Mist and Lint

On the night Trina and I split up I was both regretful and relieved.

Most times we went down the pub, Trina would ask us to get our diaries out and plan what we were doing weeks ahead. I go along with it and prepare myself for the apologies when my slack life disappoints her. As Kim said last weekend "Women end up administering men's lives."

Around midnight on the night after we had "split up", (after my unconscionable decision to reinstate a beer tasting night without consulting her first) I was luxuriating in my own company. I saw that Carl Weathers's You Ought To Be With Me had appeared on You Tube. I'd never seen it there before. Twenty-odd years ago, a subculturally-eminent soul DJ used to invite listeners to submit their Top Threes. One Sunday, he chosen mine to play. You Ought To Be With Me was my number one.

The following morning, I received this disruptive email.

I was irritated with her for retrospectively spoiling my joy. How did she know that I had been playing it? I found out later that she had found through one of the ways in which YT makes collective what should be shared. She assumed that I had been thinking of her, love-lorn.

She sent me an email in which she said that "all I'm doing is criticising and nagging you and making you feel unhappy and confused" and will not do so in the future. Then, a reinstatement of her coming round on Monday, for two nights.

We had a good afternoon of Prosecco and sex on Monday. That evening I went with my eldest for an exhilerating evening of orienteering training, a constant 1.5 hours of running and scrambling and leaping in our craggy, slippery, wooded, park. I felt a bit self-conscious about my clothes--a brown check waist-length shirt, and some narrow beige cotton trousers, the nearest things I could muster to proper orienteering dress.

We had to leave the "wind-down" game of frisbee as a team sport because I wanted to go with Trina to The Gatekeepers, a film in which past heads of Shin Bet were interviewed about their experiences in dealing with Palestinian and Israeli extremists. I'd never have thought that I would come out of a film feeling some sympathy with the Israeli Security Services.

Back with Trina, I was silent on all the misgivings, trying not to spoil the Renaissance. Now, after two days of both pleasure and doubts, I am exhausted with having to do emotional work, even to talk, on insufficient sleep.

Exhausted with her snoring: exhausted falling asleep after sex and then her snoring; exhausted with putting my T-shirt and pants on at 2am to go downstairs, exhausted with dragging the quilt out of a bag that doesn't want to give it up, exhausted with springing alert to attention when the lodger's door opens at 7.30am and quickly, almost panickly rolling the duvet back up into its bag and putting the cushion back into the cellar because I don't want to be seen in the living room before he goes out; exhausted with going back to bed with her at 7.35 and ten minutes of cuddling and then falling asleep, but then again, her snoring, getting up, with her saying "Are you off again?" with a mixture of disappointment and reproach.

She left at about 3pm today and I was relieved. Is this what "compromise" means? Second best, to an idealised first that doesn't exist (Kim, but with sex)? All my relationships end up feeling like jobs.