One of my favourite cafes

Goodbye

I rarely blog anymore and there's a reason behind it and that reason would be my ex boyfriend (who is not to be confused with the Boy and will be referred to as X in future) and I was just thinking about that whole debacle last night.

To put it baldly, I closed my old blog in the months after the break up with X because I realised he was still reading it, still commenting on it and still used it to feel involved in my life. In short, I realised he wasn't letting go and the blog facilitated that. I also closed it because I realised I had no right to stop him from doing any of it. This is the world of the internet and I was fully aware that a blog is part of the public domain. I could have locked the blog with a password the way some of my friends did but it would take away some of the things that made blogging fun.

But the nature of my break up necessitated the closure of the blog and I did it because I owed it to myself to break free of the guy who was and is the worst thing that ever happened to me. I wasted 6.5 years of my life with him and enough was enough. I was glad I was a thousand miles away in Australia and I wanted to be a thousand miles away from him in any and every possible way. I also owed it to Boy (with whom I was starting a new relationship) to cut my ties with X once and for all.

I still miss my old blog. I had a few regular readers who'd leave me comments and emails every so often and I miss that. I feel like I never really made this blog my own the way I made the other. But I have no regrets closing it because getting away from that guy was worth it.

Last night, as I was falling asleep after a long phone conversation with my best friend, it suddenly struck me that I never really blogged the way I did previously, because somewhere, in some corner of my mind, I was still afraid of X. I was still afraid he'd read it and follow it and use it to get to me somehow. I was still afraid.

X met me when I was a stupid, emotional and vulnerable kid and I stayed with him because I literally knew no other life, no other guy. In the years I was with him, I grew anti social, was isolated from my friends and grew to hate myself for that emotional dependence on him. All those parties and outings I missed or skipped out early on? All due to X.

How to describe him? X was screwed up, selfish, liked to argue and needed to be right over every issue no matter how small. When he was late for our dates and I got mad, he'd tell me that I was too anal about time and that time was merely a human construct. And seriously, when I look back I can't believe I was gullible enough to swallow that crock of bullsh**. He believed himself to be an iconoclast, someone who was different and who didn't need to follow the usual rules of society.

I'm not there anymore. I'm not afraid anymore and I don't want or need or love him anymore.

I can write freely again.

Stranger tragedies

I got woken up by a call at 4 am this morning and it led to a strange and surreal day. A day in which I wound up at the hospital, staring down at the unconscious figure of a girl I knew only from the briefest of email correspondences.

When you move overseas and live far away from friends and family, particularly when you're new to the country, there exists a network of acquaintances and friends whose telephone numbers and email addresses just get passed along to you. Because, sometimes, when you're alone in foreign country, it may be that your contact person in case of an emergency might be a mother's friend's brother or friend's cousin or some similiarly distant person.

Today I wound up being that person, because today, the offer of "call me if you need any help" was finally taken up in a way I never imagined.