the light that shone

I've written about it before; what it was like when the anti depressants started to kick in. A light came on finally. Fresh air blew through my stifled mind, stirring up the dust motes as the warm sun came in slantwise; what once was dull and faceless became, if not  beautiful, then a something that did not trouble me so deeply. I was no longer stripped down with the raw terror of it all. It gave me pause. It gave me respite. It was like it might be in another life where another me, the one that got it right this time, had a partner, an equal, a second adult in the house to tag out with when it all got too much.
It often gets too much when there is just you. I'd left my son's Dad with nothing. Less than that. I was paying off a loan I had agreed to take out so that he could get a work van.

Of course I was paying it off. All seven grand of it. If you were watching a soap opera and this plot line unfolded you would know what would happen next. 'No!' you would shout at the telly, 'Why are you doing that you stupid girl?! He's not gonna pay you back...Oh my god...' and you'd slap your forehead leaving your hand there in disbelief and be glad when the dramatic music started and you could switch over to something less emotionally taxing. Like celebrity love island.
Or, if you had a daughter, you would sit her down and explain that no man, no man in the world worth his salt, would ask his girlfriend to take out a loan in her name so that he could spend it on a van and not even put the goddamned vehicle in her name.

There was a long process of gathering evidence, going through bank statements, emails, solicitors letters and threats... applications for a court hearing that I fielded alone. Lots of people said 'take the fucker to court! You should do this!' but no one helped me. No one saw me on the day to day just putting one foot in front of the other. Days with a toddler, who needed every ounce of me, stretched out and away into the distance.
I'll tell you this now, if you meet a girl at soft play, or some kind of library event where the children are told stories and sung to, and she is skittish, desolate and shy... if she seems gawkish or even if she seems like she hates you (she probably hates you, actually, but it's not what you think), persist. Persist. Ask her round for wine... not coffee. No, WINE. You will find that she is funny and strong. She has been sucking it up for a very long time and what she needs is someone who is getting it all wrong too. But I'll leave that up to you. You might find her too closed down.
I know I did.
And for the longest time I would not take those pills. I'd been to the doctor nine months earlier and been written a prescription that I hid (from myself) under my bed before I succumbed to my desperation and actually went to the pharmacy.
And I took a pill, And the next day I took a pill. And I kept on taking those pills because almost immediately they put me in a bubble of 'I do not give a fuck-ness'. And I liked it there.
I remember the moment when I actually laughed. It was like a golden light of relief went rolling through my house. I was sitting on the stairs and my son, who must have been four at the time, was telling me, quite indignantly, that he did not want to wear a queens hat. What he meant was that he did not want to wear a crown (part of a dressing up thing maybe, I don't even know now).
But the phrase 'Queens Hat' made me chuckle, and then it made me giggle, and then it was like some uncontrollable tide of mirth swept over me and I was helpless. My son was outraged that I was laughing at him and started to protest, but I was gone, just gone. I could not stop.... 'queens hat!' I gasped weakly and was gone again.
And the relief of it all seeped in to everything. I noticed that, unlike before, when I could not give my son all the play doh colours to play with at the same time, because they would just get mixed up together and become that strange shade of, what? Brown? in no time, I no longer cared. So what if all the colours got mixed? Really? So very fucking what?
I said it jokingly to myself; Citalopram was the other adult in the house. The one that made me laugh and told me not to be so uptight.

I've watched films where the woman will leave an abusive relationship and everything will be great. Amazing. Just stay single lady and everything will be ok, I'll think. But she doesn't, she walks right back in to something just as bad if not worse. Why would you do that? I mean really... hand goes to forehead again and I'll watch the rest though my fingers.
I met Lee on Tinder. In one of our early conversations he was telling me about a date he'd been on with a woman who seemed nice but after a while had said something along the lines of 'I have to take my anti psychotic medicine now'... He'd meant it as a joke of course, to laugh at her and point fun. But I said, lighthearted in a way... 'equal opportunities dating?'
I left it there for months. and didn't reply to him when he asked if I'd like to meet. Because I actually wondered what sort of person laughs at someone who needs help like that? How was she any less human than him... or even me?
But I didn't delete him for it. Instead, when he posted a photo on tinder of him looking sexy in a hat I accidentally 'liked' it or whatever it is you could do back then. It re-ignited a conversation and when he asked me out again I said yes.

One night, fairly early on, I was lying next to him in my bed and felt the urge to be honest about taking anti depressants. Back then I must have thought it was a big deal, as if you could judge someones character on their ability to chemically produce enough serotonin to keep them from wanting to harm themselves. Or not.
In any case, I was feeling earnest and told him. He listened to my reasoning and nodded quietly, eventually saying that he too had been offered anti depressants when he'd left an abusive relationship but decided it wasn't for him. He asked me if his comment about the girl he'd been on a date with had made me think he was really down on people with mental health issues. I had to admit that I did. But we laughed about the misunderstanding after that and I felt reassured that he got it. I mentioned that it was like having that extra adult in the house, one that stopped me from going from 0 to 100 in the space of seconds. Who doesn't need that when you are a parent?

It started very subtly of course. But I remember clearly, my birthday late February. I was joking about something he'd been complaining about. 'There's pills for that' I said, grinning provocatively.
He came close and kissed me as I laughed... 'You don't need anti depressants' he said, suddenly earnest but as easy as anything.
I laughed again 'How do you know?' I said, and shrugged it off.
But it made me uneasy that he would even say it.
Drip by drip he wore away at the edges of my self doubt, from that first passing comment to stonewalling me when I talked about having to go to the Dr to renew my prescription, to outright saying 'what kind of parent are you? Who do you think you are, wanting another child, when you have told me you can't even cope with one without needing prescription medicine?!'

We were sitting in the departures lounge on our way back from a weekend Amsterdam when his face twisted into an ugly mask. He was telling me I didn't need anti depressants again, but this time there was a sharpness running razor-like in the way he spoke. The edges of his words twisting with condescension and what? Disgust I think.

The chasm grew between the light in my head and I. Those little white pills, maybe I should try and come off them, give them a break, see how I'd be without them. I started telling my friends, I'm going to come off my anti depressants, it's been over a year now...
April I stopped taking them for a week, just to see how I went. Just like that. And no, I wasn't ok. It was the weekend we went to west wales together, to stay at his parents house while they were off somewhere.
I don't know if suddenly the truth of who he really was hit me full force once the light had gone out in my head, but all I remember of that weekend is feeling like there was nothing left but emptiness in the world from all sides. Just an empty landscape and no one else but us.
We went walking up a hill in bright sunlight. As I walked that Easter Sunday I thought about my son and about how badly I wanted to be with him, eating Easter eggs and a Sunday roast, with friends there, making noise and laughter, not there in the weak spring light that was too direct and bright but also too cold.
Maybe I saw the truth of what was happening around me, as he pulled me away from everyone I loved, maybe I felt the echoes of what he really was at heart, but whatever I felt I could not listen. I would not listen. It was far too frightening and it made me sad.
I started to take them again after that weekend but the hollow feeling that had opened up that day persisted. The crack that opened up between what I thought he was and how he actually treated me became tangible.
Perhaps you might say that actually what I needed was to come off those pills that put me in my bubble of 'I do not give a fuckness' and really LOOK at the reality around me. But it had already begun. This flawless man was flawed.

I stayed on my antidepressants till October of that year and then stopped taking them again. This time for good. I was unequivocally bat-shit crazy for at least three months after. All the way till after Christmas. I obsessively checked I'd locked doors, I was up four, maybe five times a night checking that Charlie, by now six years old, was still alive, and I could not stop the thought that I might have HIV.
Its almost laughable actually. Except that it wasn't for me at all. By some miracle, because Lee certainly hadn't done it, I had caught Herpes in February. Full blown, primary outbreak with all the cherry-like symptoms on the top.
I say it wasn't Lee because to suggest that it had been him would have been impossible, defamatory even, but what I experienced then was unlike anything I'd ever encountered. Six weeks of exhaustion, blistering, muscle aches, fever, swollen glands, shooting nerve pain, crawling skin on my legs and needing just to sleep and sleep.
When I was still not right in late April I said to him one night on my sofa, very quietly after he'd made a joke about me having 'monkey bum aids',

'I think you might have given me Herpes, I think I might have caught it from you'.

It was like time stopped for a second. The hell that broke loose after that made me wish I had held my tongue. 'I thought we would never blame each other, I thought we said we would never hold it against one another or let it come between us...I can't BELIEVE you are accusing me of this...' It went on.

He went outside seething, to smoke a cigarette, by which time I had already apologised three or four times, "my sister called me and I'm going to go and catch up with her in town" he said breezily as he came in.
I knew he wasn't and said as much, apologising again. By now the story was I had aggressively accused him of infecting me... I was at a loss. No. No I didn't say it like that and I was crying, trying to tell him how I felt, how awful and ill I felt and that I was just trying to figure out why and how this had happened.
The weekend came and we'd reached an uneasy truce. But I was with girlfriends Friday to Sunday and when I called him Sunday afternoon the whole thing started again. Him telling me how awful I was for accusing him, for pointing the blame at him who had done nothing, nothing wrong.

I scrabbled around for a reason I now had Herpes and couldn't find anything. But that evening at mine... We'd had sex. Unprotected sex yes. He'd recently shown me a text with the all clear from the sexual health clinic. I knew I was all good. And so it happened. Lots of things happened.

Two days later, around mid morning, I suddenly felt very wrong. Everything was painful and going to the toilet was agonising. I thought maybe I'd cut myself, I texted him: I was in pain, I felt rough. He texted back a 'LOL' and asked me if I wanted a donut cushion to sit on.

I didn't answer his calls for the rest of the day. By the time he text me, livid at 4pm, he was saying that I was ignoring his calls on purpose, that I was cruel and manipulative and that he was having second thoughts about wanting to see me at all.

Panicked and devastated I called and apologised, but at the back of my head I thought he was right, I was ignoring his calls because of his insensitive text. What kind of an adult was I?

Later on, when he'd acknowledged his 'LOL' may have been insensitive he was trying to shrug off my symptoms. He told me that after that night he'd found a tiny cut down below, but it had gone away the next day... reading through all the stuff online in the weeks that followed my diagnosis I went cold remembering that sentence. Because there, in black and white, and almost to the letter, was a description of how the virus might appear, just like a tiny cut, or break in the skin. He could have been quoting it, and then I knew.

But there was no question once the storm abated of me ever bringing it up again. Never could I tell him I was having an outbreak. The fact that we continued to have unprotected sex did not bother him. Did not deter him. But it bothered me that he didn't want to protect himself.

Locked in my own shame about having this virus I began to think; did I get it years ago? What else did I get that I didn't know about? Could I have HIV? And the obsession cycle began to spin and spin out of hand. What if I had HIV and I'd given it to Lee? Guilt on crazy guilt on anxiety wracked me. What had I done?
From that place of light I had found; like stumbling into Narnia, not through a wardrobe, but from an equally unlikely blister pack of little white pills, to this utter darkness and despair.
But it was ok, because he was proud of me for coming off them.
I locked myself down harder and said nothing, the darkness echoed back my silence and the dust lay still.