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Socially inept.
Generally inept.
Overcomplicated.
At times like this, I longed for my mum. She always knew what to do when I had migraines, because she herself had passed them on to me. In the first few months after Lyndsey died, I’d spent my life in a constant state of semi-migraine, which about half of the time left me completely unable to function, like now. Looking back on it, it was probably the emotional trauma hitting my limbic system. Just like this was probably the result of whatever was going on with Petra and I.
Before I could delve any further into that, my head started spinning. Or rather, I stayed centred while the world spun around me. The backs of my eyelids became a veritable fireworks show, and then my mind simply… left my body. That was the only way I could describe it to Petra the next morning when the pain eventually receded. What I didn’t tell her was what it saw.
As if in a film, I had a birds-eye view of myself in the darkening living room, zooming in past the discarded bowl of noodles and bottle of water, landing squarely on me. But… the figure was not me. It was a woman, a dumpy middle-aged lesbian with purple and grey hair (mostly grey now), and until that moment I’d thought she was me.
But she wasn’t. Her gender was wrong. Everything about her was wrong.
I’m not her, I thought with a sudden wave of nausea. I’m not a woman.
I had to accept it now. I’d pushed away that thought before, but now I could fight it no longer.
So then came the real question.
What in God’s name am I?
Chapter Twenty-Three
I didn’t move for hours. After my realisation, my mind had given up on thinking completely, and I’d floated around aimlessly in a pool of mental vacancy. That was how Petra found me: robbed of the ability to form words, curled up almost in the foetal position, leaving no doubt as to what afflicted me.
Her erstwhile easy manner came back to her as she helped me upstairs. She whispered reassuring, encouraging words that rolled down my spine and unlocked it enough for me to get upstairs, then assisted me in my ablutions before helping me into bed. There, I promptly threw up from motion sickness in the bucket she’d had the foresight to place by the side of the bed. How endearing.
Eventually, she settled me against the pillows, where I immediately put my head back in my hands, the one remaining part of my brain still functioning absolutely cringing with embarrassment. She’d seen me like this before, although these days my migraines didn’t hit me anywhere near as often as they did after Lyndsey passed. But when they came, they tended to come in clusters, several over the space of a week or so. The thought that this was probably going to happen again in a few days made me want to curl up and die.
“Do you reckon you can lie down?” Petra’s whisper broke through the roaring of my blood in my ears.
“Nn-nn,” was all I could manage, not wanting to shake my head for fear of setting off the vomiting again. Quite frankly, I would have been happy to stay in that cramped position forever if it dulled the pain even slightly.
“Okay,” she whispered, brushing her lips over my bare raised knee. “I’m just going to clear up and use the bathroom, then I’ll come to bed.”
“Mm,” I grunted again, and was idly aware of her moving around as my mind continued to wander down its self-destructive alley, although none of the thoughts made sense. They simply floated by like wisps, leaving me straining to catch them in a net to analyse them, but ultimately failing. Somehow, before Petra even got into bed, I had fallen asleep.
When I woke up, I’d moved without realising it. Petra was asleep next to me, and I was laying on my right facing her. Inching my way cautiously onto my back and then onto my left to check my alarm clock, I was surprised to see that it was only two o’clock in the morning. The pain was gone completely, and I felt refreshed. Like someone had been in with a scalpel and hollowed out the part of my head that had been hurting. The relief was immense… except I couldn’t get back to sleep for the life of me.
In the end, after about half an hour, I risked getting up and (having found the dizziness gone too) gingerly made my way downstairs. I opened my laptop and signed on to the group chat, but there hadn’t been a whole lot of activity since I’d last looked, so it only took a minute to skim through it. Gemma’s ‘last active’ indicated she hadn’t been on for a couple of days – and although I was briefly tempted to message her, it was far too late to expect her to be up. Instead, I scrolled back through the messages and found our conversation about affairs. In the strange migraine-altered mindset in which I now found myself, they seemed to take on new meaning.
The thrill of an affair is like nothing else, she’d written.
My life certainly was missing some thrills, I mused. And validation. The only adrenaline I got these days was the bad kind, the ‘oh-shit’ kind when Petra snapped or when something happened at work. The only good kind I’d had recently was when Gemma had sent me that paragraph. The gushing, saccharine-sweet but simultaneously honest paragraph about how she saw me. I found myself scrolling further back now and finding it.
Determinedly ignoring the ‘customer service lady’ phrase, I focused on the rest of it.
You always brighten my day. It’s why I jumped at the chance to chat to you tonight, even though I was half-asleep when I saw your message.
My mouth curved into a smile, and my fingers itched to message her. To weasel my way into a conversation with her, regardless of the time, and drown myself in more of this laudation, addictive as the most potent drug. She might not reply straight away, but there was no problem with opening a conversation, was there? She’d reply when she was awake.
Excitement fizzed in my gut as I typed out the most innocuous of messages – Good evening (or morning), how’s tricks with you? – and pressed the send button. Then, absurdly, this was followed by a strange surge of guilt.
Shouldn’t Petra be the one I was talking to at two o’clock in the morning when my brain was whirring fit to burst? She always had been that person. On several occasions before our engagement, she had been the recipient of many a long, emotional paragraph over text message in the wee hours. And since our marriage, a handful of late-night or early-morning panic attacks, although these had all but disappeared over the years. Now, however, I wouldn’t dream of waking her. Not only because she needed the sleep, but because I didn’t think she’d say the right things any more. Not like Gemma would.
Oh, balls, I thought. Do not catch feelings for Gemma. Just don’t. That would be the LAST thing you need right now!
This thought came because I suddenly recognised the warmth filling my body now the excitement had gone down. The twitching of my mouth as I read her old words. These had been the earliest signs that I was falling for Petra.
