This Harming Man

He left me via text message - your bog-standard "I don't want a relationship/It's not you it's me/insert lame excuse here". Then he proceeded to block me on social media. The nerve. The affrontery. The sheer assholery of the man.

A few years ago, I unexpectedly met someone new. Someone I actually liked. Not as common an occurrence as one might think.

And in those initial heady days of nosing out each other's common interests like pigs on a truffle hunt, I experienced the elation of each discovery.

I was already pleasantly surprised that we liked the same musical genre, but when it transpired that we shared a mutual love for the same band, then that was just the white truffle shaving, to crown the gooeyiness of the courtship risotto that we were nurturing and simmering.

During our online chats and while out on dates, we would discuss the band with gusto, coaxing out each other's favourite songs, lyrics, albums, almost in a spirit of one-upmanship to prove who the bigger fan was. But the band in question was The Smiths, so the enthusiasm had to be watered down with a touch of ennui and melancholy. We simply would not allow ourselves to gush over The Smiths as if we were boy-band groupies - so uncool and unhip, Morrissey would have been appalled.

The ensuing months however, also revealed our differences. Our conversations were rarely humdrum, peppered with arguments that typically ended in a truce, outwardly agreeing to disagree, while inwardly clinging to our own convictions.

But this is not a story about a relationship, and more about the ensuing fallout, spectacularly cut and dry as it was. The roses he sent me on Valentine’s Day had barely withered in their vase, when that message pinged in, and he popped out of my life just like that. How dare he ghost me in this manner? And with my hackles well and truly raised, I did what people sometimes do in these situations. No, I did not resort to vengeful retaliation. I would not stoop so low. I would instead slither and sink into an exclusive pity-party which I threw for myself - the few friends I let in, bravely stood around for a while, listening sympathetically to my rants and moans, and declarations of never-agains. After a while, exhausted and with nerves well frayed, they too slipped away quietly, and I didn’t blame them. Even I didn’t want to be alone with me at that point.

Misery does love company though, so when one doesn’t find it in other humans, one seeks it out in other much-loved go-tos. Sad movies, poetry, self-help books, and my perennial saviour – music. Or was it?

The opening strains to my favourite Smiths song hit me like that double decker bus, then reversed over me like the ten-ton truck. Because now, now my favourite band was also his favourite band, and they were ruined for me. Ruined I tell you. How could I listen to my beloved Smiths now without thinking of him at all? It was a shocking revelation. In order to erase him from my memory, I would also have to painstakingly avoid Morrissey and Co. My mental well-being demanded it, but my pity-party desperately needed The Smiths! I took a stab at listening to my perennial favourites, but it was too much – my beloved Morrissey, the pope of mope, still sounded his same woeful self, but now the memories were tainted. A miserable state of affairs indeed.

That’s the thing with memories. You never know when one is about to hobble you, Annie Wilkes-style, with a sledgehammer to the ankles. One time my friends lured me out to an 80s party, which ended up with me seriously wishing to hang the DJ. Another time I was driving in my car, playlist on shuffle, when bam – Morrissey is pleading to “take me out tonight” – and for a second there I wish somebody really would – in the organised-crime-gangster meaning of the phrase.

Wasn’t it already enough that he had dumped me so unceremoniously and chipped at my self-esteem like a sculptor on speed? This couldn’t go on. I had to put a stop to it. I was a girl on a mission, a mission to reclaim The Smiths for myself once more.

Every mission needs a well-thought out plan – but the more I thought about it, the worse it got. One simply cannot go about strategizing and planning a mission on how to forget someone ever existed, without thinking of that person. I thought of going the opposite way, of sitting myself down to binge-listen to The Smiths until they somehow belonged to only me again. I managed two entire songs. So much for that. How long was this all going to take? How soon is now?

It took about a year, to become the walking poster girl for that mother of all clichés, that time heals all wounds. However that sounds too passive, and doesn’t do justice to my mission statement: Operation Honey Laundering – I pledge to rid myself of the stain tainting The Smiths, by washing it away with the earlier, stronger memories of what they’d meant to me in the years B.C. (Before Coward).

After all, wasn’t it Morrissey himself who sang “Don’t forget the songs that made you cry, and the songs that saved your life?” And it was my favourite song that came to my rescue. There really was a light that never went out, deep within me - the light of hope, expectation, thrills for the unexpected, yet undamped by the cynicism of the passing years and creeping middle age. We all have it somewhere inside us – sometimes it’s just a flicker, sometimes it radiates so brightly it is almost tangible, enough to illuminate a room.

The other day I heard he got married. I hope for her sake that she’s into heavy metal.