My review: The Hot Puppies - How Come You Don't Hold Me No More ►

◄ Your source for Hampstead Heath dogging, it seems

I've taken the day off work so I can write this piece; this, therefore, is the most expensive edition of 'Pete Writes' yet at a cost of £60 to me personally. That's not important, though.

Next to me on the desk is a flower, made of some sort of nylon. Slightly frayed and fake, obviously. It fell off Lisa's hair band and she gave it to me, in that irksome but loveable way that she has (had). Me being me, I promptly lost it and it didn't surface again until yesterday afternoon, after she'd come round to finish with me. Yes, you read that last sentence right. The day before we'd been through one of our frequent, interminable but always enjoyable mock arguments, where we'd banter for hours about nothing and call each other cocks — six years and they never once stopped being funny. We'd talked about the flower, and she said it was a gift, and I said that I couldn't be expected to hang on to every random bus ticket and pointless object that she'd breathlessly present to me and that it was probably around somewhere. She said I was a cock. I retaliated with same. We laughed.

It was pretty quick, at the end. She came round and said that she couldn't do it any more. I'd seen it coming, so I just nodded. Part of me wanted to ask why, wanted the reasons so we could argue it out but... suddenly there didn't seem to be much point. The reasons were clear. Spending hours thrashing it out, treading the same ground over and over ad fucking infinitum seemed futile and a big old waste of time. So I just nodded, and then she was gone.

About now you're probably asking why. What happened? Weren't we getting on? And the answer is yes; we were getting on fine, or so we thought. But on Saturday night we both realised something, which was that she didn't trust me. At all. I'm no doctor of lurve but I've seen enough Trisha to know that that's never going to fly. Cod daytime TV psychology aside, any fool can see that a relationship without trust is fucked and doomed because where are you going to go? How can you progress? Stupid mistakes made years ago don't go away; they just burrow underground, ready to pop up like the zombie horde and properly fuck up your day. I don't intend to go into to the details of said mistakes, except to say that they're entirely predictable and thoroughly reprehensible... and that if you think you're so perfect then drop me an email and we'll debate it as much as you want.

Like I said, I'd seen it coming. I made my own way home on Saturday and when I woke up on Sunday I was good and pissed. I spent the morning working up a full head of steam, whipping myself into a mighty rage at the god-awful injustice of it all. I hadn't done anything, and I was about to get dumped for it! I'd tried so hard and it was for nothing. I concocted insane and vicious plans; I was going to divide up all the pubs in area and demand that she stayed in her own half and never strayed, just so that I didn't have to bump into her. Like George W Bush, you were either with me or against me, and I didn't expect many to come to my side. In fact, I was kind of banking on it; there's nothing that'll nurture persecution paranoia more than the feeling that you're alone and abandoned and that your 'friends' have all buggered off and left you. The fact that you were the one who drove them away in the first place tends to get overlooked.

Idiot. Maybe, just maybe, it was time for me to be a man about the situation. No trust, and trust isn't something you can get back easily, or at all. So why not just bite the bullet and accept it? You fucked up; deal with it. Learn your lessons, grow up and move on. And the lesson is this: that, sometimes, loving someone isn't enough. No matter how sorry you are (and I am sorry) or how hard you try to be different (and I have tried) you can't go back. All you can do is take your kicking and try even harder in the future, something I intend to do to the best of my small and paltry abilities. 

Pretty melancholy stuff, eh? It could be worse; the temptation to spit bile and venom is still there, in the background, but I'm not really up for it. Instead, let's try and cheer ourselves up a bit and go out on a high note. So I'd like to say a big thank you for six fantastic years; six years where I loved, and was loved and maybe still am and will be again, if I'm lucky. I was fortunate enough to experience something that many people go their whole lives without knowing and I wouldn't change a single day, not one solitary second. The next few weeks are going to be difficult all round but I'll (we'll) get through them one way or another. What else are we going to do?

Now I've got the flower I'm going to keep it somewhere safe. It might only be nylon but it'll last forever, in an environmentally unsound, non-biodegradable way that means it'll probably be around longer than I will. Every once in a while I'll take it out and remember what it means, then put it away until next time. But I'm keeping it close; next to my heart, where it belongs.

Thanks for reading. Next, normal service resumes with an article about duck punching.   

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