your Left Hand Doesn't Love Me

How I became an abuser

We’re on a train, the last train of the evening out of Kings Cross. On the way to Cambridge. where we’re going to a house party.

He is invited to the party. I am not. I don’t know what I’m doing here and wish I was anywhere else.

We’d met that evening in a pub on Southampton Row. A Wetherspoons. It’s the same Wetherspoons in which, almost a decade later, I would chat to an agent and my life would begin to change. But all that was to come.

By now, we have settled into a pattern. We are just dating, then he calls us ‘boyfriends', then I get too close and he tells me he loves me but is not in love with me and he needs space and let’s just be friends. So we’re friends, for a bit, but then we become friends who get wasted together and then we become friends who are fucking. I’m trying to keep my distance, though, so it’s all good. It’s just drinks, and sex, and then it’s just dinners and drinks and sex, and then it’s just watching TV together before dinner and drinks and (sometimes) sex, which is what friends do, right? And then, one evening, he refers to me as his boyfriend again and me I’m relieved because I can’t remember how to be happy without him and wonder if I ever really knew. But this time will be different. This time I’ll be better. We’re in a relationship, now, and occasionally he even tells me he loves me. And surely the ups and downs and the drama and the emotional warfare? They’re just the sparks, right? The sign that we’re meant to be together. Plath and Hughes. Orton and Halliwell. Love and Cobain. Who wants a relationship without fire? The greater the romance, the bigger bruise, and it’s only his left hand that doesn’t love me.