John

At one point in my life I was seeing John, a half Italian half Romanian man who was ten years older and ten centimetres shorter than me. I met him on the night of my eighteenth birthday, while dying for a cigarette outside a pub we were celebrating my birthday in. John was standing next to a friend of mine, talking and joking. From first glance I thought he was Turkish because of his tanned skin, black hair and dark brown eyes. Encouraged by the alcohol I drank earlier and the attractiveness of the man standing a few steps away from me I made a move and the next thing I knew was we were talking, smoking, joking around and exchanging numbers.

John liked to talk a lot. He had millions of stories about fights he's been in, the army, women, Afghanistan (according to him he spent a year in Afghanistan), drugs, Italian Mafia and so on. John used to say that he had a lot of health problems, both mental and physical. He was also married and had a five year old son, so he loved talking about his wife and how much he hated her. John had three jobs: he worked in a farm at daytime, was a bouncer at pubs at night-time and also bought and sold cars on 'ebay'. If people owed him money he would beat it out of them, which is why he didn't really have many friends. The only person I know who really respected John was my fifteen year old brother who thought John was someone you 'wouldn't want to mess with' and also someone you can 'call when you are in trouble'.

Even I'm not sure why I was seeing John. I didn't really care what was happening to me at the time and when people asked me why did I do certain things I would simply answer 'why not?'. Being with John was something to do and probably I just did it because I could. Not that we did much together though, our 'relationship' was pretty monotonous: most of the time he'd pick me up with his big car (he had a Jeep-type car at the time), drive around complaining about everything and telling me stories about his tragic life while I was completely quiet, often mocking him in my mind. Eventually he'd stop somewhere remote and we would have sex in the back-seat. We also argued a lot just because we both liked arguing and the make-up sex that followed it. I didn't tell my friends a lot about this 'relationship' but I remember making my best friend Lauren laugh by saying completely honestly, 'The only things we do is f*ck and fight, fight and f*ck, and I'm absolutely all right with that'.

I obviously didn't love John, I didn't even like him. I thought of him as immature and unintelligent, strange and embarrassing and altogether unfitting to be my or anyone else's boyfriend. And yet I was with him, not because I cared about him but precisely because I didn't care about either him or myself. I knew I was the only good thing in his life at that time and maybe that made me feel important. Often I thought of him as a child who needed taking care of. When John was upset I would stroke his hair, he'd relax and say 'Nobody has ever stroked my hair like that before, except maybe my mum when I was little and couldn't sleep'.

I say that John was not a fitting boyfriend but really, he was perfect for me at the time. I needed someone simple, someone I didn't need to say much to or think with. When he wasn't talking I would slowly trace my fingers through his naked body, arms or legs and ask how did he get each individual scar. He had tens of them, he also had tens of mental scars and I would listen to each of his stories about horrible things which happened to him yet it would stop me from thinking about things which bothered me, my own mental scars, scars in this world which I felt responsible for yet couldn't do anything about. He would tell me how messed up his life was, how people are unjust and cruel. Ironically this would distract me from the cruelty of the real world. John seemed like a character from a film or a book, a fictitious character that didn't really exist in real life. He simply couldn't and I was sure everyone would agree with me if only they saw the way he held himself, if only they heard the way he spoke and the things he said.

The only thing I didn't want John to talk about was his wife because when he did it made me think and almost made me feel guilty. His wife whom I never saw or met was the only thing which connected John to real life. She was here, in the same town as me, looking after John's child. I felt her presence more than John's, I felt she and her child were more real than the man I am stealing from them, the man who is unfaithful to them with me. Of course John said that it was 'all over' with her and the only reason he hasn't divorced her is the child. I knew he wasn't lying because he wasn't capable of lying, he wasn't capable of keeping anything only in his head. John would say something first and then think about it, he couldn't do it the other way around even if he tried, maybe he needed to verbalise his thoughts for them to become real. I'm sure half of the stories he told me were not true, on the other hand they weren't malicious lies because John was very much like a child, he would make up a story and then believe it himself, unable to separate it from the actual events that happened.

Breaking up with John was even easier than being with him. I said, 'It's over'. He said, 'OK' and then rambled on for another hour and a half about something I can't even recall. He probably just got bored with me, like a child gets bored with a toy after a while, and was relieved that he didn't need to break up with me.

I don't know why but I can't force myself to see John as a bad guy, he's way too simple and traumatised to be malicious. I don't really believe in such concepts as faithfulness or love among others, they are just social constructs and in the bigger scale of things nobody has done anything wrong. Except maybe John wearing a necklace with a cross and his human-god nailed to it while committing adultery on the back-seat of his environmentally monstrous car.