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randombush3 · 6 months

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revocate animos (with or without me)

alexia putellas x reader

part one, part two, part three, part four

the second half of this part (it didn't fit in one post lol)

words: it's over 14k. i had lots to say.

summary: the final part, which originally had a different ending but i was told it was evil so i changed it.

warnings: it's mainly just sad, there's a bit of smut though

notes: i could give you so many excuses as to why this is being posted now but no one wants to read that so i'll just say sorry x

anyway, i got very lost along the way at points and had some serious plot crises that had me tearing my hair out. i researched children's behaviour to the point of needing an honourory qualification, and i spent the last three hours ignoring my girlfriend while i finished this off.

for as much as i put these two through (and myself tbh), i'm sad to finish it off. BUT ALSO NOW IM FREE.

have fun reading! and sorry about the length of it

London smells of dirty rain and exhaust fumes, of a homelessness crisis and inflation attempting to impersonate that of the Weimar Republic; greyish streets, cracks in the pavement, thousands of spices from all over the world. Grubby patterns, hidden by the smudging of millions of bottoms, coloured poles that used to match the train line but no longer do. You breathe it all in, eyes closed as the motion of the underground jerks you sideways, the train leaving London Bridge just as you left Barcelona. Without looking back.

You had laughed when they told you they’d send a driver to get you from the airport. The luxury of some shiny black car held no appeal when compared to the familiar Northern line, its blackened route well-travelled and your own brick-road home.

Part of this choice to ‘slum it’ is borne of your desire to return to the past; a time before the fame and the fortune, when camera flashes came from your parents’ Sony Cyber-shot and not paparazzos with a hunger to splash you across the front page of a slimy gossip magazine. There was no Alexia, then. The extent of Spanish in your life was Anya studying for her A-levels, and you’d spend time writing songs without it feeling like pulling teeth. Without having to relive some of the worst moments of your life.

Those hadn’t happened yet.

God, you were so naive then back then.

Your London shows are in Wembley. Two nights, two journeys through your album, through your heartbreak. Both are sold out.

“See it, say it, sorted,” you mouth along to the voice, pushing the handle of your suitcase upwards, rising from your seat. The doors of the tube swoosh open, the yellow line of the platform attacking your tired eyes as Highgate station is revealed to you. You hear a whisper of ‘is that Y/n L/n?’ but you don’t turn around.

The wheels of your suitcase gurgle against the bumpy pavement leading up to your house, but they grow quieter as you approach. They must sense the tension, glad to have the smoother surface of your driveway to move across as you force yourself to continue walking forwards.

A woman is standing on your porch. Her body swivels around as she hears you stop just behind her.

Leah takes in the sight of you, deciding that you definitely did not enjoy Barcelona. “I was just about to ring the doorbell, but I guess you wouldn’t have answered the door anyway,” she says with an awkward chuckle, not sure if you want to talk about how rough you look. You cried the entire flight, and refused to contact anyone once you had landed, hoping they assumed your plane had crashed and you had drowned somewhere in the English Channel.

“I got here in the morning.” Your voice is unused. It croaks, shattered.

“Let me get your bag?” asks Leah, rather firmly, leaving you no room to decline her request before she has stepped off the porch and into your personal space. She looks up at you, wondering how you manage to look so beautiful even now, hand blindly reaching out for the hard shell of your suitcase as she stares. “How’re Nico and–”

Your lips silence her before she is finished. Leah freezes, surprised this is the moment you have chosen to kiss her.

But she misses you as soon as you pull away.

“I’m so sorry,” you whisper, and she cringes at the self-loathing that drips from your words. A tear rolls down your cheek, but you are unsure whether it falls because you have kissed her or because you want to kiss her again. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

You must have argued with Alexia. Leah’s realisation weighs heavy on her heart. Something has to have happened for you to have made your move, because Leah had been starting to accept the idea that you were still in love with your ex and she was nothing more than a friend. She had been looking forward to your concert tonight, in all honesty, and was excited to see you again, glad to have you in her life in any way, shape, or form.

“Because,” she starts hesitantly, “because you didn’t like it? Or…”

“Leah.”

“If you wanted to kiss me again, I wouldn’t mind.”

“Leah,” you repeat, the vowels almost failing to drop from the tip of your tongue. This is a dangerous game, but the look in Leah’s blue eyes tells you that she is happy to play it. “Leah, I… I shouldn’t have kissed you?”

“Is that a question?”

You blink. “I’m not sure.”

“If it’s a question, I’d say that the answer is the opposite. And that we should go inside.” She slides her hand over the metal handle of your suitcase, warm skin covering your fingers where your grip is still curled around it. “But only if you want to.”

Do you want to?

You value your friendship, you really do; Leah has been there for you many times since you met her, never asking too many questions. She means something more than what you crave from her, and doesn’t deserve to be the woman you use to detach yourself from reality.

But Leah is looking at you with desire that has been missed, relentlessness promised by her toned muscles. Leah is looking at you as though you are the only star in the galaxy or the sun on a rainy day. Leah is looking at you like she wants to devour you, and you, with no soul left to give, resign to letting her have your body.

“This won’t change anything, right?”

It’s a mean question. You know that.

“Course not,” Leah lies.

You let it convince the both of you.

Pink glitter covers the dining table at one end, and shiny green stars are scattered on top of the brown grain of the wood on the other.

“She might be at soundchek,” Alexia explains to Nico, who is finished with his Mother’s Day creation and is now intent on FaceTiming you to show you the card he has made. “And cards are supposed to be a surprise. That’s why we made envelopes!”

“But you said my card should be put in a museum,” he replies with a frown, his nose crinkling in confusion just as yours does. “So we show her now.”

“Mi amor, that’s not how it works,” laughs Alexia, reaching out to ruffle his hair. With Elena settled comfortably on her healthy knee, gleefully pushing piles of glitter around so that it mixes with the glue smeared on her card, it is safe to say that this year’s cards are going to be successes. “Mama has promised to call when she gets home, and you can tell her that you have a surprise for her. That will build up the excitement, and make it even better when she gets to open it.”

Your son has become a cynic. “And when will that be?”

“Mother’s Day is on the 19th, so we have three days to wait.” You have purposely chosen a chartered route to Tokyo that flies via Barcelona so that you get to spend the day with your children before your fortnight in Asia to end the first half of the tour. “Do you want to write the words out for Lela once the glue has dried?”

“I don’t know what Lela wants me to say,” he explains with great concern, turning to his sister with a very serious expression. He speaks to her in English, because he knows that this card is for you. He understands that there are two Mother’s Days, though he thinks it’s because he has two mothers, and that Alexia’s day is in May. When Alexia opens her mouth to speak, Nico is quick to shut her down. “Calla, Mami, no sabes nada de inglés.”

Your legs slam together but find no available route with Leah’s body in between them.

It feels… good.

Liberating.

You haven’t brought her into your bed, which she notices but doesn’t comment on. It’s excusable to be on the sofa, to have stayed downstairs for the hours she has spent trying to make you feel better, because the clock has only just ticked its way to lunchtime. You laugh to yourself at the thought of that, amused by the notion that you have already eaten.

Leah is curious when it comes to you. That much you had expected, having been aware of her lingering gazes long before the sores on your heart had calloused into tougher muscle. She has been waiting for this resiliently, and you present yourself to her as though you are a new toy she finally gets to play with. She kisses you slowly at times, to memorise the warmth of your tongue or the jut of your chin, but she often grows impatient, wanting nothing more than to end her torture and find out what it is like.

What is it like to have a woman like you? To wake up next to you, kiss you, touch you?

How does your mind work? What do you smell like just after getting out of the shower? Does your accent ever slip, or is it really that posh?

The air in the living room is hazy now, and your eyes close in bliss as you let your sweat seep into the grainy fabric of your white sofa. Leah doesn’t crawl into your open arms as you assume she will.

She wipes her mouth.

Although Leah has enjoyed this very much, she knows that this instance has not been you allowing her to start to love you. It has been for her to help you forget how much pain you are in. Somewhere deep down, she cares, but she doesn’t try to search for the emotion.

“So,” she says with a giggle, as if you are two teenage girls, best friends who have decided to kiss so that they can practise for the real thing, “do I need to send an apology present to your makeup artist?” Sitting back on her knees, she swipes one hand down to pluck her t-shirt from the floor, pulling it on top of her naked body before sending you an exaggerated smirk and prodding the developing bruise on your neck.

“Fuck,” you groan, batting her hand away. “I completely forgot I had that thing tonight.” You also need to call your children before Alexia bans your name from her household (if that hasn’t happened already).

“That ‘thing’ being your concert at Wembley?”

“I’d have thought selling out Wembley is the norm for you now, Captain,” you tease, clearing your throat. “England have done it, Champions of Europe for the very first time.”

“You’re freakishly good at a commentator’s voice.”

“Gotten used to being my own commentator. Only Spanish streams in my house – even United matches!” You smile at your own frustration but it quickly sours as awkwardness drops on top of you. You bring your arms up to cover your bare chest, but Leah clears her throat with softened eyes and you no longer feel so exposed.

You feel safe.

“What happened in Barcelona?” You shake your head at her question. “That bad, huh?” she presses.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” you tell her, grey clouds hanging over you as your voice darkens and lowers. “Like, at all.”

“I think you should. It’s better it comes out now than later when you’ve had lots to drink and no idea who you’re ranting about it to, isn’t it? And it’s just me; I’m not going to judge you.”

“But you know her. You know her friends.” Your hands move to cover your face. Leah can have your body, but you don’t want her to have your tears. “Thank you for caring, babe, but I think I’m going to handle this one on my own.”

“Well, you know that–”

“You’re always a phone call away.” You smile, tears sucked back inside you, bottled away in glassware you store in crates labelled ‘VERY FRAGILE’. Desperate to change the subject, you adjust your position on the sofa, sitting up. Leah tries very hard not to stare at the curves of your chest. “You know, Lee, I never thought you’d be that good in bed.”

…

Alexia is in desperate need of advice.

Her muscles contract and relax, the tissues pulling on her bone, which, in turn, pulls her. She is strung along, driven perhaps by her leap in recovery and impending comeback. She almost breaks out into a jog, but the church she has dragged herself to comes into view before she can gain speed.

She had not expected this from herself.

It’s nothing special to her, though she will admit that the architecture of the building does hold some sense of divinity, but the heavy wooden door is propped open and she is drawn inside.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation, Fridays, 17.00-17.30.

Alexia checks her watch, the golden links gleaming on her wrist, catching the sunlight that filters in through the glass windows.

She catches a glimpse of white behind the doors of the Confession booth, becoming acutely aware of how empty the church is. The curtain has been pulled back, bunched to the left-hand side carefully, as though the previous handler had moved with peace.

It can’t be that bad, can it?

It’s just like therapy.

Her feet carry her forwards once more, leading her into the wooden booth. It smells old. The cushion she kneels on is blue, she thinks, but she cannot tell because it goes dark once she pulls the curtain shut.

Alexia is not a religious person. Sure, she signs the cross before stepping onto the pitch, and, like most people she knows, she is baptised, but her faith is limited to that. When she tore her ACL, she spent evenings trying to pray, trying to force her to believe in Him. It would have been comforting to know that someone had a plan for her, was watching over her carefully with the knowledge of how it was going to play out. It was to no avail.

But somehow she knows what to say, and so she does.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” She recites the words like lines from a play, head bowed in shame as she writes her next sentences in her mind. “This is my first and, probably, my last confession.”

Silence.

She rests her hands in her lap, shuffling around to ensure she is not pressing down on her knee in any way that is harmful. It would kill her to have to push back her return to the pitch because of some stupid thing she has spontaneously chucked herself into.

“I messed up.” She laughs. “No, that is actually an understatement. I know this is a church and I really shouldn’t swear, but I fucked up. Father, I had Heaven in my hands and I threw it away as though it were meaningless. Was it greed? Was it greed that led me to do it?”

“Do what, my daughter?”

The priest sounds younger than she’d thought he would be.

“I had an affair with a woman whom I am certain I do love a little bit, but, by doing that, I destroyed a life that was perfect. Was it greed?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

“Was it temptation?” Alexia tries again, desperately. Part of her yearns for the priest to tell her it was the Devil so that she can shed the responsibility. “I love my wife. More than anything, I love her. I do not think my own life is worth living if it is not in service to her, to our children, to the smile she reserves for her favourite people. I… I didn’t attempt it, but I thought about killing myself.” She swallows the lump in her throat. “Only once, but I thought it all the same. My sister called me selfish.

“It’s just – forgive me – fucked, isn’t it? I got carried away. I got lonely, I was alone. I craved something to make me forget, to pinch the gaping hole in my life shut. I relied on it to make me feel better, and it did for a time. But now it has made me feel much, much worse.

“And I am sorry! I am so, so sorry. I have grown sick of the word; I’ve used it so much that it holds no meaning anymore. It doesn’t do my regret justice, nor my quest for forgiveness, and I’m really on that quest, Father, I want to stress that to you. I lost my temper and said things I should not have said – things I don’t even believe – but I did not mean them then, and I do not mean them now.”

“You are not religious,” accuses the priest, very gently. His voice washes over Alexia’s ears like a wave of warm saltwater from the Mediterranean, and she feels comfortable enough to swim into the expanse in front of her. “Our God is forgiving, but it is not His forgiveness that you seek. I cannot give you a prayer that will make her absolve your sins, because our holy words are not spells.”

“Father,” croaks Alexia. As her lips part, she tastes the saltwater of the sea, dripping down her cheeks as though the tide has come in and there is no other option than for her to be flooded. “Please help me. I don’t know what to do.”

The priest speaks, but she assigns the voice to someone else.

The first thing you forget about a person is what their voice sounds like. It lingers like a feeling you can’t quite name; distant, distorted, enhanced by fantasy.

Alexia does not remember her father’s voice.

The realisation is crushing.

She knows his words – they are her prayers – but, like Catholics do not know the voice of their God, she can no longer hear the voice of hers.

What would her father say if he saw her like this? On her knees in a Confession booth, backed against the wall with nowhere to hide?

This is not the girl he was proud of. Alexia, of course, is not that eighteen-year-old anymore; she hasn’t been for a decade. But, recently, the legacy of that unknown Levante player has disappeared.

Alexia is so very lost.

She does not know where she is in her own city. In her home.

She does not know her place in her life, much less her place in yours – if you will still grant her one.

She has not felt the thrill of football for months, has driven herself to Hell and back, and considered giving up enough to be on the brink of actually doing it.

She has seen countless meals hit the water of her toilet, never digested, never deserving of the very thing that keeps her alive.

She has counted your sacrifices, memorising the digits of an ongoing figure so that she can punish herself with the knowledge.

She has tried to forget English, tried to improve her English, and taken vows of silence.

She has cried and cried and cried until the only thing left for her to excrete is her hot, red blood.

She has searched for a way out of the maze. She has failed every time.

Alexia is lost without you, and she knows it. Everyone knows it, perhaps even you yourself. Do you revel in that fact? Do you enjoy it?

You have a right to watch her suffer. You do, you do, you do.

Alexia runs a hand through her damp hair, sweating as she sobs in the booth next to some stranger who she will never meet again. Her mouth is dry but her cries are wet and raw, and they scrape her throat as she chokes them out, losing her breath and falling silent only to catch it and begin again. The cushion burns her knees as though she is trapped in an inferno, the darkness blazing against her skin.

The priest talks to her for a long time, not letting her leave until she has calmed down. She sniffles, wiping her nose with the back of her palm before softly pressing her thumbs to her blotchy cheeks to clear the final tears from them.

When he is finished, he instructs her to take a few deep breaths, which she does. “You are not entitled to her forgiveness,” he reminds her. He begins the Prayer of Absolution – he insists for the sake of closure – and Alexia walks away from the church no more than five minutes later.

She is still stuck in the maze, but she has restored that voice in her head that she knows will help her find her way out.

…

“So you went to church?” Olga asks with an amused smile, taking the first sip of her latte, relishing in the gentle burn of the liquid. She needs this coffee; she stayed up late last night because she knew Alexia has been struggling. There is nothing worse than being asleep when Alexia calls her for help.

“I have no idea how I ended up there,” Alexia explains, somewhat defensive about yesterday’s catharsis. “Confession is way better than therapy. There is too much accountability in therapy.”

“You have a lot to account for.”

She huffs out a breath, taking a sip of her own drink. “I know, Olga, but I cannot change the past, so what would you like me to do?” Olga doesn’t reply. The brunette parts her lips, but promptly closes her mouth when she sees Alexia’s slight discomfort. “Mama wants you to come to dinner tonight. I… I do too.”

Olga’s smile is big and genuine. “I’d love that,” she answers. “Eli is the best cook out of our friends’ parents. Everyone knows that.”

You’re in London, childless, and are watching the grand old Arsenal play (reluctantly, forced to by Leah if anything). Alexia has seen the pictures of you at the match on Instagram; she has already felt the frustration that you are most-likely never going to watch Barcelona play again unless it is to support the other team. Like clockwork, Alexia seeks to fill the gaping hole you have left in her life. Somewhere, somehow, the lines of friendship between her and Olga have blurred.

…

It takes just over a month for Leah to crack.

You appear in London every two weeks, attending meetings and events, but she has decided, once and for all, to see through your excuses. You come to London for her. She knows that, and so do you. Leah’s ego has not reached a size where she believes she is enough for you, but the facts (and Lia Wälti) tell her she is wrong.

Except, what Leah tends to leave out is that no matter how many times you let her sleep with you, she still is unable to access a certain part of your mind.

She has never been upstairs in your house because you always prefer to go to her place in St. Albans. She has never slept in your bed, nor woken up next to you.

You talk to her like she is still the same old Leah, the captain you befriended during the tournament of her lifetime, your entrance in her life intertwined with the ecstasy of winning the Euros. She closes her eyes and thinks of how you looked that summer; white England shirt, sunglasses pulled down over your eyes. Smiling, cheering. For her, she greedily claims to herself.

Sometimes, in her mind, you lift your sunglasses – you always seem to be crying when she pictures this – but Leah is only vaguely familiar with the timeline of your divorce. This is the issue.

There is a door that you have locked and refuse to let Leah find the key. It leads to heartbreak, to Nico and Elena, to a family you once had.

“I wish you would let me in,” Leah says one day. (The day she cracks.) She tears her ACL two days prior, something that makes you feel guiltily nauseous, and you have come to visit her. She knows that you had flown over the minute you had swapped custody with Alexia.

Your legs curl into your chest as you try to reduce the amount of space you are taking up on Leah’s sofa, cautious of her injured knee. Leah misses the warmth of your thighs, and wants to revoke her conversation starter instantly, pained that she has to even ignite the fire of this forbidden topic. “What do you mean?” comes your quiet reply, unwilling to disturb the peace of her living room. The peace of existing side-by-side.

“Exactly what I said.” Leah nods to emphasise her agreement with herself. “I wish you would let me in, because how do you expect me to love you if I don’t know you?”

She sees the bullet fly through the air; she sees the moment it hits you, the way you go rigid. Dead. Dying?

“It’s crazy because it usually takes years for me to feel about someone the way I feel about you, and I just… I just wanted to tell you that it’s okay to let me in. I want to hear everything, to know everything.”

“Oh.” What had you expected when you kissed her? “Oh, Leah.”

“You don’t have to apologise.” She assigns your guilt, the tears in your eyes, to your distance. Perhaps you hadn’t realised, perhaps it is a coincidence Leah has never slept in the bed you used to share with Alexia. Maybe you are unaware that Leah has never heard you speak Spanish, and doesn’t know a single thing about your life in Barcelona.

You’re a busy person, after all.

“No, no,” you dismiss quickly, shaking your head. Leah can’t help but wonder if the paranoid voice in her head is right; has she been reading too much into this? “Fuck, I am such a twat.”

But you don’t elaborate further, asking how she’s feeling, distracting her from your realisation about her realisation. Before Leah knows it, you are making her laugh harder than she has in a month, and soon, like most good things, your visit comes to an end.

Returning to Barcelona is a little weird.

You feel as though you have done nothing but check over your shoulder the entire journey, staring the past straight in the eye and wishing you could change it.

You hadn’t meant to make her fall in love with you. (But she has. Oh, she has.)

This week’s swap is no different; the same park as usual, the same pleasant weather to undergo an unpleasant task.

On the bench usually occupied by Olga, a different, blonder head comes into view.

“Irene?” you ask in surprise, wondering if she has been sent in Olga’s stead or just so happens to have brought Mateo, her son, to the very same park. You sit down beside her, somewhat pleased to not see Alexia’s henchwoman today. “Where’s the free childcare?”

The defender’s eyes narrow, as though she is debating whether or not she should tell you.

Irene has known Alexia for a long time, and, by extension, has known you for a long time too. She is calm, level-headed, and mature, much like Alexia. Except Irene hasn’t ever thought to cheat on her wife.

You are clearly in a lot of pain, and you have a right to be; Irene does not rise to your comment. “Olga has gone on holiday,” she states with practised neutrality.

“Ah, they’ve broken up.”

Eyebrows raised, she turns to you, breaking her line of sight that encompasses Nico, Mateo, and Elena. The playground is small enough, and very safe. “They were never together.” You wait patiently for her analysis of whatever the fuck was going on between them. “Olga said she wasn’t what Alexia needed. She’s on holiday with Carla, and I guess she is quite upset.”

“And Alexia?” You know Irene does not like to gossip, nor stir the pot. So you can be nosy about how she is doing.

“I think her ego was bruised, but she sees Olga’s point. She has been… better recently. She’s focused on getting back onto the pitch, and Jona is only saying good things about it.” Irene’s eyes brighten at the thought of her captain’s recovery, and her tone soars through the air. The entire team has worried for Alexia, spending their own nights tossing and turning, wondering if the old version of her will ever return. “I know you two don’t speak, but if you did, you’d get a glimpse of what it was like before.”

You can’t help your smile, and Irene does not make you feel pathetic for wearing it. “Good.”

“I heard you were in London?”

“Visiting a… friend.” Irene is not a gossip, you remind yourself. “I think I might have to stay in this country for a bit and let things cool down over there.”

She chuckles. “Whose heart have you broken?” She won’t tell Alexia, when Alexia inevitably asks about you, that you are seeing someone. Not that you have confirmed that to her.

“I’m yet to break it,” you tell her, sighing, “but I know I will, and that is much, much worse.”

“Hey, at least you have two weeks of being endlessly busy to keep your mind off it.”

Children change a lot in two weeks, so Irene then launches into an update on school, clubs, and everything else. She gets the information from Alexia, of course, who writes out a list every time you switch over. No one has ever handed you the piece of paper before, worried that her handwriting will be an unnecessary reminder of the pain she has caused you, but, for some reason, Irene does today.

You are not put off by the swirling Spanish in front of you, instead choosing to study it. You have spent hours in Alexia’s lap as she scrawls out football notes upon football notes, scribbling prompted by footage or, freakishly, her own memory. From the lightness of the indentations of the pen, you figure that Alexia is exhausted. From the half-finished sentences, you decide that she was rushing when she wrote this.

But, as much as you delight in your brief analysis of the evidence in your palms like Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery, you can’t ignore just how greatly you have missed the letters that swim between the lines (and the hand from which they were written).

Irene spares you your dignity by standing from the bench and checking on the children just as your tears begin to fall.

…

You take one last look in the mirror embedded in the sun visor, ensuring your hair is perfectly in place and your earrings match your cream, sleeveless turtleneck to poise you just between casual and smartly-dressed. A quiet grumble from the backseat draws your attention away from your reflection, though your last glimpse at your concealed eyebags and red-rimmed irises leaves you feeling a little dejected and mourning the days you’d actually get some sleep. (Or wouldn’t, smoking cigarettes on the balcony while talking Alexia’s ear off.)

“Mama, we go,” decides Elena with a huff, tugging on the buckle of her car seat.

It’s Nico’s first-ever recital tonight.

He started playing the piano in September, when his teacher at school had mentioned how he boasted to the children in his class that he was a musician: ‘if I am Catalan because my mami is Catalan, then I am musician because my mami is musician’. You felt guilty. His teacher says he is naturally talented, voice lacking surprise but praiseful nonetheless, and is proud to name Nico his youngest student at tonight’s show.

The bouquet of daisies you ask Elena to hold makes her look like a miniature carnival float, and she toddles into the venue by your side while you do mental gymnastics between the knowledge that Alexia will be here tonight and the nerves for your son’s performance. It’s nothing complicated, but you worry he will hate it. This is the only thing he does that is a nod towards you; his one deviation from his worship of Alexia.

“Mami!” squeals the walking flowers as soon as you make it to the half-full hall. You direct your gaze to the three rows your daughter refers to, every seat lined with either professional footballers or family. With a sudden rush of blood to your head, you feel out of your depth.

You’re not sure whether the hazel eyes that find yours help or worsen that.

“Keep it moving,” you mutter firmly, holding her hand so she does not make a break for it and tumble right over to the cohort of FC Barcelona and Seguras. Not wanting to get too close to them, you take your seat in the penultimate row, knowing Nico will not be able to see you over the grand piano set up on the stage wherever you sit. “You can talk to her later, sweetheart.”

She is in an obedient mood, most-likely intimidated by the tension in the air. You tell yourself it’s the stress radiating from the line of performers sitting on the front row. Nico stands on his chair, waving first to Alexia and then to you (it’s your turn with them so you are a lot less exciting right now), before he is lightly scolded by his teacher and the first child walks up the steps and onto the stage.

Five uninspiring children later, Nico is finally led up onto the stage. His teacher sits down on the piano stool and nudges him forwards. He smiles brightly at the room. You reciprocate, encouraging Elena to do the same to keep her engaged with an admittedly boring event.

“Bona nit a tothom! Jo sóc en Nicolau i tinc quatre anys i ara aniré a tocar ‘Brillia Brillia Estel Petit’.” The audience melts before him. “Mama, that means ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’,” he whispers loudly.

You send him a thumbs up. He sends you a grin back, before giggling as he climbs onto the piano stool beside his teacher.

Situated comfortably, feet dangling adorably far away from the pedals, his chubby, little fingers hit the ivory keys once, then twice.

You pray this goes well.

It does.

He plays with two hands, something you hadn’t expected, and Elena holds in her noisy yawn until after he is finished so she must have been invested in the performance. Your own hands sting after you clap with such prideful force that you are the loudest in the room, and the hoots and hollers from Alexia’s territory only make Nico even happier as he bounces down the steps and back to his seat to wait for the others to do their pieces.

After the recital has finished, you walk down the aisle separating the seats in half to get to Nico, daughter-less courtesy of a squadron of football-playing kidnappers.

“How was that?” you ask him smugly, his arms wrapping around you in a tight hug. “I knew you would be brilliant, even when you were scared you weren’t going to be. Do you know how proud I am of you?”

“This much?” He holds his hand about thirty centimetres apart. “Mami says this much.”

When he widens his hands, you gesture something even bigger.

“‘Immensely’ is the word I would use.”

“Im-men-lee?”

“Es que nuestro orgullo llena una casa sin techo. Hasta el cielo.”

“Up to the sun,” you amend, ignoring the way the voice has made you stiffen. You don’t read too much into her misuse of the collective pronoun. There is no ‘our’ in ‘affair’.

Alexia’s hand hovers by your waist for a moment, muscle memory getting the better of her before she draws it back into her body. Nico gives her a matching hug, telling her how much he has missed her.

You try not to blame yourself for his derailed childhood.

“You were amazing, petit,” Alexia says, picking him up with one strong arm and settling him on her hip. You grip the wrapper of the bouquet you are holding. “Did Mama get you a gift?”

He peers at the daisies in your hand with curiosity. Shaking his head, his confusion deepens as he studies the bouquet you are extending towards him. “They are for Mami? Flowers are for love.”

“I love you,” you tell him, not trying to make a point but instinctively prickling in the presence of Alexia.

The silence is awkward.

A few metres away, whilst entertaining the sleepy toddler on her lap, Mapi is excitedly talking to Alba. “Y/n hasn’t killed her yet,” says the defender with glee, one of your admirers. The team respected you before, never questioning their captain’s judgement nor family, but when word got out about the affair amongst the older girls, most of them began to see you as more than Alexia’s wife. A new layer to your character was revealed; you are a strong, independent, and successful woman. Football nerds sometimes forget success comes in more forms than blaugrana kits. “They made such a beautiful couple.”

“They did.” Alba watches as you talk to your son, your eyes actively avoiding the woman in front of you. “Our mother has sent Alexia over there to invite her to dinner. It killed me to see her sit alone.”

You are too used to the feeling of eyes on you that you no longer notice the weight of people’s stares, but, if this were not the case, you would know that most of the heads attached to the bodies sitting in Alexia’s rows had been swivelled towards you for majority of the recital. Pity is never a desired emotion to have offered to you, but the Barça girls can’t help but feel that way whenever they see your forehead crinkle in an attempt to understand Catalan, presuming you only speak Spanish as you have more than enough on your plate. (And, as most of the players will admit, your children speak better English than them, so one can only assume that it is your main method of communication.)

“She’s a very good mother,” Mapi comments with a small nod, sucking a sharp breath in as she begins to sympathise with you even more. Not a day goes by where she witnesses the suffering Alexia’s idiocracy has caused – as Ingrid, her girlfriend, knows very well – and does not fail to scream in frustration about her best friend’s stupid mistakes.

“She’s a very good person.”

They fall silent as they see your head tilt up, jaw clenching as Alexia begins to speak to you.

“Can you hear what she’s saying?” whispers Eli to her daughter, equally invested in the conversation. “I knew I should have sent you; Alex is too socially awkward.”

“Mami, she is talking to her wife,” replies Alba, though she remembers what happened the last time Alexia and you had spoken and the outcome of that. Maybe that commences her increasing agreement with her mother… “I guess you– Are they coming over here?!”

Even you seem surprised by how your legs carry you towards the Barcelona clan, a step behind Alexia and Nico. Hesitant would be an understatement, but most of them are too preoccupied with congratulating the four-year-old they have come to watch to notice your tight-lipped smile and trembling hands.

“Hola,” you say shyly.

Eli pulls you into her strong embrace without missing a beat. “Te he echado de menos, hija.”

You try very hard not to burst into tears.

They take you to dinner; a plan you had known about but not envisioned yourself included in. Although it’s your fortnight, Alexia (through the conduit of Alba) had previously arranged to drop Nico and Elena over to yours before midnight.

You blow off your FaceTime call with Leah.

The restaurant is on the lower level of fine-dining. It’s chic, but it does not make your children feel unwelcome. The table is set for five places, though Alba informs you that the reason for this is because the reservation was made before she broke up with her girlfriend.

“Mama, what are you going to eat?” asks Nico, slipping back into his old life seamlessly, mixing his English with the Spanish he knows everyone can understand, his legs swinging underneath the table with an enthusiastic energy. He is still too young to pick up on how far apart his parents are sitting, or how you refuse to let your eyes linger on Alexia’s tanned skin, far too much of it shown off by the tank top she sports in the humidity of the busy restaurant.

You glance around the room, searching for those who have recognised you. Under the weight of at least four curious stares, you motivate yourself to enjoy your meal.

“Not sure yet, babe,” you answer. “Alba, do you fancy sharing something?”

“Yeah, of course.” The younger Putellas smiles. Alexia knows who has lost the war.

Dinner passes with light conversation centred on very neutral topics. No man’s land is clearly the children, and you had never expected to be so desperate to continue a conversation about school lunches until the other options are how Alexia had an affair with her teammate or that your song with her favourite singer is topping the charts and explicitly about being cheated on.

Although you and Alexia both watch how many times your wine glasses are refilled, Alba lets loose, as does Eli (probably to ease the stress on her heart that her girls force upon her). Their cheeks redden and Nico begins to yawn, Elena already curled into your side halfway between dreams and reality.

“Should we head out?” you ask it to the table, but the only functioning person is Alexia, really, and so you close your eyes to avoid having to make eye contact.

“I should probably get Mama and Alba into a taxi.”

“If you call one for them, I will call one for us?” Your suggestion is instinctive; an old habit reminiscent of many similar nights, back when there was love and happiness and a relationship that didn’t feel like walking on a floor made of broken glass. “Or did you drive here?”

“No, but you drove,” comes Alexia’s reminder. Internally, you face-palm. Parking the car before dinner seems like years ago; something feels different now. “But if you don’t feel up to it, I could drive you home. I haven’t had much to drink and I have nothing else planned for tonight. Elena is practically in a coma anyway.”

You laugh – a softened version of it so as to not rouse the dead weight of your daughter.

“Are you sure?”

It’s late.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

I don’t care.

“Mama,” Alba slurs, pulling her mother in close. “The saint has given her sinner a second chance.”

It may not be as quiet as she thinks it is. Alexia, occupied, is deaf to the comment. You are not.

This is not a second chance.

This is a lift home.

The last time all four of you sat in a car together was the day you found out about Alexia’s affair.

You had suffered then – are still suffering now – but your anger was hot and sharp and new. Fresh wounds.

Now, though more scabbed-over than healed, those wounds no longer seem to gush blood; you entertain Alexia’s stiff small-talk.

She asks about the tour, never veering too far off the road of practicality and shared custody. When does it resume? Which has been your favourite show?

“Wembley is like playing El Clásico in Camp Nou,” she determines, not needing to ask about that because she knows you too well.

Your memories of the London shows involve a naked Leah Williamson. (If only she knew that!)

“Yeah, London was great.”

Awkwardness is part of Alexia’s personality; something you are fairly certain you still love. She is shy, though it perhaps comes off as stoicity, and she has never been good at making conversation. You know she hates it, and you know that her eyes, Alexia’s eyes, are gazing at you every time she thinks you are not looking.

She is weary about the desire darkening her pupils, but she does not do well to hide her hunger nonetheless.

“Go into the carpark,” you instruct as you approach your building.

Wordlessly, she presses the correct pin into the pin-pad, never having forgotten it.

She parks the car beside a new-looking Mercedes. It’s not a car for children, and she imagines it reeks of cigarettes – there is no way you have stopped smoking.

It belongs in the carpark; in your little world of celebrities and male footballers; of money and fame and fortune. (One could argue you lack the latter, what with your current situation.) Alexia’s life has never moulded with yours.

Perhaps it never will.

Perhaps she slept with Jenni because they are equals, you think. Because Jenni understands Alexia in a way you cannot.

“Mami,” cries a quiet voice from the backseat. You stop staring at the grey, concrete walls, snapping back to reality as Alexia shifts to turn her attention to the source of the whimpering. “No quiero que te vayas.”

“Lela, me tengo que ir.”

“Pero–”

“You could always come up to say goodnight to them?”

It starts off innocently.

Of course it does. Of course you are nowhere near forgiveness, more likely to forget about the crushing affair before you excuse any of her actions. Sometimes, you wish for amnesia. Sometimes, you refer to the tab open in Safari – ‘is there a drug that makes you forget?’.

Alexia is granted a tuck-in and a story for each child, glad that their rooms are separate so that her time in her home is prolonged. The walls are familiar, the floor is the same. There are new pictures in new frames, but the old ones have not been removed. If you had ever wished to take photographs of your relationship down, you have never acted on it.

She realises you must not spend a lot of time here alone. Maybe you cannot bear it. Maybe your life in London is more important to you than she had thought.

Anyway, for as much as she subtly noses around and draws out the night, she has no intention of overstaying her welcome, sure that she probably did that the minute she stepped inside.

In fact, she is on her way out, under the assumption that you will not want to speak to her.

“So you’re back to playing?”

“Sí.”

A doorway conversation.

You’re English. You’re very polite. Alexia knows this, tries to not get her hopes up.

“Does that mean you don’t want a taste of this ‘97?” You hold the bottle up to her, the cork lying on the granite worktop with the incriminating suggestion that you have already had a glass.

“We play the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh, Ale, this is a good one.”

How many times have you said that to her before? The same tone, the same look in your eye; red tinting your lips, one hand on a lighter because you smoke when you’re drunk, even if you refuse to touch the cancer-sticks when you are sober.

“Was this a gift?” she asks, drawn into your magnetic field like a flimsy paper clip; thin, worn metal trying to piece the pages of her life back together. “Or have you been making ridiculous purchases again?”

“I can assure you that it is not ‘ridiculous’.” You moan in delight as you take a sip from a glass you subsequently hand over to her. “Gosh, that is divine, and you are simply going to dissolve when you taste it.”

Dissolve she does, but one can attribute that to the company.

The contents of the bottle dwindles quickly, paired with a vulnerable retelling of her ACL recovery (sans suicidal thoughts and huge, huge regret about the affair – she doesn’t want to bring that up, seeing as you are clearly trying to forget about it), and the warm breeze of the Barcelona nighttime. The salty air from the mediterranean mingles with cigarette smoke, though Alexia softly says that you really should stop.

You hesitate on your next puff, but you inhale it all the same. “I like my wine smokey.”

She opens the next bottle for you.

The wine glasses are soon discarded, pouring becoming shaky and difficult.

“They sleep all the way through the night here,” observes Alexia, surprised that no little hands have knocked on the glass door leading to the balcony. The last time you had reached for the wine, you’d moved closer to her. You have not yet returned to your original seat on the other side of the rattan sofa.

You raise your eyebrows, under the impression that they were both sleep trained. “They don’t at yours?”

“Elena keeps trying to sleep in bed with me.”

“Maybe she likes you more,” you suggest with a light, alcohol-infused laugh. “She must have been upset to find her place filled by your friend.”

“No,” murmurs Alexia, “it has never been filled. Though I don’t think you can say the same.”

You swallow the stickiness of the wine running down your throat.

“Not in our bed. My bed.” You fight yourself. “Our bed.”

“In Highgate?”

“Anywhere,” you breathe.

“It’s been months,” croaks Alexia, your hand pressed against her stomach as you slowly lean into the feeling only she can give you. “Months.”

You kiss her. Time folds in on itself, and you are transported back to when every touch was electric; when nothing was tainted. The pain of the past months, the heartbreak, momentarily fades into insignificance as you lose yourself in Alexia’s warmth.

Her fingers tangle in your hair, pulling you closer, afraid that this moment might slip away too soon. The taste of wine lingers on your lips, and she craves the softness of them – she has been craving them since July.

“Well, now it has only been seconds,” you whisper as you pull away.

With a sense of urgency, she chases your mouth once more, strong arms pulling you on top of her, manipulating your body against her with no hint of uncertainty.

Alexia knows you well.

Her touch lacks curiosity and exploration. Her hands are experienced and confident in their movements, and she has hoisted you up and brought you to your bedroom without needing to have been told that this is what you want.

“Is this what you want?” she asks anyway.

“Please.”

And she really doesn’t make you beg.

Your hands roam her body with a primal hunger, instinctive touches to the most sensitive parts of her, leaving a trail of fire in their wake. Her back is tense, muscles flexing as she pushes your clothes off your skin, her own following their path soon after.

Parted legs and soft moans.

She slots herself between your thighs.

Her tongue is determined, fierce. Sloppier because she is drunk, but, then again, so are you.

Your fingers repay the favour.

“More,” you request just as she pulls away.

“Is it in the same place?”

You nod, panting.

There is a playful glint in Alexia’s eyes as she finds the strap just where she left it. As she secures it in place, you wipe the sweat from your brow, forcing your mind into the dirtiest of thoughts to ward off the building regret.

The room is dimly lit, and the air heavy with desire. Your heartbeat pulses in the silence, the thrum of the organ drums that guide Alexia’s slow, deliberate steps back towards the bed, kneeling atop the scrunched sheets.

She positions herself between your legs once more, and you can feel the heat of her body radiating against your skin. She leans in closer, her breath hot against your neck, sending shivers of anticipation shuddering down your spine.

With trembling hands, you reach out, nails digging into tanned, taut skin. You pull her closer to you, urging her to take whatever she wants.

You want her to have you. You want her to make it hurt less.

As Alexia presses inside, a jolt of pleasure courses through your body. You cry out, the sound igniting a blazing inferno within her that grows hotter the moment you ask her to move. Feverishly, her hands move over your chest, finding purchase on your breasts with a dormant possessiveness as her hips begin to drive the strap in deeper.

Your breath hitches in your throat as you surrender to the overwhelming sensation, encompassed by someone so divine that you begin to separate yourself from all things wrong with this situation. The headboard thuds against the bedroom wall as she pounds her thrusts into a rhythm, and you shut your eyes as you quietly ask her to kiss you.

Tears cascade down your cheeks, but you do not know to whom they belong. Her tongue smothers your moans, and her hips begin to snap into yours more urgently, with more desperation. The pressure builds inside of you, and you feel as though you might explode.

You feel as though this is the end, and you are glad that here is where your misery terminates.

You’re glad, you’re really glad.

Your back arches, your chests pressing together, large hands holding you close to her.

And then it all comes crashing down.

Everything.

You wipe your eyes once the orgasmic bliss subsides, seizing your wine haze as the tide goes out and destroying the blindfold that had deprived you of seeing things straight. Right now, with the pleasant ache between your legs, you can’t quite bring yourself to regret it, but you know you will. You haven’t forgiven her; you’re not sure that it is possible.

“You can shower, but you can’t stay here.”

…

Nico knows that he is special. He is lucky, and he is loved, and he gets to go to a very nice school that Mateo (his ‘cousin’) claims is fancy.

He likes his teacher. She reminds him of someone he once knew – you have suggested the nursery helpers back when he lived in London. He is not sure if you are right, but he doesn’t remember what London was like so he tries not to think too hard about it.

Nico’s friends, like Pau who is sitting beside him, all think it is really cool that he can speak English. Pau says she hears his mother on the radio sometimes, but Nico hasn’t yet grasped the concept of fame past the annoying camera flashes and big, sold-out stadiums. He dislikes fame as he knows it, anyway, because the cameras hurt his eyes and the stadiums are so loud that he has to wear ear-defenders that squeeze his skull a bit too much.

“My mum is from Bilbao. My dad is from Barcelona,” states Paula as she swipes a crayon over the sheet of paper her drawing is on. Green wax slowly stains the white to form ‘grass’. Everyone is drawing their family today, although Nico hasn’t yet started, waiting for his teacher to circle their table so that he can ask for another piece of paper. “And this,” Paula carries on, squiggling brown hair onto a smaller version of the stick-figure father, “is Ander, my big brother.”

“Who is that?” Nico asks, pointing at the fifth figure on the page, guessing that the fourth and Pau-sized person is, in fact, Pau.

“My sister! She’s called Nerea, and she plays basketball.” Pau promptly makes an orange circle the size of Nerea’s head, which floats in the air between her and her sister. “My mum says Nere is going to be a lesbian, but I don’t know what that means.”

“My mums are lesbian!” he blurts out, excited enough to garner the attention of his teacher. When she appears, he grins at her sweetly; the kind of smile that has melted many hearts, though Nico is unaware of how many people know he exists. “More paper, please.”

“Nico, you haven’t even tried with your first one.”

She isn’t harsh at all, but he has slowly learnt to stop asking follow-up questions. Six months of exasperated ‘I don’t know, Nicolau’s has taught him that.

He shrugs. “Okay.”

He learnt what a shrug was the other day, when Mapi told him off for doing it to her. (“Don’t shrug your shoulders at me, Nicolau Putellas!” she had chided playfully. “All I asked was which of your mamas’ houses we need to go to.”)

“Nico, what’s ‘lesbian’?”

“Mama says football is lesbian. Basketball might be lesbian! That’s why your sister is lesbian.”

“My mum says that lesbians kiss girls.”

“Mama kisses girls! And Mami. And they used to kiss each other but now they don’t speak and me and my sister swap houses.” Nico begins drawing it out for Paula when she peers at him, befuddled. “Here is Mama’s.” A big square, a glamorous-looking woman inside of the blue shape; a stick with a circle on the end of it; the notes he sees in his piano music floating in the air. “And…” he says, tongue sticking out as he concentrates on the opposite half of the page, “here is Mami’s.”

He draws a football. He picks up the red crayon too, and uses both the blau and the grana simultaneously. “Mami plays football for Barça.” He draws two lines on Alexia’s t-shirt. 11. “Mami made me get 11 at football.” Nico had originally worn the 10, but then the affair had come to light and Alexia was suddenly deep in conversation with his coach and apologising to the boy Nico then had to swap shirts with.

Then, he drops the crayons in his hand and searches for the stack near Paula. He selects the purple one, gripping it tightly, his friend still listening to him with intrigue.

“This is me and Lela.” Two stick figures are drawn in the middle of the page; the middle ground between each of the squares.

Nico sometimes feels stuck between it all.

When Mami got very sad, he and Elena went to stay with Mapi and Ingrid for a few nights. He held his little sister’s hand as much as he could. He always tries to remind her that he is right there with her.

Mami once told him that it was his turn to protect Elena. Nico hasn’t forgotten that.

“I keep Lela safe.” He has encouraged her, slightly selfishly, to call him ‘skipper’, which he has picked up from the Lionesses. Luckily, Alexia has not told him off for it because she doesn’t know what it means. “Lela is my little sister. She is a baby. She doesn’t remember what it was like when Mama and Mami loved each other, but I do.”

The purple crayon scrapes on the page as he presses it into the white, colour rubbing out in the shape of a heart. “Lela and I are together tot el temps. Mami tries to take me from her sometimes, but I don’t let her.”

His story – and ability to make Paula pay attention for longer than ten seconds – has already attracted the quiet attention of his teacher, but she moves closer as Nico continues. The four-year-old leaves out how Alexia is usually inviting him to training with her. Since Elena has yet to show any interest in football, it remains her and Nico’s special thing, and, of course, his mother misses him when it is not her turn.

You benevolently give your permission if you have no prior plans. It is upsetting that the only hindrance to extra time spent together is the little boy who once worshipped Alexia Putellas like a god.

“Nico, why did you want two pages?” asks Paula curiously, assuming he is finished now that his whole family is displayed on the piece of paper.

He frowns. “Because now I have to do this.” And with that, he tears the sheet in half.

Paula’s mouth drops open in surprise, as does his teacher’s.

“What’s wrong?” comes a mature voice, a hand placed on his shoulder just like it is when the other children in his class cry. Nico doesn’t cry. He is strong and brave, like a little soldier. “Did you not like your drawing?”

“No,” he replies neutrally, “half can live with Mama, and half can live with Mami.”

“But now you are ripped down the middle.”

He traces the jagged edges of the halves of his life. One of his legs is on your side, the other on Alexia’s.

“I know, but it’s okay. I don’t cry.”

Alexia does, though, when his teacher talks to her that afternoon.

…

“I slept with Alexia,” you confess quietly, comforted by the sound-proofing of Anya’s home-studio. She asked for help with her album; your success might be contagious, she insists. “Last week, when Nico had that recital.” You clutch your mug protectively, as if she will strip you of the right to drink your tea to punish you for your crime.

Anya is unsure what you would like her to say. You search her face for anger, but do not find it.

“If Gio were here, she’d probably slap you.”

You snort, almost spilling hot liquid all over yourself. “You two are like my mothers, and you’re the nicer one by far.”

“God, you are such an idiot.”

“And a slag.” She waits for your next admission with excitement. “I also slept with Leah Williamson.”

“Do you think you and Alexia are just destined for polyamory?” Her amusement is quite pleasant, but one thing wasn’t dulled by the wine that night and you have been dying to tell someone about it.

Your knee bounces up and down as you gear up for it, having thought it through

“I think we are destined for each other.”

Song-writing be damned, Anya fully removes her headphones, placing the equipment beside her keyboard before letting out a small, exasperated laugh. “You are in love with Alexia again,” comes her accusation, with no real malice behind it.

“I never stopped being in love with Alexia. She just made it a lot harder to love her.”

Is that an understatement?

“Hey,” you say with sudden energy, sitting upright and grasping at your phone, tea wobbling over the lip of the mug and running down your wrist. “Should we go to Bali in August?”

…

You avoid both of your footballers right until the World Cup camps roll around.

Leah doesn’t get to go, subjected to the ACL curse. Alexia’s call-up is not necessarily unexpected, but you do find yourself wondering how many more betrayals her friendship with Mapi León can handle. (Mapi is on her last straw, but she knows her friend really needed the win after her hellish year. The Champion’s League was never going to sate Alexia’s hunger to be the best at football – possibly an overcompensation for her terrible relationship skills.)

Your children, this time, are delivered to the park by their very own mother. Alexia beats Leah in this sense, because she has a valid excuse to see you without confessing feelings you do not want to hear.

“I have something for you,” she says just after she has finished her goodbyes, pressing a small box into your hands. Her voice is filled with nerves and you are intrigued, hating yourself for being so. “Don’t open it until you get back home.” Her eyes meet yours for a moment. I’m sorry, they seem to say. “Alright, have fun in Bali, and don’t forget that I legally have custody but I am not going to go to court to battle you for it as long as you put them in Spain kits for Spain matches.”

She could, if she wanted to be difficult, have you send Nico and Elena to New Zealand during her weeks. It would be very unreasonable, but the contract your lawyers drew up still stands.

“They were delivered yesterday. I think it’s going to be a struggle to convince them to put on the worst kit ever.” You still don’t forgive Alexia for cheating on you, but there has come a point where acceptance replaces the animosity. Nico’s teacher has been the catalyst in this step forward. The developmental pamphlets she had thrust in your faces were enough for the two of you to come to a mutual agreement of increased civility (that maybe, maybe was only made possible by the fact that you have very recent memories of each other’s orgasms). “But, yes, I agree to your terms. Don’t forget that his favourite player is Alessia Russo, however.”

“He is in a phase where I am ‘uncool’! It’ll pass.”

“If you say so, Alexia.”

“Anyway,” she carries on, rolling her eyes. “Open it when you get home.” She… presses a kiss to your cheek? “I’m so sorry, mi amor.”

You blink back your surprise, but she is gone before you can reply.

The small, neatly-wrapped box sits in the palm of your hand, the corners edging off your skin and sticking out as you stare at it. Nico and Elena continue their (unsupervised) playing, but you manage to call out a warning for ‘five more minutes and then we’ve got to pack’ while you examine Alexia’s gift.

Is this how Pandora felt?

If you open it, what will be unleashed?

Alexia, before now, hasn’t actively pursued your forgiveness. She has given you the time and the space you had broken-heartedly requested, nodding as you communicated your wishes to her through someone else, never before able to confront the face that tore up your life before your eyes.

There was a time when all you ever wanted to do was talk to her, but she tried to forget about that when she realised the extent at which you went to avoid an interaction. When she had understood your desperation to be left alone fully, she began to breathe. The step backwards gave her room to examine just how royally she had fucked it all.

She now feels a bit more capable of tackling the clean-up, working with a much clearer mind. Everyone is relieved that she hasn’t killed herself, or, at least, that she is keeping those thoughts at bay.

You realise that she has bought you a ring, and regardless of whether you wear it or not, she wants to tell you that she is sorry.

...

IT'S NOT OVER YET! THIS WILL TAKE YOU TO THE SECOND HALF

#woso x reader #alexia putellas x reader #woso #woso fanfics #randombush3 #leah williamson x reader #woso imagines #barca femeni #alexia putellas #alexia putellas imagine

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paullicino · 23 days

Text

Six Years - On PTSD and Choosing Life

Content warning: This essay very frankly discusses mental health, trauma, gaslighting and suicide. It also links to discussions of abuse and sexual assault.

If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, know that you are not alone and help is available to you or anyone who might need it, such as the Samaritans, the Suicide Prevention Hotline, or this list of other crisis hotlines and this list of international support resources.

This was reposted from my Patreon.

There are blue skies today. The sun bounces off the mirrored windows of a skyscraper downtown. It cuts straight across my balcony and shines onto my wall. A few blocks away, the staff of my favourite café will share their latest gossip with me, as they always like to do, and maybe later tonight I will make good food and play games with friends until unwise times in the morning. Isn’t life full of wonderful things?

You can find them everywhere. And I certainly do. Sometimes I’ve found them in the intimate, up-close details of a famous oil painting, between the notes of a new song heard by chance, even in the rustling at the bottom of a dumpster, which becomes chittering and then fur and a tail and then direct eye contact with a tiny criminal whose only felony was hunger. I’ve found them amongst perfectly crafted sentences that capture thoughts and feelings and hold them forever on the page, in the silence of the impossibly wild mountain wilderness a thousand miles from home, in the first moments that I’ve taken someone’s hand and watched the gaudy lights of some forgettable venue play across the lines and the shapes of their face.

That’s so many wonderful things to live for. And I can get overdramatically passionate about the tiniest, silliest little details.

I’ve been trying to write this for a long time. I had three significant dreams during that period. In the most recent, I had moved into a dark and barren basement, with most of my possessions still in boxes. Some old friends from long ago came knocking. They pressed their faces against the small windows and tried to force the ageing door. “Where did you go?” they kept asking, their voices entering through every crack. “What happened?”

Six years ago this month I destroyed my suicide note. I burned it on a rainy August night and watched it curl into a tiny, helpless twisting of ashes and charred plastic that no longer had any power or purpose. The note was inside of a ziploc bag, a choice I’d made to ensure its integrity and survival against any of the several different plans I’d made to end my life, and this had melted into black strands of hair-like debris that reached up to nothing. One or two of my handwritten words remained half legible in this mess and tried to reach beyond the flames, to share their intent with the world, but they would never again mean anything to anyone.

I made videos of the burning and took a few pictures, a sort of ritual of recording, then I told a close friend what I’d just done, and then, for a very long time, I set the image as the wallpaper on my phone. It would be an ever-present reminder to me of my choice to stay alive. It was supposed to help me feel strong, though the truth is that I rarely did. It was the worst, most harrowing and most damaging period of my life and with help, honesty, insight, therapy, time and invaluable connection with others who have either seen the same things that I have or had comparable experiences, I managed to fumble and fight my way through it all. But I will never be the same. Six years is a long time and I am still profoundly affected by so much. I am still trying to understand things. I am still trying to figure myself out, to make sense of my identity, my situation, my experiences. To work out where I went and what happened. And I am still trying to move on.

These words are something about that ongoing experience, that work in progress, and about the dual significance of a span of six years. It is not so much about causes or causers, but instead about consequences and changes, and that’s for three reasons.

The first is because what happens after and as a result of trauma is so enduring and significant, perhaps even the most significant consideration of all, and it’s how we find ourselves discussing things like spans of six years or, for some people, far longer. I want to try to explain some of that sort of intensity and that sort of timescale.

The second is because it’s my hope that this is the most helpful way for me to talk about all this, the most illustrative to other people, the most constructive. I could have chosen many approaches, some which I believe might have been more harmful and destructive, and I don’t generally want to be a punitive or destructive person. Ultimately I think this is the most positive and productive approach.

The third is because I’m still not ready to unpack many things, as so much is still ongoing. I am not at the end of this, not out of the woods, and I think I need to know that I’ve reached the end of whatever journey I’m on before I can return to the start.

There is, allegedly, a power in choosing how your own story is told. So I’m choosing to tell it this way and, I hope, with the awareness that any exercise of power requires consideration and responsibility.

Six years is a long time, and while I’ve been trying to write and rewrite this thing for months, those months still pale in comparison to more than half a decade. A lot has changed in six years, and yet I also wish some things weren’t still the same, that I would have been able to make more progress, that I would have been able to create more distance.

Because, while I am six years from that burning note, from that summer rain, in my memory and my mind it doesn’t work like that. I still find myself beside that moment in time, like I could open the door to the next room and once again be right there.

---

Writing this has been very difficult. Writing is supposed to be one of the things that I am best at, and in the past words used to spill out of me so regularly that I wrote a tri-weekly diary, but I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my relationship to writing has changed. It’s not just that this is a difficult topic. It’s that words don’t come as easily or as fluidly as they once did, making it much easier, all too appealing, to simply not push myself. To avoid things entirely.

But I wanted to write this, in part, because it would be another act of not giving up. I wanted to show myself what I could do, what I still can do, and that, even if I’m changed, I’m still stubborn enough to fumble and fight my way through.

---

I want you to imagine a house. It can be any kind of house, that part isn’t important. What is important is that the house is your home and you have lived there for a very, very long time. It is comfortable. It is safe. It is so intimately familiar that it is a part of your identity. Perhaps you grew up there, or you raised a family there, or you retired there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s your home and that everyone knows you live there.

Next, imagine that you have a terrible day. The worst day. And at the end of this terrible, terrible day, on a bleak and dusky evening, you expect at least to be able to come back to your house, your home. You take the same route back to the same address, where you see the same building stood before you and open the same front door, ready for the comfort of a place you’ve made your own.

You enter this space that you’ve known for so long and you notice something is wrong. The first clue is something small, perhaps a lamp missing from its usual spot, or you collide with furniture moved somewhere unexpected. You feel for a light switch that is now on a different wall. You stumble on the stairs as you make your way to a bed that is hard and unwelcoming. In the morning, the light from the window is not only a different shape, but cast in the opposite direction.

The changes stop being so subtle. After you notice that a carpet is suddenly faded and pale, you open a closet to find it is twice as deep. Some of your possessions are missing. The spare room no longer has a skylight. The kitchen is a different colour, with different appliances, with no back door, half the size it once was because the walls have been moved. There are new rooms whose arrival and contents are both equally inexplicable. Your most cozy corner is now cold and uncomfortable. You must relearn the entire layout, from bathroom to basement, because moving around the way you once would only causes you to stub your toes, to trip, even to fall.

Your friends don’t understand why you no longer enjoy going back to your house, your home. They don’t understand why you screamed at the different closet, why the sunlight on the wall makes you nervous. Being in your own home now hurts and scares you. How can you possibly relax here? But this is still your same house, at your same address, the one that everybody knows. You can’t argue that it isn’t. And if you invite a friend inside, after ranting about everything that is different, they ask “Why did you change all this? It’s so much worse.”

What can you even say in return? “I didn’t”? That shit’s insane.

But that is how it feels, like I live in a house that isn’t my home. Sometimes I don’t recognise myself. Sometimes, on the worst days, I don’t know who I am any more.

“Where did you go?” ask the voices, entering through every crack. “What happened?”

---

Last summer, a man came roaring down my street in his flawless luxury emerald convertible. I remember him well. He had dark sunglasses and a tan suit jacket and a hairstyle slick with oil, like he was being a parody of a rich man from an eighties film. He surged through the stop sign right in front of me and I let him know what I thought of his public display of privilege and indifference.

“Go a little faster, you cunt,” I yelled. “Maybe you can hit a kid.”

He swivelled his head, looked back over his shoulder and stared straight at me.

He also slowed down.

It was then that I realised the volume I must have used to project myself, over the noise of his engine and toward a driver already continuing down the street, meant a few of my neighbours had likely heard me too.

I’m not sure I cared.

I used to be a more modest and deferential person, and often that is still the case. But often it is not. I have less patience. I have less fear. And I have less trust.

The fear thing is great. Last autumn I walked across a narrow, quivering suspension bridge with no care for the drop below. Later, I found another far narrower, far smaller one and, all by myself, alone in the woods sixteen kilometres up a trail, I jumped up and down on the thing until it shook and swung.

I used to be terrified of heights.

My sense of fear isn’t gone. But it’s both so much more manageable and also, quite often, a thrill. It’s taken me a while to realise that I increasingly seek out things that are exciting, risky or extremely stimulating. I am frank with strangers. I am quick to make decisions. I am keen to try new things.

It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? That’s because it isn’t. Not all change is bad and not every consequence of my experience has been negative. Slowly, gradually, I am learning to appreciate a few of the changes, to lean into them. While one part of me feels sad that I’m less trusting than I used to be, another part of me sees this as more practical. I’m far quicker to drop something or someone like a rock the moment I sense things that I don’t like, and my sense for such things is certainly sharper than it used to be. Am I always right? I don’t know about that. Perhaps some people have been casualties of an overabundance of caution. Or paranoia.

That might just be the new cost of doing business.

---

It was some time in early 2020, while talking with my GP and taking some evaluations, that we began to look at my behaviour more closely. A year before, I’d talked extensively with a therapist about anxiety and about a growing sense of discomfort and distrust. I had far less patience, particularly for those who pushed boundaries, violated or were exploitative, often regardless of whether these things even involved or affected me. Anything that felt uncomfortably familiar, whether it was something I saw in a film, caught on the news or heard about on social media, could ruin my day. I would become jumpy, irritable, scared, or simply unable to do much beyond lie down and try everything I could to banish the feeling that my chest was being crushed. This might take hours. One evening, an ex found me curled up on the floor, ashamed of my own sadness. On another evening, a routine trip to see an exciting film turned into a sleepless night of panic and distress.

I began taking tests and found myself either dismissing the results or retaking them over and over in an attempt to get different answers. The outcomes kept telling me I had the symptoms of PTSD. This was far too dramatic a result and there had already been enough drama in my life already. I myself was too much drama.

Anyway, I thought, having the symptoms isn’t the same as having.

Sometimes I think about how, during some of my most difficult moments, the toughest weeks and months that I didn’t really know how I was going to get through, I made a lot of haphazard decisions motivated by panic and fear and ignorance, by doing my best to improvise and cope and adapt. Some things worked out. Some things did not. Probably the deciding factor there was luck and I’m not really sure I can look back with any wisdom or insight.

I didn’t always know what to do, what to say, who to trust, or how much to trust, how to respond to new information and changing situations, or what in holy hell might ever work out. My response to all of this was to keep secrets or to be cagey, to avoid places and people, to suddenly and liberally cut others off through a mix of ghosting, avoidance and outright blocking, or to occasionally have three-day long anxiety spikes in which I remained highly activated, oversensitive and endlessly insecure. During one of these, someone teasingly pushed me to take part in something that I didn’t want to, something that wasn’t even a big deal, and I was so close to breaking down that I had to almost run from my friends and find a quiet place to catch my breath, all the emotions in my body somehow pinched into a single point somewhere in my gut. During another, a laptop accidentally nudged half an inch sent me into panic mode, manifesting a feeling like a blade of ice slicing straight through my pulmonary artery.

These sorts of responses and behaviours would happen even in spite of all the various combinations of therapy and medication and support I was cycling my way through. I don’t feel proud of how I handled many of these things. I would love to be able to say that I handle them so much better now, with the aid of wisdom and insight. Perhaps sometimes I do.

Sometimes I have simply made terrible decisions and, looking back, I am still not sure how I might have ever done any different. I am lucky that the vast, vast majority of those decisions didn’t fuck things up further.

---

It’s a magnificent day as I write this. The world is jade and azure and gold. The sky is exquisitely, flawlessly blue. Every leaf is rich with the gloss of summer. The sun is setting into the sparkling sea beside a succession of fading distant mountain ridges, each hazier than the last, the furthest so indistinct it looks almost like mist, a ghost of an idea two thousand metres tall. Container ships the size of city blocks sleep in the bay, their hulls traced and wrinkled with rust from a lifetime of global migration. As the growing shadows of slowly swaying trees reach their way toward me, the last light of the day glides over the ground, over the grass and even over my body itself, like spilled wine gushing from a glass. It colours everything the sweet shade of nostalgia. The air is gently warm and the grass is soft beneath me.

I love days like this. They are one of the reasons why I moved here, why I put so much time and effort and energy into relocating halfway around the world. Into building the life that I wanted, piece by piece.

And I love so many of those pieces. I love my little apartment, with the balcony that I always wanted, with its ragtag assortment of secondhand furniture collected one item at a time, with its shelves tucked in here or squeezed in there, never quite tidy enough to look presentable. I love my walkable neighbourhood, with its shops and cafés and cats that follow me from block to block, or critters that peer out from between bushes in the rustling dusk. I love how low cloud creeps in to cover the tips of the skyscrapers downtown, or how the jagged outline of mountains shape the horizon in almost every direction. I love trying to make things, especially with other people, and the reward of being creative, of being silly or being funny. I love all the things I’ve learned to cook, or the ways I can warm myself up on a cold day, or the late nights I can so often indulge, with no care for what might come tomorrow.

I have so much to be grateful for and so much to be proud of. So much here. So much now.

Pretty soon, the sunset will transform the whole sky into a gradient of colour. Someone somewhere will be playing guitar on the beach, and maybe they’ll be good. Stars will appear in the sky, above the familiar urban zodiac traced out by the city lights of apartment buildings. If I stay up late again, the dawn sky will turn the royal blue of an emperor’s cloak. And then all of this will happen again.

I have so much to be grateful for. So much to appreciate.

---

A few weeks ago I had my first nightmare in some time. They still happen. The specifics matter less than the broad themes. Deception. Gaslighting. Manipulation. Boundary violation. All of it in plain sight, yet still unseen, making me feel like I’m helpless, like I’m crazy, like I have no hope of ever being believed.

I thought about it all day. The situations, the faces and the fears. This is the way it’s always been and once one of these nightmares visits you, it stays for a while. It’s like a small stain, an odour that gets into your clothes, the stink of cigarettes after a party the evening before.

Can you wash out a stain? Sometimes. With the right substances, with the correct regimen. And with some aggressive, persistent scrubbing.

One summer night years ago an ex woke me up because I had been thrashing about in my sleep. I had worried her by rolling around and muttering like a madman. Was I having a nightmare, she asked, and it wasn’t just that I was, but that I had them all the time. Every week, at least, each leaving that same gross feeling of violation and abuse. The anxiety medication that I had been prescribed was helping me sleep more, but it also seemed to make my dreams more vivid and profound. It was either that or barely being able to sleep at all, woken by the slightest of noises, up before the crack of dawn because some unresolved tension in my body overpowered all tiredness and fatigue. Even with medication, the smallest of things could still turn me into a nervous wreck, and one night I cried cross-legged on my bed as I explained to my ex not just that I had interpreted a few of her utterly inconsequential actions as a sign she wanted to leave me, but also that I might always be like this. Forever.

The nightmares began a few months after I burned my note. It was right after I opened up to another friend about what was going on in my life, and their response was to tell me about something else that had happened, the full story of an event from another six years before, from distant 2012.

It’s not my tale to tell, but six years is a long time to not know the full story of something. A long time to be deceived, to find out you’ve been lied to by someone you trust and that your ignorance has affected many decisions that you’ve made. Again, I am lucky that the vast, vast majority of those decisions didn’t fuck things up further. But some did.

Six years. It hit me then how long it can take for people to feel able to talk about something, as well as continue to be affected by it. How far the ripples travel and who they touch. And now, here I am, with my own six years.

That discovery was one of several experiences that transformed me into that person having three-day long anxiety spikes, remaining highly activated, oversensitive and endlessly insecure. That person thrashing about in his sleep. That person yelling “You cunt,” down his street.

---

I’ve written before about my physical health and my relationship to my body. I was anxious about things being wrong with it long before I had thorough examinations and validating diagnoses, but as part of those treatments I wrote about, a trio of doctors warned me about how stress was worsening every condition and symptom I experienced. Stress was ruining my health. I was having so many migraines that my GP sent me for an MRI that revealed how those migraines were changing the white matter in my brain.

I would have to do something about this.

Those doctors would help me do something about this, as would other professionals, and their help was invaluable. This would be impossible to tackle alone.

Sometimes I think about people I’ve heard say such things as “It’s not your responsibility to fix someone else,” and, while I don’t disagree, doesn’t such a phrase also imply it’s surely somebody’s responsibility, in this society that we all share, built from things that help us support one another?

Otherwise we’d be suggesting that people fix themselves.

Sometimes I think about people I’ve heard tell others, or themselves, or sometimes the world via the spontaneous and sneeze-like broadcasts of social media “It’s on you to fix your shit,” and I wonder if that’s where that sentence should terminate, if that’s exactly how it should be phrased, if those are really the words that everyone, or anyone, needs to hear.

Because sometimes I also think of another clumsy analogy I once put together. It’s a scenario in which I describe a pedestrian struck by a car, perhaps one driven by a rich cunt with dark sunglasses and a tan suit jacket, perhaps even one that has mounted the curb or surged into a crossing. The pedestrian is knocked down, maybe immobile from the pain and injury that comes from a broken pelvis or fractured leg. An ambulance is summoned, a customised vehicle equipped to transport them to a hospital. In that hospital, that specialised medical facility, a team of trained experts will use skills and equipment to triage and manage, to analyse the pedestrian’s injuries, to provide relief and to chart a course toward recovery. There will be x-rays, there will be drugs, there may well be physiotherapy. I doubt at any point that the person lying in the street would be told, by someone coming upon the scene, “It’s on you to fix your shit.”

No. Not any more than they’d be expected to walk to the hospital, to interpret their x-rays or to prescribe their own medication. Indeed, if they attempted any of these things themselves I wouldn’t be surprised if someone along the way communicated to them some more polite version of “What the holy fucking fuck do you think you’re doing?” and “You’re in no state to do this yourself, let alone know what you need,” and “Fucking hell. You’re at your most vulnerable right now. Fuuuck.”

Hopefully.

Once, many years ago, I knew someone who broke their pelvis. It takes months to recover, maybe a year or more for a limp to fully disappear. And it requires all kinds of help and oversight. It worked out. Doctors and medical professionals can be remarkable.

I have read a lot of books and papers over the last six years. I have listened to a lot of podcasts and interviews. I have been recommended a lot of material by therapists, by friends, by fellow PTSD sufferers. One well-known trauma expert I was pointed toward is Canadian psychologist Dr. Gabor Maté. And he says this:

”Everybody is born needing help.”

He means that it’s a fundamental element of the human experience.

---

Sometimes I go running and sometimes I go to the gym. The reasons I do this are complex, ranging from wanting to be healthier, to wanting to feel better about my body and how it behaves, to feeling like I am making progress with something. That last one is particularly important, because I’m doing something where I’m objectively able to recognise change.

When I run, an app tells me how far I ran and how long it took. I can’t disagree with the app, because it’s entirely objective, and so when I have a bad day, feel terrible and wonder what the point of anything is, the app still shows me that I achieved a reasonable or even an improved time.

It wasn’t always like this. I was bad at these things. I run better than I used to. I perform better at the gym than I used to. I have the metrics to prove it, and while I’m not a particularly dedicated or regular person with my exercise, I still keep at it and I still see improvements.

Whatever it is I’m doing, these apps and their statistics all offer me the same, very simple analysis:

“You’re doing better.”

I motivate myself to run, to go to the gym, to go on twenty-five kilometre hikes over difficult terrain, but I don’t do these things without some kind of help that comes from either expert resources, advice or training.

I don’t exist in a vacuum. None of us do.

---

Help is important because it offers things like perspective and expertise and informed advice. And don’t all of those things sound so extremely important?

How about we imagine that our immobilised pedestrian wasn’t collected by an ambulance. Let’s imagine instead that the driver of the car that hit them stepped out of their vehicle, shook their head, put their hands on their hips and said “Look what you’ve done.”

And then “It’s okay, I know what’s best for you,” before carrying the inert person into their car and driving away. Perhaps even unseen. No witnesses.

If such a thing happened, in this society that we all share, with that person at their most vulnerable, who is responsible then? Who is responsible for what happens next? Who is responsible when that pedestrian, forever limping, says things like “It was my fault, I shouldn’t have been walking there,” or “I should have been looking out,” or “I should have been more visible,” and so on?

A lot of accidents and injuries and collisions and whatnot can be traumatic, scary, confusing. “How do I make sense of this?” asks that person, whether carried away alone in a car, or surrounded by doctors in the emergency room, or anywhere else they may happen to find themselves. “How do I deal with this?” And who might be around them at that moment to help answer such things?

And what will they say?

Perhaps you know someone who was, metaphorically, struck by such a car, before being then carried away by a driver with all sorts of ideas about what’s best, and who later blamed themselves for everything that happened. I don’t know.

I do know how important it was to receive the right help from the right people.

---

It’s hard to know exactly what to do. You may respond to your trauma with a desire for revenge, retribution or restoration. You may not have the insight or the time or the means to do anything much at all. There is the ideal of what could or should happen when harm has been caused, but there is also the uncomfortable reality of how such things actually play out, of how long justice can take, of who is granted credibility, of how complex social dynamics can quickly become, of how awkwardly and uncomfortably people can react when they discover something they would rather not have, or that they have been misled, or so much more. We’ve all seen such things play out secondhand and firsthand.

I have had six years to consider the most helpful way to respond, the most constructive, the most positive and productive. I am still considering. I don’t have much in the way of answers or advice there.

Sometimes I think about the anonymous Broken Teapot essay, with all it has to say about the complexity of dealing with abuse dynamics, of harm happening within a group or community, about social consequences. It was written over a decade ago now, but it remains a very relevant piece of writing that brings up all sorts of considerations around responsibility, about trying to come to terms with trauma and abuse, and about how people might try to use systems or processes to try to solve things in unhelpful ways or even for their own ends.

People can have a lot of opinions about how to handle trauma, how to respond to abuse and how to leap into some sort of process of justice or accountability or reparation or even plain old revenge. So many opinions.

It’s exhausting.

Back in 2020 I tried to write something about all these complications and considerations that I was going to title The Calculus of Abuse. Like much else, it rots in my drafts folder.

Sometimes I think about how many of the ways that we push people to address both their trauma and the things or people that have caused their trauma only makes things worse. I am sceptical about the practicality, value and effectiveness of processes of justice, reparation and accountability. I think a lot of people believe that they will fix things, that they will be fair, that they will spotlight situations and systems and people that cause harm. That, in this cold and unflinching exposure, justice will be done and books will be closed on long and difficult stories.

And I think that’s because we see this happen now and then. Sometimes it happens very publicly. It seems to at least occasionally all work out.

Sometimes I think about friends who were excluded from social circles because they spoke up about something creepy or problematic, because it mattered less what actions or behaviour someone had demonstrated, even what could be proven, and much more who was more popular, or that the status quo be maintained, or that applecarts not be upset. I think about how different people share or don’t share their traumas and their experiences, what they include and what they leave out. I think about people who weren’t believed, people who were misrepresented, people who were shut down. I think about people who spent so long trying to get a handle on their trauma that any thing or person they might want to stand up to already had so much time to prepare, to seed the ground, to dig in, to get a head start. And I even think about the capacity people have to improve, to feel regret, to move forward as better humans. It’s a potential that I hope exists in us all and the writer Kai Cheng Thom seems to agree, saying that even those who cause harm themselves need help to “exit harmful behaviour patterns.”

Sometimes I think about what a friend of mine said about abusive people just being "regular people with very limited tools." And that’s not so different from a child. Doesn’t that make you feel sad?

I think about all of these things because how could you not? How could you not worry about how taking action to address a terrible thing would, in fact, only make that terrible thing even worse?

There is a paper by the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman called Justice From the Victim’s Perspective that touches on how many processes and pushes toward addressing abuse and trauma can be retraumatising, without any guarantee they will lead to a meaningful outcome or significant change. It touches on how legal processes and systems can be manipulated to further harm and harass those seeking redress, or how disparities of power and status and money can immediately put the damaged and disadvantaged people who try this on the back foot. It touches on difficulties presented by such things as burden of proof, especially combined with the challenge of a memory minced by traumatic events. How does someone demonstrate and prove trauma, or gaslighting, or manipulation, or anything else?

It also talks about how not everybody seeks such things as justice, restitution, revenge, or not always in the ways that we think, and for a multitude of reasons. These can vary from worrying they won’t be believed or that the process will serve them, to wanting to move on, to the idea that it may be pointless, as some “offenders are empathetically disabled… not capable of a meaningful apology, so they can never provide anything to victims that would be useful.”

Both this and the Broken Teapot essay also feature people examining how they themselves have handled abuse and trauma. I think this is probably the most difficult part of many years of therapy, reading and reflection. Sure, it sucks to have been harmed by an event, a situation, a person or a system, but at some point you also start asking yourself difficult questions like “How do I avoid something like this again?” and “Did I do anything that made this worse?” and “Was I codependent, did I enable someone or did I perpetuate something with my reactions or my responses?”

“Abuse dynamics aren’t so simple,” says the Broken Teapot essay, at one small but very important moment, not long after “I was not solely ‘a victim’. Is anyone?” And, after all those years of therapy, reading and reflection, I’ve come to believe that abusive people and systems gain at least some of their power from how you interact with and respond to them. If we were, all of us, perhaps better informed, we might understand, avoid or escape so many difficult things so much sooner.

And while both the Broken Teapot essay and Justice From the Victim’s Perspective talk a lot about sexual assault, their considerations and their examinations of consequence are more broadly applicable. This reflects how I find myself relating to so many stories of trauma and abuse, regardless of what the specifics of any incidents might be. It’s because I recognise the same things in the subsequent developments, reactions and outcomes, much like I might recognise the same chord pattern in different songs. I see people trying to understand their own changing behaviours, trying to articulate why they won’t do a particular thing or go to a particular place any more, trying to both explain and understand how their body or their health has been affected. The specifics don’t need to be the same for so many of the consequences to be. And I recognise and am much more attuned to recognising those consequences.

Both these pieces of writing are also very good at illustrating one of the most important things that you can learn about trauma, and that is, whatever happens or whatever choices you make, things can never be put back in the box.

Trauma is never erased.

---

Here’s what I think is another of the most important things we can learn about trauma, which is that people are generally very bad at dealing with it and are even worse at dealing with it if they are unsupported. And even if they have all the support in the world, they are probably still going to make bad choices, self-sabotage, lose perspective and do things they regret.

They will probably be foolish, be confused and be likely to make choices that could hurt other people. They may not have great insight or work against their own best interests. That doesn’t mean that they get a free pass. It doesn’t mean we are obliged to simply accept these behaviours. But I think these are realistic expectations that we should have.

In his pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes that many trauma responses are “irrational and largely outside people's control,” coming from people who are “rarely in touch with the origins of their alienation.” An awful lot of the book is about helping such people to find ways past this, rather than disregarding them or pushing them away, even though this will be difficult. I don’t remember anything in the book that comes close to “It’s on you to fix your shit.”

---

While one part of me wishes many things had not happened, feeling both weaker and sadder, another part of me acknowledges that I have gained new skills and strengths. And one of the best things about what I’ve gained is that all this doesn’t just help me, but can also be applied to help others.

That’s a good thing.

I’m a tiny bit wiser than I used to be. A lot of reading and talking to experts and digesting all sorts of media leaves its mark. It’s not just that I know a little more about myself and my experiences, it’s that I can now better recognise parallels to those experiences in other people’s situations, behaviours and pasts. I anticipate slightly better, seeing problems further ahead, and I have a stronger sense of what I need to drop or to avoid.

I’m doing better.

---

I don’t have much that I can write here in terms of the specifics of therapy. I would describe a lot of the process of unpacking and analysing the causes of my PTSD as being extremely painful, like trying to both tidy up and then reassemble broken glass with your bare hands. The things that brought about your PTSD are shameful and harrowing. Their analysis can also be, through a process that can variously be sad, scary, frustrating, educational, validating and empowering. It takes a long time and requires expert assistance, which means the help you need can be a somewhat scarce resource and very, very expensive.

You pay for your trauma for a very long time.

---

I discovered one of the most beautiful sounds in the world some time after 2016, some unknown amount of time after I moved into this apartment of mine, with its balcony and its skyscraper views. I don’t remember now when I first heard it, but it’s been years now and I still adore it whenever it happens. It’s small and subtle and can happen at almost any time of night or day. It’s a sound that makes me think of safety and independence, of making my own space and then occupying it. Of security and stability.

I really, really appreciate security and stability. Much as I increasingly seek out change and crave new experiences or opportunities, these things feel so much better if I can enjoy them with the understanding that I have some sort of foundation under me. Something solid. No matter how small or how far away. Some place of safety.

The sound happens when it’s raining. Whatever metal it is that rings my balcony is hollow, so that when rainfall strikes it, it responds with a kind of subtle but sonorous singing. This ringing isn’t the specific sound I’m talking about, though. That sound is slightly different, something that rises above this other background arrangement.

When a particularly large drop of water hits my balcony railing, it gives a flat, gentle ping of appreciation. The background patter of the other raindrops will continue and then, again, after some irregular interval, presumably as water has collected from the balcony above into a particularly large drop, the ping will sound again.

I heard it one morning this spring, months ago now, right after I woke up and not long after I had started writing all this. I lay there in bed on a day the colour of slate and cigarette smoke and I thought about how the world is made up of so many beautiful, tiny things. Ping, goes one of them, and maybe nobody else on the planet notices or cares. But I try to remind myself of this and how my life is full of so many other probably stupid little things that I like, that I love. Don’t lose these things, I try to tell myself. Don’t forget about them and don’t forget to notice them when they happen. You gave yourself so many more of them when you chose to stay alive.

You get a lot of time to think on days the colour of slate and cigarette smoke.

---

You’ll notice I say “sometimes I think about” a lot here, when reflecting on less positive things, and you might consider this a writing device or a cheap hook or some other writer’s cheat. It partly is, but it’s also a truth. I do think about these things, and so many other things, very often. I think about one or another of them almost all of the time. I find it very hard not to think, to turn my brain off, and the unfortunate truth is that it reminds me about things to do with my trauma almost every day. It has done so for six years now and, as we’ve already established, six years is a long time.

Evenings can be the most difficult time. While I’ve always had a flippant attitude toward sleep schedules, I never used to have trouble going to bed. Some nights my brain will never switch off. My memory is overflowing. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired, it makes no difference if I’m exhausted. The rules around sleep are different now and I think I’m still trying to relearn them.

One therapist described the traumatised mind as like an overflowing wastepaper basket full of difficult memories that are constantly falling out. Any new addition can cause one or many of them to spill and scatter. Time and therapy can help to more properly sort them and make space for other, new things.

What a good analogy.

Occasionally, there might be a suggestion of ADHD sent my way. I can understand why things would look that way and a lot has been said by people more experienced than I about how ADHD and PTSD can seem similar. I think if ADHD had ever been the case some mental health professional or other member of the medical community that I’ve dealt with would have spotted this by now. But no. I’m distracted by some memory or flashback. I’m avoidant, or I’m in need of some thrill or stimulation. I might be full of nervous energy or unusually, intensely focused on something because it feels so good to be thinking about something I enjoy.

And sometimes things are bounding out of that wastepaper basket like clowns out of a clown car. I can feel like I've lost a lot of control over my mind and it's all I can do to rein it in. Some days I have coping strategies and some days I'm sick of it and wish I didn't need to have to cope.

And so I keep myself busy with the stimulation and the novelty that I crave. With people. With events. With runs, with the gym and with twenty-five kilometre hikes. Whatever it takes, whenever I can. It’s not ideal. I’m still figuring out what I need. I don’t always get the balance right. Sometimes unexpected things make me very emotional, either very sad or very frustrated, and I rarely know in advance what might do that. Sometimes I sleep less than four hours a night. Sometimes I want to be alone. Sometimes I desperately need company. I probably seem very strange.

But, let’s not forget, in the past I would lose whole days. For hours, my chest would feel like it was being crushed. I might be found curled up on the floor, ashamed of my own sadness. The nightmares would come every week. So things have clearly, obviously, demonstrably improved.

I’m doing better.

---

I still suck at writing. I don’t know how to fix that yet. I still very regularly feel like there is a gulf between me and so many other people, even my friends. I still have outsize reactions to irrelevant, immaterial things. I still lack confidence in my own personal calibration. "Many traumatised people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them,” writes Bessel van der Kolk. Yeah.

Toward the end of its six season existence there is an episode of BoJack Horseman where an actor reacts angrily to some improvisation and unexpected physical contact that happens during filming. Her colleagues are confused as to why she does this, and perhaps she doesn’t understand herself, but we the audience know that this a response to a physical assault by the titular character some time before. She never finds out, but this leads to her missing out on perhaps the biggest opportunity of her life, after a director discreetly describes her as erratic.

There is no further development with this plotline, no resolution to be had. Nobody finds out why she is like this, nor wants to, nor sets things on a new, better course. I try to remind myself that this sort of thing can be happening all the time, to try and grant people some grace and compassion, but also I try to remind myself that this is me. I have my versions of this behaviour. Maybe fewer than I used to, but still. I can be erratic and I have to face the consequences of that, as well as minimise it as much as I can.

I recently stopped buying fresh fruit from my local store because they would repeatedly put mouldy, furry produce on display. The last time I discovered this, I was holding up a box of ostensibly shiny, blood-red strawberries to once again discover the mass of fuzz hidden underneath. Food is expensive enough as it is, I thought, and it doesn’t also need to be garbage. Too late, the look on the face of the customer standing next to me clued me in to how vocal I’d been with my three-word expression of disgust and displeasure.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

---

You’ve read a little about my first dream, about old friends. You’ve read a little about my second dream, the nightmare. Here comes my third, from earlier this summer.

I dreamt that I was trying to get home again. I was confused about where I was, trying to remember a route through unfamiliar Vancouver alleys. It was evening, not yet dark, but the time between when you lose the long shadows cast by the last of the sunlight and begin to wear the rich, jewelled canvas of the stars. None of the people I stopped and spoke to knew the streets I named. None of the alleyways I walked down took me in familiar directions.

I never found my way home, but I never stopped trying. Perhaps this does indeed mean I haven’t reached the end of whatever journey I’m on, that I can’t yet return to the start. I think it’s both practical and pragmatic for me to accept that the next six years might still present me with many challenges. That I will have bad, directionless days. That sometimes I’m going to fuck up and fall short.

I woke up to another bright, warm summer’s day, far later than I meant to, and I made myself a fine cup of coffee and a rich breakfast that I would be foolish not to enjoy.

Sometimes I think about suicide. Those thoughts haven’t left me yet and I’m not sure they ever will. Sometimes they arrive strong and loud and insistent, from out of nowhere and with all the power of a thunderbolt in a storm. Sometimes I want to be a shining example of how to conquer PTSD and sometimes I'm so sad I can’t get out of bed and sometimes I am just pissed off and angry. Each day is still different. But tomorrow I will wake up and perhaps I will think to myself “There are blue skies today,” or perhaps I will hear ping, or perhaps I won’t need anything at all to feel great. And perhaps there will be some undeniable sign in the day’s events, in my behaviour, even in the world around me, that demonstrates to me how much I’ve improved.

Each day is still different and today the glib part of my personality says “I sure hope you’ve improved, it’s been six years! That’s six years of painful PTSD examination, therapy, medication, reading, research, specialist appointments, many thousands of dollars spent and a god damn MRI of your weird and messed up brain.” And am I being disrespectfully flippant of my own experiences when I add that having an MRI of my brain was, at least, kind of cool?

Because another part of my personality wants to remind me I’m wiser, braver and maybe even a little more able to help others, people who I will remind myself can’t be expected to fix their own shit alone. People who shouldn’t be pushed aside, in this society that we all share.

And I don’t regret calling that cunt a cunt.

It’s been six years and each day is still different and this morning, when I pause to ask myself how I’m doing, I find I have the most simple of answers.

It’s three words.

“I’m doing better.”

#PTSD #mental health #survivor #suicide prevention #writing #patreon

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