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A longterm relationship between a non-exclusive pedophile and an unaware non-pedophile ends. Who is left owing what to whom? The first week after we separated was the nicest, because I hadn't yet moved out.
I had collapsed under your relentless questions on the Winter solstice as we were in bed together. Why, despite all the efforts to restore our sex life and our openness with one another was I still so closed off, still so obviously uncomfortable in bed, so unable to see you needed attention and so unable to give it?
For you, my leaving you was the only thing that was never brought on to the table in these conversations, still less your leaving me. It would be the end of the world for you, like being orphaned, even though of the two of us, anyone would pick me as the partner most playing a child.
The best excuses and answers I had coined while out on long walks had run out; this time I fell into a total silence, like a boxer failing in his final round and just focused on remaining conscious.
There was nowhere left to go but to throw the illegal punch: to confirm that contrary to promises, I had never stopped having sexual experiences with chatters online, that you and I were just different in this way, and for you to see that I was not talking any more about any way to put it right.
Setting the date
With your usual bigbrotherly pragmatism you said the thing you dreaded the most in the world like it was a holiday plan. You declared the relationship dead, then moved immediately to practicalities; set a date - days away - when I was to leave the house; how to rearrange the furniture in the bedroom so it instantly felt like a new place for you. You knew how to get the burial done.
The next morning, we both sat in terrible shock, but britishly, cracking the occasional joke, admitting to each other how it felt - like a bus had hit us. The dog bothered for scrambled eggs, its insistent whimpers an excuse to break off worrying about each other.
I called an old friend, choking midway through explaining the facts and asking if I could stay a few weeks. The immediate yes was a surprising beat of the heart in a pause in resuscitation. It was not yet Christmas. nobody else could be told. For families, we acted it out. It was easy because Covid had disrupted everyone's plans and we only had to look each other in the eye, and no lies were required.
The last days of the year
I moved the bedside table, and spent the first couple of nights in the spare room, chatting to friends and hatefully using my new freedom immediately to talk to younger men who wanted a sexual conversation.
The next morning in the kitchen you asked me for a last kiss, just so love didn't feel snatched away when we could still hold it, dead in our arms, a few days more.
On Christmas Day, I took the dog for a long walk and chatted sunnily to my parents while you played records at home, or cleaned. I took hours in the muddy woods and by the grey lake, fussed over the dog at every stop, giving meaningless good boys and goodbyes. We had lunch and opened presents when I got home. We dressed up in matching jumpers. It verged in some ways on glorious since every other Christmas had been wry smiles at each other in the crossfire of mild family argument and foolishness with the kids.
After Christmas I called my dad and I could feel his embarrassment that I might emote. He received the news and was off the phone in probably under 120 seconds. My mother cried along in shock because there was no way this could possibly have happened to two people who so self-evidently loved one another. Which of course, it couldn't.
The other half of the dark
The day after New Year, I got a cab with a few heavy bags of clothes and post-Christmas food, further into London, where an old friend waited. It was icy and no day to begin a future. Winter depression sat on me heavily as I worked fitfully "from home" in the lockdown, and took my daily exercise in longer and longer stretches, reaching the Thames, reaching the London parks, palaces, parliament as the weeks went on and the dusk drew out a little. I took photographs as I had in the Summer, and returned to my room to silently cry in agony.
Over and over I used my flat, dull liberty to talk to all the pedophiles - the nice, anti-contact ones I knew by pseudonyms; the horny chatters whose names I never knew and who avoided the p word as an inconvenient trip-up to enjoying the b word - boy. They melted away or I blocked and discarded them one by one. Snow came and went. I made arrangements to leave London for the first time in my adult life. I couldn't feel anything.
And we spoke on the phone. How brilliant, professional you were and how kind we were to each other. You briefly flirted with blaming me for everything, but could not stand that I would not argue back—I had thoughtfully gifted you a perfect narrative to fit that—then we settled into being scared together, like we were both terribly sick with a disease that made you survive when you so wanted not to. After two months, the days were long enough that I could walk all the way to see you in your house.
Diminuendo
Four solstices, Christmases, New Years and January darknesses. Each one activates it all perfectly again: the shock that it was actually over after years of flirting with it during therapy sessions, and the knowledge that my life could not ever, ever be as well assured as it had been, no matter who else might come along.
I saw you recently, four years on. You found someone else—twice now, and someone will be be moving in perhaps within days into the bedroom that was ours and is now yours. I pushed you off the cliff and someone was there, as I had assumed, at the bottom to pick you up and help you with your broken bones.
It has surprised me, too, how many new people I would have in my life, ready to talk about the things I so needed to talk about. But not one person.
I keep you in my will. You are owed back what I have borrowed from our life. I can't wait for you to have it. When I have found if these smarting bones—mended crookedly in haste—will serve me to write some essential things down, I think you shall.
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