Maya - Chapter five

And I was right. I wasn’t psychic or full of the confidence some people are born with that an attractive guy would want to be in my life; that wasn’t a conclusion I would ever reach. I just knew there and then that he was important, that he would mean something to me, that he was different. It wasn’t even that I fell in love with him, some head over heels rubbish that fills the book-shelf of an optimist’s bedroom. I didn’t. It never felt like love; it felt just like a compelling power. From that moment he had a hold on me that was magnetic; wherever I was, I could always feel his pull.

Before I met Ollie, I thought I'd adequately immunised myself against relationships. I'd believed my heart was shut safely in the vault I'd created, protected by its bloated membrane of disillusioned recollections. I learnt at an early age that people let you down. They don’t mean to and they’re always sorry, sometimes there are even tears or recriminations that last for years and present themselves at family gatherings when a mixture of flowing alcohol and high nerves spill them like a split beanbag.

Years of meeting my friends at their places and asking boyfriends to drop me outside bigger, better looking, more normal houses two streets away had kept me well versed in the art of pretence. The actuality of what lay behind the address only ever visited by a social worker and occasionally the police never failed to surprise me so I learnt to fear the worst and give up on hoping things would improve. That for once she might mean what she said and keep her desperate promises to stay sober became only an impetuous, futile, childhood notion that drifted into my mind when I was away from the chaos and had distanced myself from the depressing reality.

So people to me just became part of a pattern: pieces of a puzzle that I could logically put together, that I could control. They would come into my life, fill me with new information, provide me with new experiences and then they would go. Perhaps this is all we have: a treadmill of life? You interact with a collection of gems, stones and rough diamonds over the years: the same types just different colours, different time zones.

As I grew older, the one thing I couldn’t work out about people was whether they were adding to me or taking away. I sometimes felt like a punctured tyre. A hole would appear and people would patch it up and then I would begin to feel full again, too full, almost like the air would burst me. So, I would leave them and feel no leaks for a while, until another one sprung up and I had to patch that too. Only with that leak, the people from before had gone and I had to find some more people to make the patch. The holes kept appearing and I always seemed to find people to mend them. Finding Ollie was like I had finally found a seal strong enough to repair me for good. At least, that was what he convinced me.