A Cloud Hangs Over Me, Marks Every Move...

This is as close to breaking point as I think I've ever come.

I don't think I've ever had a break down, nervous, mental or otherwise. I wouldn't know how to recognise one if I had. Maybe its only when you look back on a traumatic incident or a black period in life that you can reflect and say that maybe you did break down, or at least partly so. Whatever feelings are involved in something like that - a sense of nauseous-dread feeding on you from within like some kind of symbiotic and parasitic worm perhaps, or a fleeting sense of your own mortality that flashes across your brain with every asthmatic wheeze you breath, and yet still you put that “It will be your last…” cigarette to your lips and draw back on its toxic vaporous bilge. Maybe it’s a fear for whatever the future may hold especially if you can’t see one with you in it. Low self esteem maybe, a sense of worthlessness or rejection - a crushing sense that your head is in an ever tightening vice and may just explode at just one notch tighter and which ever direction you look there is no way out. The list is potentially endless. Whatever the symptoms are, if these are the symtoms - these are all sensations which are happening right now, to me.

Every direction seems closed and barred from entry. Right now there is that horrible ache in the pit of my stomach and deepening sense of displacement that I just don't belong, and what I thought was right, was once perfect, is so utterly, devastatingly wrong: My relationship with Louise…

There is more stress than I've felt in my entire life. My.Head.Physically.Hurts. My body feels leaden - I'm waking up in the middle of the night at four in the morning, always four - my heart is pounding, I'm sweating and unable to draw breath - I clasp around in the dark for an inhaler and hope that its there, a full one, not another empty one - just so the strangling gasp which I'm trying to catch wont be my last. But in the cold harsh morning light, the waking realisation slowly dawns that I'm still the lead comedy figure in the amateur pantomime production that has become my life, begins to set in once more - I genuinely feel as though I wouldn't have minded if it had. And the one person, my so-called 'girlfriend', that one person out of all the rest, who I hoped would come through for me, at least be there for me - just wont. She doesn't want to, or can’t. In fact she wants the opposite - and with cold, dead, emotionally flat-lined eyes locked onto mine she says that She.Doesn’t.Love.Me.Anymore, spitting the emphasis on every word so that they become like echoing bolted locks each slammed shut on some kind of caricatured prison cell door that now houses the splintered remains of our shattered relationship.

A Smiths song, yes, a fucking Smiths song, or least the partial lyrics of one begin to whir through my mind: "Please don't drop me home, because it’s not my home, it’s their home and I'm welcome no more..."

Or rather it’s her home, and I'm welcome no more...

And I feel crushed and bereft of any hope every time I walk through the door.

I don't remember it being this bad after I left college to return home with a rather shabby-looking 2:2 in Scientific & Natural History Illustration, a degree course perfectly poised to arm its graduates with precisely nil employment skills thereafter. I worked hard to get of that shambles in The Year of Hell© that ensued. It took my friend Woody six or seven. Finally, after working through the bitterly decaying debris of a college romance that would not transcend the boundaries in which it once flourished (she returned to her boyfriend), and channelling all my efforts in reversing those previous three years of mostly pissed-up-the-wall traditional illustration skills and developing fresh new ones - on a digital canvas - on a borrowed computer, in just one - I finally got the breakthrough job that I'd worked so hard for. Those were bleak times, but the events that occurred in them are stuff of personal legend. I was younger then and far more resilient than I am now, and I knew that I would succeed no matter what. No, not even returning, tail-between-my-legs to the cleaning job that had sustained me through college, or going back to the Yogurt Mines©. It was my idea first Pot Noodle – It was - to tunnel for rich seams of custard style thick and creamy - Alleluia, We've Struck Yogurt!!...paydirt, that robbed me of my summers, or hiding as a 23 year old from the wrath of my younger brother in the dark of the closet in my bedroom with a dressing gown over my head because I'd stole all the best currency from his coin collection - AGAIN. Nope, none of that misery even begins to compare with this. That was just comedy misery, this is something else.

Louise says pointedly, that her feelings have changed and she can't see herself spending the rest of her life with me...

Nor was it as bad when I was first made redundant in 2003. Yes, I knew I had to pull something pretty spectacular out at some point soon, and there were low points - myself and Jeanette had just split up and we were both racked in turmoil – was it the right thing to do or not? But my then former employers had cushioned the blow of losing my job with an over-generous redundancy package. I had no digital portfolio, but that didn't matter, I could botch one of those up easily enough. No, it was party-time and my closest friends then were students at one of Liverpool's universities. And so party we did – squeezing at times as many as up to twenty or more in my hovel bed-sit after the clubs and pub’s we had long since spilled out from finally closed. If it wasn’t my place it was someone else’s, and as the lighter nights approached we’d sit up with blankets and bourbon procured from the Mad Swede’s flat until the small hours in the mild early spring weather amongst the daffodils, talking utter bollocks on the hill in Liverpool’s Sefton Park. If that was a low-point then I wouldn’t change a thing.

Louise is nearly thirty-four she says, she wants to be married with kids. That should have been five years ago, with someone else, and she just can't see that with us - in particular ‘me’ - so why waste any more of her time and anymore of mine…

Splitting up with Susan in 2008, was it 2008? There were that many splits and mini-breaks (and not of the pleasant kind) that I can never recall. But I was hit hard. Hard because I did my best for her, more than she ever deserved, or could ever really appreciate. I took the flak, firstly for the little things - when she had a bad day at work, whereby the ensuing mood that followed would seemingly last for three. Compounded more so by the fact that the next day would be bad and the one after, and so on – and I just grew used to being the wall that she would tear strips off. I became defined in my own moods by the way Susan was treating me. And gradually it became my fault too when the dreams aspirations in her life failed to materialise. I took the blame when she failed to get yet another acting role – a profession whereby, no matter how good you are, and to my mind she was bloody good – but if your face, or your weight, or poise, teeth, accent, eye colour, hair length, or any number of things…doesn’t fit then you just wont get the gig because there is always some other wannabe right behind you in the castings couch queue who just might. And if the castings couch doesn’t work, well, the Producer’s daughter fancies having a go so hard luck and goodbye, oh and yeah, don’t call us and we certainly wont call you. And I bore the brunt of that. I hadn’t helped her prepare, I hadn’t gone through her lines with her…except the only times I hadn’t were the times when she didn’t want me too. These times always blew back in my face – I hadn’t supported her enough. I would never count not making it as an actor a failing – it’s a tough gig where you are unlikely to succeed. But that and all the rest were passed on to me. It was my fault she could and would drink three bottles of personality-altering paint-stripper that masqueraded as wine in a night and have to be picked up off the floor. Her persecution complex was my fault too – everyone was against her in her eyes, because of me it seemed. It was my fault she had a shitty job that she hated and felt abused by. It actually wasn’t a bad job. It was my fault the fact that she felt that she (a North East girl) had no friend’s in the North East, and yet I did. It was my fault for every public Carling-induced, vindictive and destructive drunken whirlwind of abuse that she would inexplicably volley in my direction for some perceived sleight that only she could fathom. She could escalate arguments in to full scale wars from embryonic incidents that had happened some three years before. She would shift the goal posts every time I tried to maintain an even-voiced, level-headed parry to whatever ludicrous and nonsensical barb she would try to inject next. But trying to maintain that level of calm only inflamed and incited her further, until the time she cascaded blows upon me. On another occasion she reached for a kitchen knife, shaking it with rage towards my face before taking it to bed. Throughout all of this, whilst it was making me unhappy, it was clear that she was unhappy – and perhaps I was the root cause of it. After all, that seemed to be the gist of everything – perhaps it was me, maybe I was to blame, maybe I am an utter ball-sack, an utter shit of the highest order. Well I must be, I caused this much grief and I believed it. And so I was devastated when we broke up – what was wrong about me that could cause all this hate and resentment in the girl I loved then? It pretty much broke me because I was certain that I wasn’t a person who could do that to somebody. Maybe I am.

Louise says if she could change the way she feels she would do but she can’t. End of. Period. Sorry…she quietly mumbles, eyes down, fingers nervously twisting her hair to the point where it will no doubt brittle and snap like we have just done. So that’s it for us then. I’ve done it again, and I feel utterly raw and alone and hopelessly lost without her. How did I manage to change my beautiful, carefree, Louise in to this troubled, vacant, hollow shell that once contained a vibrant life into some strange unknown entity seemingly bereft of any emotion. I won’t ever know because she may never tell me.

Louise and Susan, whilst they are very different people, both it seems to me suffer obliquely from the same disposition. Louise’s depression aside, and I suspect Susan suffered from the same extreme highs and deep lows that Lou does, but as then undiagnosed. Both seem to share the same the inability to manage their own life expectations, that and the fact that neither are/were necessarily where they would have perceived themselves to be some five years previously. Susan, in her mind should have been cavorting on a West End stage, or indeed any stage no doubt, but life for her, for whatever reason didn’t work out that way. Louise - happily married to somebody else and raising their children. But again, life didn’t work out that way either and she realises that the clock is ticking for her, just as it is for everybody. But at what point, if any, do you settle for, and learn to appreciate what it is you do have. If something was so right, how can it now be so wrong for no tangible reason other then a light switched off over night on her emotions? How can it be so far gone that it cannot be retrieved? Nobody is perfect, but then isn’t it sometimes the imperfections that make something unique and truly beautiful? Or maybe I’ve just passively absorbed too many Jerry Springer’s Thoughts For The Day, but the point, no matter how schmaltzy, whether I’m right or wrong, and whatever your stance on it, still holds because life isn't always perfect, and sometimes its just plain depressing, but if your prepared to put the effort in it can still be pretty good at times, right?