therapy

 
Is the Mona JB of 1984 1979 smiling? Your vote please.
(Ed. note: In 1984 the JB was 10. Does he look 10 in this primary school photo? No.)

We are becoming reacquainted after his return. I don't know if it's just me, the sociable hermit, prone to overstimulation, but when he comes back, I am 80% delighted to see him, and 20%: well, I don't quite know where you're going to fit. Luckily he takes this in good heart, and - this is his great gift to us, the glue that keeps us together - he makes me laugh at myself and my tortured artist persona.

Of which related moments I have been having a few, recently. Dear friends, allow me to bore you senseless with my adolescent dramas  take you back in time. Baaack (insert swiggly lines to denote time travel) in tiiiime...

It's Dublin, 1990's. I am having my heart broken in the way that only someone in their twenties would allow, repeatedly. Finally, Dramaboy leaves and goes to live in London, abandoning me in the worst way, and that is, by not even telling me. He hooks up with a woman of 36, (which seems so old, at the time. Huh.) It's all drama and gloom. Drama and gloom, droom and glama. You get the picture.
For my part, I reassemble myself, and I go to Italy for four years, to have another disastrous relationship with an Italian man, who is not capable of fidelity. I'm in a man pickle again, what I need is five years of therapy, but I haven't even got the wit to extricate myself. I feel sorry for him, I take him back. Finally, not content with that level of droom, I go home and, inexplicably, get involved with Dramaboy again, (who in the meantime, has been dumped unceremoniously by the "ancient" girlfriend. Ha.) leaving Italian Fannyrat in Varese to his demented mother.
DramaBoy is difficult, it's true, but he's good value, he's exciting, (or so it seemed). Wouldn't you know it, he's a musician, and he knows interesting people, like the ones who wrote that famous Channel 4 series, about three priests. Yeah, that one. He's wildly inconsistent, really, he's not what you could call stable, certainly, and we fall in and out operatically over a couple more years, culminating in a catastrophic June Bank Holiday during which he talked me into moving in with him and then out again, in the space of three days.
Finally I get angry enough to have the energy to leave. I'm done, as my American friends say. Done like a cake. Fried like an egg. I leave for real. I change careers, I love my new work, and who needs men, anyway? I go to America, I enter a Golden Age of Luck. I feel blessed, the universe smiles. I am lonely, at times, I have lost my tribe, and have to find another one, but work is rewarding and enlarging, and I am happy.

 THANK ALL THAT IS GOOD, you might well be thinking. She's going to grow up now, and get a life. The JB, this is where he comes in, and he's normal, right? No Oedipal complex, no particular weirdness, not undiagnosed bi-polar or whateverthehell. And you'd be right. I go back to Ireland, when my visa runs out and the Kerryman, equal parts Academic,  Wild Man, Goofball, gallops in on his rides in on his bike, and we are together. Phew. We have our troubles, as you know, but they are no one's fault and we get on well, mostly. There's a flow to the proceedings that I haven't known before.

Fast forward to the Dog Shelter, August 2011. They are inundated with visitors and I am posted on the back door, where I am to herd folks away from the kennels so they don't get the dogs all agitated. It's really boring. It's a bit hot. Half an hour passes. La - la - la. No, if you wouldn't mind going that way, or that way, thanks. And this is where I make my fatal mistake. I start googling the old crowd, idly, on my phone.

And a site jumps up. I click on the site. (Oh, the temptation to link to it! Best not. I'd be rumbled. THAT would be excruciating.) The site blasts out a song. THE SONG IS ABOUT ME. It's all about letting me go, it's about how hard he tried, and how he doesn't want to be bitter.
What now? What?
Arrgggg.

And that, my friends, is why technology is bad.
T

You don't know how pleased I'd be to hear your stories. Log in as anonymous, if you like. Go on, join me in the pit of excruciation! It'll be fun! I have gin! Or what was it I used to drink? Brandy and ginger!
(Bleah.)

Comments

[Hairy Farmer Family]

Ohhhhh! I don't think I've ever read a post that swept me along like the very bestest of best short stories before! That was just lovely. Except... brandy and GINGER? Surely not!

Saw an interview with the chaps that wrote the thing (the oh-so funny & fabulous thing!) with the 3 priests once. Struck me there was one nice one and one... exceedingly weird one.

May will like 'Italian Fannyrat', I feel sure.

[bunny]

It's true--letting you go IS a terribly hard thing. I've totally failed, myself. I try not to be bitter...

DITTO HFF--such a thrilling tale! I was riveted. (And then horrified by the brandy and ginger. Though perhaps it's lovely! It's not like I've TRIED it!) I've got nothing that compares. Curse you, exes! Why must you be so dull!

(Oh, and yes, that's a Mona JB smile, and a very handsome one!)

[Twangypearl]

Oh! Thank you! I am tickled pink.

HFF, you must read Parma Violet Tea, as on Belgian Waffle, she is utterly hilarious and tragic. The term "fannyrat" is credit to Ms Underscore, in fact.

Oh, I agree - brandy and ginger, an awful nausea-inducing beverage. I was mad. QED, so, so many times.

[Val]

Yes, an unmistakable smile...

I'm ashamed to admit "MY" drink, in my foolish youth, was amaretto sours!

[Andie]

Yes, the JB is smiling, very certainly.

Ginger and brandy, eww, my mother used to drink that. Wouldn't mind a gin though.

Well, look, I don't subscribe to the googling of exes. It's bad bad bad. I prefer to treat with ignore.

I agree with Bunny though. I think you are very hard to let go.

[a]

I enjoy googling exes. I certainly don't want to talk to them, but I am curious. I'm referenced in a song, but it's a song about fingerprints, and it's quite awful. And the reason I'm mentioned is due to the horrors I witnessed at a "professional" conference where people were not acting very professionally. That's entertainment, man.

The Mona JB is definitely smiling.

[Twangypearl]

Amaretto sours, oh my. I don't even know what that is, but I am tempted to find out now.

I couldn't let go of you, Andie and Bunny, either. I'd miss you too much. (I would.)(Not even joking.)

THANK you, a, for the fingerprint song. HOW FANTASTIC, a forensic song! I AM entertained.

[May]

No no no NO. Ginger and WHISKY. Honestly. But I spent my youth (such as it was. My mother claims I was BORN aged 36) drinking Guinness and wearing great big Doc Marten boots with scarlet laces and not brushing my hair.

Mona JB is considering whether a full-on smile will get him a slice of cake, if you ask me.

It all makes an excellent short story. Excellent. A song about not being bitter? The CHEEK. The utter, utter CHEEK.

I am delighted that I have been completely unable to find any old boyfriends on the internet. But then, I am very boring, in that I accidentally met the love of my life when I was seventeen and have been completely unable to dismiss the chap from my mind for long enough to get into full-on drama with assorted fannyrats since.

However, I do have an old crush - I never dated him, but he kept meandering back through my life, single when I was not, mysteriously unavailable whenever I (briefly, long story) was, and yet always bloody THERE, looking delicious. He spent his twenties declaring he'd be a great artist and would never settle down and have kids. And then he morphed into a self-rightous bore with, yes, kids! and I look at him and think, what in effers did I SEE in the pompous twerp? What? WHAT?

He told me, once, having kissed me (dick), that I was 'too intense and needy' and that 'he needed a partner who would support him, not drag him down'. Everytime I think of that evening, and how upset I was, and how I didn't brain him with a chair, I go fuchsia and need to slink away and scream in a foetal position.

[Twangypearl]

Ah, see, there's those who make it all about themselves. You might search for further explanations but could be it's as simple as that. That twit, honestly. "drag him down", grrr, the nerve. I'm so glad H was met, at the right time. That was the sun shining on both of you, so it was. Bask warmly.

Ginger and whiskey you say? Hmm!

[Adele]

I'm posting this late, but this post spoke to me in Technicolor:) Your twenties sound not unlike mine (and the spooky thing is that I, too, had a completely...untenable romance with someone from the environs of Varese). Ah, good times. At least - in our old ages - we can look back and say that we really, um, experienced things. (Stupidities, mostly, but...still).

But the song? C'est too much. This is the song that broke the camel's back. I suggest some graphic revenge. Use your artistic wizardry. Funnel it.

(That schmuck-o).

Mr. D is my port after all that storm. Sounds like the JB is for you, as well. It's very hard for the non-artistic types (i.e, the straightforward, wage-earning types) to understand those of us who must CREATE. And those partnerships aren't always easy (um, mostly on them) especially when solitude is a welcome part of your makeup.

That said: lucky devils to have snagged us:)

[Twangypearl]

Adele! How did you get to be so tuned in? It's amazing. A rare thing, indeed.

Because, yes! Funnel it, of course, of course! I am going to enjoy this.

Clearly, yes, all their birthdays came at once the day they found fantastic us. HEH!