It's Sunday. Again, and like pretty much every Sunday for a long while now, I've had the day off. I may hate working every Saturday, but at least it gives me the Sunday off. Not that I'm generally appreciating it at the moment.
Okay, Ashley. After a great deal of cajoling on my behalf by Shaun, I finally got her number. Not that it was an easy thing. She apparently asked Shaun to get me to ring her at work (she's the phone jockey at a pizza place along Birtley). So I got on my break and I do. I say Hi, it's Mark. She says, Mark who? which is a great start. I say that it's Mark from Shaun's party. She says hi, but that she's got to go now.
You know me enough by now to know how fucking paranoid I get. I'm sitting there, on my break, feeling like I'm going to throw up. I mean, was it some sort of joke on Shaun's part, on Ashley's? It turns out that it isn't, it's just that her boss popped up and obviously talking to mates on the phone when you're supposed to be at work isn't the done thing. So Shaun says he got a text off Ash to give me her number. This he does and I text her and we have an interesting night of bouncing text messages back and forth. The penultimate one comes about one o'clock. Me and Shaun are still up watching Doctor Who (another thing I hate about working Saturdays) and she says she's going to bed. An hour later, I'm in bed watching telly and my phone goes. It's Ashley again, saying if I want to ring her, I can. So I ring her. We talk for about quarter of an hour, about nothing in particular, although the whole age difference between us does come up and she says she wants to be friends, nothing more when I make a comment about us having a 'relationship' (I think I freaked her out a little then, what is it with me and saying stupid things during late night phone calls? Were it not for me blurting out 'love you' to Alison we might well still be together, or at least it might not have ended so miserably after three weeks). After a while we each go to bed. I promise to text her tomorrow.
This I do. She'd said on the phone that she was going out to the town with a friend today so I text her and suggest that maybe once she's finished in town she could come over and we could hang out. She texts back that she's hanging out with her friend all day. I reply that that's no bother ad maybe we could do something during the week and was there anything on at the pictures she fancied going to see, the implication clearly being that we could go and see a film together.
That was at one o'clock this afternoon. It's now half eleven and she still hasn't texted back. Hello Mr Paranoid.
So. Let's forget Ashley for the minute and let's just wonder over my whole history with girls and how I seem to fuck everything up comprehensively. Most recently, we have Kayleigh who I liked and who I thought liked me. She arranged to come over one afternoon after a weekend of texts which I took to be very flirty. I made some moves and she freaks out, although she doesn't tell me. She tells the Guv and gets her to tell me. Since then she hasn't come over. Even Natalie hasn't been over and she seemed to find very convinient excuses every time I asked her over to watch Harry Potter (god, that sounds a bit twisted, but in all honesty, that's all it was going to be) and now she's off to Tenerife to work in a bar so it's odds on that I ever see her again. You have to start wondering when girls are actually leaving the country rather than spending time wth you (and yes, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in hyperbole, I probably don't even begin to figure on Nat's list of things that she'll miss about the Mow let alone being the sole reason she's leaving).
I try too hard, apparently. Even Christina has said that and for Christina to make a comment that doesn't directly relate to herself, it's a major thing. But what can I say? In my twenty seven years on this Earth, even if you only take into account the period from my first kiss (August 1998) that's still nearly a decade in which I have had relationshipness for seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. I've probably spent longer watching Star Trek over that period (at which point Christina, probably thinking she's some stellar wit, would most likely opine that that is specifically the reason why I don't have a girlfriend). So, yeah, I'm desperate. But only for something that everyone else has.
You see, all these people offering advice are in relationships or have had significant relationships and entering into another relationship at some point in the future is not some impossible goal. Like it is for me. I have my low periods (or perhaps I should say 'lower' periods, because I am generally low,all the time anyway) and in those periods, I'm always reminded that there are people youger than me who are married and have kids. Pretty much everyone I went to school with is in a long term serious relationship. Blades and Will have been together for something like seven years, Emma and Haz are coming up for being together an entire decade. Even Amy and Ali have been together something like four years. And out of the single triumvirate that once existed composed of me, Gilli and Tom, Tom is now happily living with Emily and anyway, both Gilli and Tom have had serious relationships before. It's not like some great mental block that they have. I think I might be incapable of being in a relationship, at least not without fucking it up in some way. I fucked it up with Sarah quite consciously and maybe my subconscious was trying to sabotage my relationship with Alison. Seven weeks out of a decade is nothing. Most people would hae spent a lot longer than that on holiday during that time. And if I was to work out the amount of time me and Sarah spent together during that month or how long me and Alison enjoyed each other's company, it'll boil down to even less.
Maybe I should just face up to the fact that I'm not boyfriend material. Fuck, I'm hardly even friend material.
The area manager and the Guv had a talk with me on Thursday. I had a little stressout on Tuesday and the Guv had a few words with me. Then the area manager comes in and puts on his 'friend' hat and tries to talk to me but just comes off as being patronising. I tell him that my depression is in large part due to my lack of relationshipness and he says that it happens to everyone. I felt like asking him if he knew how it felt to be more or less single for ten long lonely years. Or how it felt to have only had three girls who liked me enough to even kiss me in the last five. And one of those was completely pissed out of her mind. Because I know he won't. He's married and he's got a kid. There's something that happens to you when you have that sort of security. You stop being able to comprehend the fear.
The fear of course is the fear of dying alone. Actually, no, it's the fear of having the live your entire life alone. Dying is, by virtue of the act itself, something everyone does alone. Sure, you may have peolpe around you when you kick the bucket, but the actual dying? That's something you do alone. Living a solitary life? Now that's difficult.
It would be impossible I think, for a lot of people. In fact, as I have said before on occasion, put someone else in my shoes, give them my family life and all the bullying and the esteem issues and see how well they cope. I think that it's a testament to my strength of will (or sheer bloody-mindedness, whichever) that I'm even still here at all and as well adjusted as I am (which,as I'm sure you'llbe aware isn't massively, but I'm not exactly a back brain recluse yet, am I?).
Back when I was a kid and actually believed in God, I used to pray at night and wish for the chances everyone else got. And that's all I still want, although events have precluded my belief in any sort of higher power, all I want is for what everyone else has. Or at the very least, a chance to have what everyone else has. You know, you see people coming into the shop - complete dickheads with no discernable personality or even borderline good looks and they have girlfriends. You have to look at them and then consider yourself and wonder just what the fuck it is that is so repellant about you that girls just don't like you.
I've got an appointment at the doctor's on Friday. Seeing him about my depression. Part of me still hates the idea of popping a bunch of pills to make my life better because as far as I can see it, my life is shit because of outside forces. I'm considering counselling, but the cynical part of me knows that it's going to be the same old patronising bullshit that everyone's been trying to feed me since I was eighteen, just so they can comfort themselves that they are helping but without actually putting themselves out.
Fuck.
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