Like father, like daughter

This craziness has got to stop. In all probability it only exists in my own head, and it’s making me miserable rather than happy. So it has to stop. Surely, surely, it’s a simple case of mind over matter. Surely, surely, my heart (if it is indeed my heart and not the female equivalent of men’s balls) shouldn’t be allowed to have things all its own way.

 

The fact of the matter is, I’m losing sleep, and that’s making me bad tempered. I’ve been ratty with my husband, and not very nice at all to poor Anna. I’ve wasted far too much time with my head stuffed up my own arse, thank you very much. Goodbye Owen, thank you, and good night.

 

‘Aha’ a voice whispers, ‘that’s easy to say when you haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for a week.’

Yes, but if he’s so easily forgotten, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

‘But you haven’t forgotten him, have you?’

‘I can if I put my mind to it. I’ve got a marriage to concentrate on here. A marriage to a man I love.’

 

And instantly I am on iTunes, buying an old song called ‘Torn Between Two Lovers’. I play it, and it’s so syrupy and kitsch I feel a bit nauseous.

 

Faisal is right, it’s a tendency to romanticise stuff that’s causing all these problems. My late father suffered from the same personality flaw, and in the end it did for him. Oh, he’d had affairs all his married life, but at the age of 79 he decided he was going to fall in love.

 

Her name was Ruth, and he met her at a literary festival. He was a poet, you see. Fancied himself as a modern day Thomas Hardy, but he needed a muse. In reality he was elderly and decrepit, and very easily misled by a woman not a great deal older than me.

 

Ruth adored his poetry, and, it seems, was a very affectionate person. She gave him several big hugs and he was smitten. (Now, isn’t this beginning to sound a little familiar?) But then, calamity of calamities, he lost her address. There was an outpouring of poems, a letter to her local newspaper, and bang – he found her again. An exchange of letters, more love poems, and my mother found out. He told her he’d never really loved her anyway, and that their marriage had been a sham. He died a year later (a year ago this week, in fact), broken hearted that she never forgave him. But he still didn’t take the poems he’d written for Ruth out of his final collection.

 

I wonder if he’s coming into my dreams so very often to try to tell me something.