From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday 19 September, 11:53pm
Subject: Pfft
Your tsunami’s a mere ripple in comparison to the monster wave of I feel sorry for myself that I rode for the majority of last year.
I can totally pick your reaction to the above. You’re red with embarrassment, thinking, ‘That’s what I was trying to say in my email, Taylor. I’ve got no right complaining about my stupid breakup when you’ve been through hell and back’ – STOP RIGHT THERE, Goldie.
As you know, we do not speak of the accident: AKA THE THING THAT HAPPENED.
Yes, it was a seriously crappy thing to go through, and I’m still processing a bunch of emotions about it (and I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon), but that doesn’t mean I’m going to look at your email and think, Goldie’s a self-involved, insensitive human being for talking about how she feels today.
I can tell that you’re holding out on me re the tidal wave of humiliation. You’re obviously embarrassed about more than the text messages you sent on Sunday. It’s something bigger.
So spill. You know I won’t tell your secrets.
Xx Tay
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday 20 September, 8:33pm
Subject: Being real
Truth? I was red-faced reading the first half of your email. I do have the guilts, just like you said.
Part of it is that since we started emailing again, I’ve been this steam train of ISOLDE, ISOLDE, ISOLDE – my breakup, my misery, I can’t cope, send me playlists blah blah blah – just, UGH.
The other bit?
I’ve had the guilts that we haven’t talked about you. Every time I email you, I want to ask you about how you are, about the last nineteen months that I wasn’t around as your friend. But I’ve been too scared. I know you asked me to make a pact that we wouldn’t talk about the accident. I never actually wrote back and said ‘okay’ to that, but I guess silently, I agreed.
I can’t imagine what you’ve been through since losing your leg. But what I do understand is how frustrating it is when you just don’t want to talk about something and someone keeps trying to make you do just that.
So I understand why you wanted to make a pact. But I’m just worried that in agreeing to it that one day you might start to feel like I don’t care. That our friendship only goes one way.
You said in your last email that I can tell you anything. So what I’m going to say back is – that goes for you too.
Now I’m thinking about how you asked me to spill on what’s really embarrassing me. I REALLY don’t want to. But I’d be a hypocrite if I told you that we should be able to share anything with each other, and then I ended the email right here.
Ugh.
Okay, let’s start with . . . you were right, Tay. It’s not the text messages that are the issue. The real reason I feel humiliated is because I feel like an idiot.
Correction: I’m scared I might actually BE an idiot.
I.e.: incapable of recognising the truth when it’s right in front of my face.
Twenty-eight days ago, I loved Aidan. I thought he loved me.
Twenty-six days ago, I walked in on him kissing someone else – someone he’d had feelings for, for most of our relationship.
We dated for five months. I was insulated in this little bubble of I’m so happy. The bubble felt so glorious and happy and safe that I did something crazy.
I said ‘I Love You’ first.
I know. We both know I’m intense, and I feel things like crazy, but I don’t normally share those feelings. Instead, I hug the emotions right against my skin. Because my feelings are – well, they’re mine.
But three and a half months into my relationship, I said: I love you, Aidan. It floated out of me, 1) because of the bubble, and 2) because it was real. I could feel it, right down in my bones.
In reality, I spent five months with someone who was killing time while he waited around for Steffanie to dump her boyfriend.
So I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to come to terms with this killer trio:
Aidan never actually loved me.
I was his ‘make-do’ girlfriend.
I had absolutely NO inkling of 1) or 2).
So basically, this always leads me back to Isolde, you’re such a fool.
I guess what’s eating me up inside is that I don’t trust myself any more. No matter how great the guy or how sure I feel, the reality is now that I’m always going to doubt it.
X Issy
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday 21 September, 1:17am
Subject: RE: Being real
I knew I didn’t like Mr Imbecile, but now I REALLY hate the guy.
Is, you are NOT the idiot in this situation. I know your brain’s already piping up on cue with Um, yes I am, but just consider this:
You might have said ‘I love you’ first – but the guy SAID IT BACK. I’m willing to bet it wasn’t the last time he said it to you either.
Any normal human being who hears ‘I love you too’ believes it. Why wouldn’t you? Think of all the courage you had to summon up to say those three words. (BTW, you might feel embarrassed about saying THOSE THREE WORDS, but I’m proud of you. It’s a BIG thing and it takes guts.) So, if you think about it, it’s an equally scary thing for the other person to say it back.
So when he did say it, of course you took him at his word.
What this experience says about you is that you’re a trusting, loving human being.
You’re not the only one to have said ‘I love you’ first and realise not that far down the track that the other person’s reply didn’t mean a thing.
Yup. I wound up saying those fateful words to Natalia. March, last year.
Didn’t work out so well, did it? :(
At least you can say that no-one warned you about Aidan. Or at least I assume they didn’t. I had a straight-up warning from someone I trusted (aka YOU), and what did I do? I acted like you knew nothing.
You know I spelled the words out in red rose petals in the snow, right? I even posted a shot of it on my Instagram, tagging her. Yup, all 9000 of my snowboarding followers got a load of that.
How’s that for embarrassing?
I’m not sure if the Mum–Louise communication line filled you in on how Natalia ended it.
In June, three months after I Love You, the accident happened. You know the basics: my injuries were so bad that they put me into an induced coma for a couple of days.
About a month after the accident, Natalia flew in to see me. She stayed with Mum and Dad so she could visit me every day for a week, before she had to fly back to the States for a job.
That last morning of her visit, we had a conversation about the fact that she was based in LA, while I’d be here, doing rehab and learning how to walk again with a prosthetic leg. I told her I was scared of what that meant.
There was silence between us for a half-beat. And then she looked me dead in the eye and said, What happened doesn’t change anything with us.
I believed her.
I guess that’s because I wanted to believe her, even though this little nagging doubt was whispering in my ears. I told myself that if she’d been the one in the accident, it wouldn’t make one iota of a difference to how I felt. I loved her, after all.
I won’t bore you by reciting the contents of six weeks of long-distance phone calls. All you need to know is that I could tell, from the tiny inflections in her voice, what was happening.
I was losing her.
I fought like crazy against it. Every phone call, I’d go on about how incredible I thought she was, how much I loved her and how important she was to me. In August, I pulled together every bit of my savings and bought her a plane ticket to Queenstown.
I have a surprise for you, I said the s
econd she answered my call, and then I told her. Instead of a reply, there was a long silence. Then there was a rush of words:
I don’t have the time for a relationship.
It’s not fair on you.
Don’t hate me, please?
Hate her? She was crazy. I loved her.
She ended the phone call, and the last solid thing in my life fell away.
And there began the period I now call Taylor had zero respect for himself.
The texts you sent Aidan would have been nothing on my Don’t Leave Me one-man show – phone calls, voicemails, texts, Facebook messages. A dozen different ways of saying the same humiliating thing over and over:
Please, Nat, don’t do this.
I was pretty much begging for whatever scraps she was willing to throw me.
Anyway, after a few weeks, she stopped answering my calls and didn’t return my texts either, and I sank even further into the depression I was already wrestling with since losing my leg.
Post-accident, I was staying off Instagram, but I made an exception with Natalia. In November last year, she posted a selfie on a plane with a friend. On the friend’s account was a shot of four people, taken in one of those enclosed chairlifts in Switzerland, and there on one of the benches was Natalia. She had her arms around a guy, and they were kissing.
Straightaway, I felt like I was going to vomit, but I told myself the girl in the photo had to be someone who just looked like Natalia.
I tapped on the tag over the guy’s face and found a whole bunch of pictures of them on his account.
The first picture was from mid-August, aka a fortnight after she told me she didn’t have time for a relationship. It was a shot of the two of them at the gym. Her new guy, Jake, was a fitness model. He was deadlifting 160 kilograms, and she was pointing at him, grinning.
What made me even sicker, Goldie, was knowing she was out snowboarding with him. It was like a slap in the face.
So I lost my head and wrote underneath his latest #fitspo post:
Wow, you’re such a MAN, stealing an amputee’s girlfriend.
And then I threw my iPhone at the wall, smashing the screen.
Five minutes later, I went to delete the comment, but by then, a bunch of his followers had seen it and risen to his defence. I deleted the comment, but people had screenshotted ‘receipts’ and then the whole thing wound up on Twitter. Because Natalia was tagged, a bunch of her followers jumped on board the abuse-train, and the whole thing went berserk. As I’d taken down all the pictures of us together, Jake’s followers were all You’re a sad little liar and You WISH you’d dated her (amongst other things way too rude to put in this email). With people coming @ me like crazy, it was only a matter of time before the info dropped that I was an amputee. That got the trolls off my back, but at the same time, it felt like the whole world suddenly knew about my accident and my leg, which I didn’t feel ready for at all.
I swore off social media for a year. I’ve only just dared to get back on. You’ll see my Insta profile is set to private. What I hope you’ll take from this story is:
1) Everyone does something embarrassing after being dumped.
2) Sometimes the people we love aren’t who we think they are.
You can either beat yourself up about 1) and/or 2) forever, OR you find a way to forgive yourself.
A year on from my mess, I know that the last option is the best one to go with if you want to get over your ex.
Never getting over Mr Imbecile is a fate I wish on no-one. Especially you. You deserve all-round awesomeness in life.
I know what I’m about to write might sound harsh – but hear me out.
It’s a good thing that Aidan revealed his true colours early on.
It’s better that he’s out of your life because when the going gets tough – which it does, trust me – you don’t want that type of shallow love.
You and I, we go deep. Hold out for someone who does the same.
Xxooooo (extra hugs because I know you need them)
Tay
P.S. I’m sending you something in the mail – keep an eye out for it :)
Taylor
Saturday 22 September
I tell Issy about that moment in the hospital with Natalia, the one where she said: What happened doesn’t change anything with us. But I don’t tell Is about the other one. I’ve never told anyone, not even Claire, my counsellor, because honestly . . . I don’t like to think about it.
It happened the second day that Natalia visited me in hospital. She was sitting in the chair next to my bed and we were watching TV together. A nurse came in to rewrap my compression bandage. They did this four or five times a day, wrapping the limb in a figure-eight technique to reduce the swelling and increase the circulation around my stump. The compression bandage also helped to ‘shape’ the limb in preparation for my prosthetic fitting down the track, once I was moved to rehab.
I really wanted to ask the nurse to come back later, when Natalia had gone, but I knew that was stupid. Natalia was here for a week and she had to see my leg sometime. It was better to get it over with.
I still felt sick when the nurse pulled the covers off me.
My eyes went straight to Natalia’s, of course, even though part of me didn’t want to look for her reaction. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at my leg. The nurse had only just started unravelling the bandage, but already I could see the expression forming on Natalia’s face.
I would have understood if she’d looked confronted. The way my leg looked – well, it was different to before. It wasn’t as shocking as it had been a week out from the op, when the stump was badly swollen and staples dotted the fold of skin. I’d struggled to look then, whenever the nurses had changed the dressings.
But in the fortnight since the operation, the swelling in the limb had gone down. The doctors and nurses had been encouraging me to look at my stump – and to touch it as well.
‘You need to re-establish a connection with your body,’ they said to me, more times than I could count. ‘The sooner the better.’
And that had been . . . well, really hard at first. Trying to get my head around the fact that this stump, fifteen centimetres from my knee, was part of my body. Was me. It was still sinking in, to be honest.
So, yeah, I would have understood if Natalia had been shocked when she saw it. But it wasn’t surprise or shock scrawled across her face. Her nose crinkled ever so slightly – just for a second – like she’d seen something repulsive.
It was gone by the time she looked at me. She gave me this odd little smile and then pointed at the TV, saying something about one of the characters. She laughed like she was unfazed by what had just happened.
But I knew then. She couldn’t handle what I looked like now.
That was the moment I realised she’d end up dumping me eventually.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday 22 September, 9:19pm
Subject: RE: Being real
Tay . . . I know that wouldn’t have been an easy email for you to write. And if I’m honest with you, it wasn’t an easy one to read – not because of your honesty, or the story you told me, but because, well, you know how I feel about you.
I get we’ve just come out of a long communication freeze. I know I was fuming at you, and you were furious at me, and then fury became hurt and pride too, but honestly . . . you’re Taylor to me.
Do you remember that time on the North Island when we visited Hot Water Beach? We can’t have been older than six or seven. Your cousins from Auckland were there – Georgia and Mikayla – and so was Mikayla’s friend Kasey. Remember how Kasey wanted to swap hot pools with us ’cause you’d done an epic job with digging the sand for us so that we had an awesome hot pool, and when we wouldn’t switch, she threw a whole handful of sand straight in your eye?
I’m sure you remember what happened next.
Yup, I tackled that girl like an A
ll Blacks player. I don’t remember deciding to launch myself at her. All I know is she tried to hurt you, and I just saw red.
Anyway, that’s still in me. That fierceness when it comes to you.
I know you were embarrassed about telling me what you called the ‘Taylor-had-no-respect-for-himself’ story. But you know how I see it?
I feel respect for what you did.
I love that you fought like mad to keep that love alive (even if I do hate the girl you were fighting for). I love the fact that in your guts, you knew that if what had happened to you had happened to Natalia, it wouldn’t have changed a thing between you.
Tay, that kind of stuff is beautiful.
You sent me extra hugs – I’m sending a score back.
Xxxxxxxoooooooo Goldie
Parcel in Isolde’s Mailbox
Friday 28 September
Hey Goldie,
As you know, the Aidan/I-Love-You story left me livid. All I could think was, What can I do to help?
It’s been forever since you visited us, so you’ve got to be hanging out for some NZ chocolate, right?
Xxx Tay
Instagram DM Conversation
Friday 28 September, 7:31pm
Ana Zhang: It feels seriously stupid to be DMing you when you’re RIGHT NEXT TO ME IN THE CAR, but seeing as you won’t talk about the parcel in front of your mum, DMing is my only way of saying TAYLOR IS AMAZING.
Isolde Byrne: You know if Mum hears Taylor and I are emailing, she’ll be all, ‘You see? If I HADN’T told Maia, you and Taylor wouldn’t have got back in touch.’ Then we’ll have to sit through that spiel all the way to Manly. You’re only here for the weekend – you don’t need to hear that!
Ana Zhang: I don’t want to talk about your mum. I WANT TO TALK ABOUT TAYLOR and the emails he’s been sending you. THAT’S the type of guy you want, Is.
Isolde Byrne: THAT’S Taylor, aka the guy I’ve known my whole life. Stop making him my boyfriend-in-waiting. Plus, I’m never falling in love again. Love is for suckers.
Ana Zhang: I’m about to glance up from my phone and send you my best YEAH RIGHT look.
The Long Distance Playlist Page 6