Fuck you, Weekend

This weekend has been a weird mixture of emotions. I went to see the new Twilight film with Bestie, had a mini moment of fear with One Ball, and reminisced about my former life with the Big Love Crazy stuff for a weekend, I tell ya. Crazy stuff.

This time last year, I went to see the last Twilight film with my favorite gal pal on the other side of the world. Big Love and I were on one of the together phases of our together/not-together cycles, but he refused to go with me. “It’s not really my scene,” he said, but we both knew he just didn’t want to go to the cinema with me. There was an excuse every time.

This time last year, he took me snowboarding for the very first time. It was an absolute disaster. And when I say disaster, I mean a DISASTER. To say that I can’t snowboard would be the understatement of the century. I couldn’t even stand up on the damn thing, let alone make my way up and then down a mountain strapped to one. We had problems from start to finish.

We’ll start with the chairlift. I’ve never used a chairlift before. I’m probably never going to use a chairlift again, thanks to that one on the top of that mountain, that first time I ever went snowboarding. I couldn’t get on the thing. Then, when I was on it, I couldn’t work out how to stay on it. And then, when I got to the top, despite not really being on the damn thing at all, I couldn’t get off it. After watching people elegantly dismount the lift a hundred times in front of me before feeling brave enough to do it myself, I fucked it up. Spectacularly. I faceplanted the floor. As in, f-a-c-e-p-l-a-n-t-e-d. I had to check that my nose wasn’t broken. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

Once we were up there, it was time to come down. I slid down a bit and I thought I’d got the hang of it, but then I slipped down the next bit on my ass and couldn’t get back up again. When I did, I twisted my ankle. So then I took the board off in a dramatic, I’ve-had-enough-of-this-bullshit huff, and the fucking thing slid down the side of the mountain. My rented board. The rented board I was going to need to pay fuck-knows how much for when we got to the bottom and I told them I’d lost it.

Yes, that’s me. I’m the girl who takes her snowboard off halfway up a mountain, lets go of it, watches it slide down said mountain and then can’t get it back.

Big Love doing what Big Love did best, he came up with a master plan. It wouldn’t be that far down, we’d just clamber down and get the board. Except it was quite far down. Further down than we thought, plus the snow was a lot deeper than we thought. And by that, I mean a lot deeper than the height of me. I put my foot down into what I thought was a solid mound of snow, but it wasn’t a solid mound of snow; it was a soft, powdery pile … and I fell about nine feet down into it. Thankfully, Big Love was a keen snowboarder, had been in a few similar predicaments himself, and managed to rescue me out of the snow-coffin I was sure I would die in.

As we tried to get out of the deep valley of the mountain we’d now found ourselves in, far away from the actual slopes and trails, things got worse. The snow got deeper and deeper, softer and softer. I didn’t realise just how deep it was until I reached out to grab what I thought was a branch and it actually turned out to be the top of a tree. And then, because I’m British and we don’t know what to do in the snow, and because I’d never been snowboarding before, and because it felt like I’d ruined the entire day, I just cried. I refused to move because I couldn’t move without sinking and probably dying, so I just stayed where I was, daring not to move, and cried.

“Do you want me to go and get mountain rescue?” he asked, trying to be helpful and giving up hope of ever getting me down the mountain himself.

And no, I fucking did not want him to go and get mountain rescue. Because we were on the STARTER SLOPE and it was embarrassing and I was embarrassed and I was going to die anyway.

“Just go. Save yourself. Leave me here. Tell my mum I love her.”

We eventually got me down that mountain. Daylight was starting to turn into night when we did, and I had to do the entire thing trying to squeeze both my asscheeks on the slim board and slide down without sinking into quick-snow, but we did it. And now when I look back over that day, I can’t help but laugh. It was hilarious. It was a hilarious disaster. At the time? I did not laugh. It wasn’t funny. It was a snowy near-death experience and I was NEVER SNOWBOARDING AGAIN.

He managed to get one full shot at the slope in before the place closed for the night. I sat grumpily in the cafe and drank my hot chocolate, desperately hoping that no one would recognise the mad British girl in the baby-blue snowsuit who flumped, slipped and cried her way down a mountain, sans snowboard. And when we got back to our duplex that night, we had sex for the first time in weeks. I recently found a photo from that day, of us, and it made me smile. We looked so happy. How was I to know that it was already too late? The demise of our relationship had already started at that point, the together/not-together cycle very much in full flow.

I keep thinking to myself: I just need to get through another few months and all of these one-year anniversaries will be over. I just need to make it to February and I’ll have managed an entire year without him. All of our this-time-last-year memories will be done and dusted. That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m struggling with my emotions right now, especially with Christmas just around the corner. And that just reminds me of how crappy my last Christmas was, with him, on the other side of the world. He’d lost his job because of a pretty shocking drug-fuelled incident, and we were virtually crippled financially. We barely managed to get decorations up. And it just got worse from there. I found myself cancelling all plans and spending New Year’s Eve treating him as he overdosed on cocaine.

This year, to avoid thinking about all of that stuff, I’ve decided to keep myself busy. I’ve bought myself a dress for the New Year’s Eve party I’m planning to attend with Bestie, and I’ve already agreed to work any and all dates over Christmas and the New Year period. It’s not like I’m going to be spending time with my family. We’ve been fighting and not talking. My mother’s boyfriend is an asshole, blah blah blah.

Back to the here and now …

I have reservations about One Ball already. It’s a complicated thing, but I’ll try and make it simple. He hasn’t had a phone for a while. He dropped his iPhone in a bucket of water and now only certain things work on Wi-Fi; using the device as an actual phone to make texts and calls didn’t work. Thankfully, the messaging app that we used to communicate did work.

He had a spare older phone that he was using at one point, but that got stolen. Or so he told me. He recently bought a new phone so he could keep in touch with me now that he has gone back to his normal place of work (long-distance, yo), however, ANOTHER messaging app showed he’d updated his status 12 days ago.

Here’s my question: If he only got the phone two or three days ago, how was he updating his status 12 days ago? The app doesn’t work with just Wi-Fi alone; it needs to have a working phone number, in a working phone in order to be usable. I had a conversation with Bestie and he seems to think that One Ball has had a working phone the whole time, and perhaps he isn’t just mine. Maybe I’m the other woman? This “new” phone has a different phone number to the “spare” one he was using.

Another thing that puzzled me was the fact that he said he had two email addresses when I requested to send him something a little while ago. He has his “original” email address, which is the one he uses all the time. Then he has a secondary one, for the “weird people on the internet”. How many “weird people” is this guy talking to? I have a few different email address, though. I let it slide.

I then noticed something else, though. The original messaging app that we were using – the one that worked on Wi-Fi – had his name spelt in a completely different way to his actual name. Same surname, different spelling. I asked him about it and he said it was for when he was talking to the people on the internet dating site. It was so the “nut jobs” wouldn’t have his real name. Are you keeping up with this? I found his real spelling on an ID card in his car a while back, but it only clicked that it was different a couple of days ago.

Things are starting not to add up. The reasons he’s giving me are making sense, aside from the message status update 12 days ago, but with the two big lies about the kids it doesn’t look good, does it?

Bestie thinks he’s leading some kind of double life. I think I’m being a paranoid bitch. One of us [One Ball and I] calls the other every night, and sometimes we Skype. Surely he wouldn’t be able to talk every night if he were leading a double life? We also text ALL THE TIME, day and night.

The thing that put the cherry on the cake, so to speak, was when he joked about me getting the train up to see him on Friday. I seriously considered this option as I was off work, but as soon as I started asking questions – what trains, how much, etc. he abruptly told me that he was “only joking” and I couldn’t turn up. Why? What was stopping us?

I guess it’s safe to say that this weekend hasn’t been a great one for me.

Photo by Yann Allegre on Unsplash

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🥞 D R I P P I N G 🥞 Started my Sunday off t

• A S H E S • I turned my Grandparents into a

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