What Could Have Been

What's the difference of loving a gal compared to being in love? He knew the answer, oh yes he did. He had been only ever in love with one woman. He had loved a certain gal for almost eight years now. Eight long tough lonely years she was inside him, all that time. She was like him in so many ways, how could he not be in love with her forever? Would it to be wise to share her name with you, he thought, for its all so very true. No, I'll change it in respect of her privacy. Also there were other gals before and since, who meant nothing. He used them to pass the time. They deserved anonymity. They all did. This story is on going and won’t end till the certain gal says yes or he takes his last mortal breath. Darkness and suicide is out there, on his horizon.

Memories from that time cascaded through his mind like dark wicked forbidden dreams in the black labyrinth of the night; almost unreal but it was real once, long ago. The event was like a glitch, did it really happen at all? Now little real remained, but in his head. It must have been because nothing doesn’t leave after affects like this, for eight years always there hiding deep within his being.

Did she ever think of him in that time afterwards? Was she still single when he was in London last summer, when the gal he moved to be with left him? A dangerous what if, how far apart was they in miles then? He wanted to know, to get the answers but one bigger answer was in his head. Was there a second chance? If being together were governed by love and emotions alone, the couple would be together for a thousand years but in a world ruled by rigid natural laws that was impossible. Where to start this marauding story? The beginning, for sake of sanity and common sense, it all started when the lad in question joined an old online pen pal site, now gone. He wanted new friends, pen pals, bands to listen to and romance. A young lady replied to one of his ads by announcing, “You'll do!” Who started it? Her with her reply or him with his ad? They were both to blame.

We'll call him Fred; he joined the pen pal site in about 2003/4. On it he chatted to many people, it was the gal who ensnared him that did it. With her simple words, “You'll do,” setting the trap that held Fred till now, March 2012. She was called Betty and she was 28, a Sagittarius with all the traits of that fiery sign. This clashed with his Leo sign, dooming their fast online love affair. Betty and the event took Fred from his most exhilarating highs to his lowest darkest times. By one single letter sent from America, two or three long distance calls and a couple of dozen emails, the scene was set. How was that possible? Each letter and word in his or her communication was an emotional sentence that would last a lifetime. He wanted to gauge the affect of each word, was it worth one month’s heady high and then eight years torment? He had to get his head around it. Or madness beckoned.

***

Back to the early days. Betty was something. Long dark brown hair worn long and free like her spirit, she had pretty oval brown eyes and a pointed face giving the impression that she was an elf but an oh so pretty one. Was it her free spirit, her lovely esoteric looks or her warm heart that stole his heart? Forever, for she was the biggest thief he had ever come across, he couldn’t say met because that had never happened when she left him.

He noticed her photo on her pen pal profile. She was looking at an early type of webcam so the pic wasn’t too clear but good enough to see her. She was looking at the pc screen, not the camera so it was like she was looking a little away, was that a good or bad sign in the days and weeks to follow? Not fully focused, distracted.

Betty had the most delightful charisma she gave off from the first email on the pen pal site. She replied to my ad asking for what? A pen pal, friend or girlfriend? Which I can’t remember. I am Fred and I clicked with Betty, it was those honest brown eyes that led direct to her soul that grabbed my attention. I wanted this gal, this woman, for the rest of my life. We sent messages via the pen pal site and then by email to our own accounts. She was something dreamily esoteric like purple pixie dust; I was the dark being from the gothic universe being drawn towards her.

Each time I logged on to the pen pal site I looked at Betty's mystical eyes and imp/elf like pretty face and started to fall in love, unlike ever before. I read her music tastes, a mix of Goth, indie and alternative. Bands like Warsaw/Joy Division, Siousxie, Dead Can Dance and Franz Ferdinand.

When it came to music Fred was a bit of a Goth, he loved it passionately. Bands like The Gathering and Lacuna Coil from Europe, Tristania and Sirenia from Scandinavia. This showed how cultured he was. He also loved 80s Goth, some metal, girl singers, alternative music and good pop. So musically Fred and Betty were boy meets gal, an ideal match.

Betty explained she was a teacher who wrote poetry in her spare time. She sent some to Fred and gave him the links to what she had online. He read her work with delight, she wrote like he did from the heart. Betty said she wore her heart on her sleeve, her poems covered romance gone wrong, nature and other delicate matters. Fred told Betty he was a poet and had been published many times over the years. He emailed her some of his work that was quite dark compared to hers. Would she like it? He waited impatiently for her answer. When it came he was surprised, she loved his poems, saying he was better than her!

Fred got to know Betty in the passing days; she breathed new life into his stale existence on the dole with no day job. His loneliness hung over him like the memories of old gals he had dated and past friends now no more, gone. The past always snapping at one’s heals, his new American sweetheart said, I know just how you feel. Lost, alone, unwanted and unloved, in utter despair.

Would that all end? Betty explained how she currently lived in the land of gators and swamps and that she'd soon be moving over to England. She said she'd been living here before in Manchester and London.

I asked if she was with a guy during that time and she said, yeah. I knew he'd been with Betty for a while. A woman like that wasn’t alone for long. She had been a naughty gal over staying her visa. I think it was by eighteen months. She got a bollocking when returning to the States because a relative was ill.

On her return to England Betty would be with me, either in my crap northern town or in a city from where my father was from, Durham. I'd be happy anywhere with Betty. We even talked on the phone of me going working in America doing a fast one, no visa, doing warehouse or driving work if I wanted a change and easy cash. If not, I’d just chill with Betty and enjoy my break from England. I explained that I’m a writer, a published poet and love doing that, I want to make a career of it. She even said we can get a place together; I can stay at home writing and put my first book together while she works doing her teaching job. I was thrilled! Imagine all my dreams about to come true, a surreal feeling of me, Fred, reaching my full potential in life. I'd never done that before and no one had ever believed in me like Betty did, not even Tina my ex wife who had been a pagan white witch.

Fred was something special. He was a published poet of several dozen times in the 'small press', the poetry scene in mags, anthologies and 'zines. A remarkable achievement for a self taught poet on the dole being long term unemployed, living in a mouldy council flat in a big rundown riot town north of Manchester. Everyone knew how run down that town was, no jobs, no potential, definitely not for an aspiring author. Betty must be mad getting involved with a loser like Fred who had no job, no car, didn’t own his own house, bought all of his clothes in charity shops to make up his gothic look, whose only positive contribution to the world was his writing.

Betty loved Fred's writing. She read his poems quietly in class while her students did their work. Maybe she even read some of Fred's more tame positive work out, he can’t remember. When she left him his mind collapsed.

Fred was at a training centre while on the dole doing job searches. Here he wasn’t really learning anything but how to do a CV and looking for work when there wasn’t any. He regularly emailed his new love on the pen pal site and by normal email. When asked what he was doing one day, Fred told the truth to the member of staff - I’m sending my future wife an email.

Well don’t, he was told.

Did I really say that, my future wife? Fred promised himself that when he left Tina he would never marry again. After five years he changed his mind, just like that. His first wife was something but Betty was ten times better. He'd landed on top of the mountain with this one and got the gal who would show him a new and better life.

They had another phone talk at his mum’s, even talking of getting married at first to build a good foundation, a sensible move he agreed. Or was it because she wanted a visa and UK citizenship, he thought in March 2012?

On the phone they talked of making love. Betty and Fred spoke of intimate things, she said of how she liked it slow when in a sensual move or enjoying a quick fuck. Just mere words shared between two people, a bridge had been crossed and trust established. But really it was the beginning of the end, Fred mentioned in several emails and a letter he couldn’t wait to make love to his new gal. She thought he only wanted her for this, how wrong Betty was. Fred should have kept his erotic thoughts to himself, what a way to learn. As he read the only ever letter from her he started to cry. It was such a happy letter, before this tragic time.

Dreams of a new life with a nice beautiful gothic lady just collapsed. Betty started ignoring Fred's emails; he picked this up quickly but didn’t know what was up. He didn’t know it was him saying he wanted to make love to Betty and get to know her erotically, was the problem. When she did reply, she said she wasn’t mad or had fallen out with me. Fred relaxed momentarily but unease washed over him like dirty dish water. She replied, “I got a bad feeling about you, you just want me for my body. You treat me like a vagina and all your messages are crudely nasty sexual ones.”

How wrong Betty was about Fred, he meant his messages to be sensual and erotic. Not nasty and crude. To him they were. It was a big difference of opinion that doomed their relationship before it started or had met or got married or lived together or had kids or grew old together or...

The fact again: how wrong Betty was. She advertised for someone else on the pen pal site, “American girl coming to England seeks her soul mate Manchester, London, anywhere...” Silly bloody red neck gal had her soulmate and lost him. Gone, over, lost forever, consigned to the dustbin.

Fred wept like a child, for he'd been forsaken by his one true love. His mind was a ruin damaged beyond reason and understanding. He never had felt such emotional pain as he cried uncontrollably. He found he had a knife in his left hand, a brass handled lock knife. This was the tragic moment Fred started to self-harm aged 33. He cut deep into his right leg till it bled red, carving his leg with his religious symbol a pagan pentagram, as if his religion his ex wife had left him would save him. Did he also carve her name onto his leg? Betty. He can’t remember but the pentagram is still visible 8 years on. Through streaming tears that blurred his vision Fred lied on his bed, knife in hand cutting his perfect leg to bits. A line had been crossed forever after Betty broke his heart.

Yet he still loved her, always would. They were soulmates brought together by what? Fred should never have said those sexual things and Betty should have never have broken his heart, wounding his soul. Did it not hurt her to do this? Of course it must have. In his lucid moments, Fred wrote heartbreaking poetry that he never showed anyone for years, only publishing it in his fourth book after much soul searching. He'll never let his mother read that book because those poems are too sad. She must never know what a gal did to her son or how close to the edge her son felt. People who read those poems told Fred that he described the road to hell very well. He was an eye witness.

Yea, he replies, it's the truth. I left out how I nearly went and stabbed two lads who disrespected me. Yea, Fred could have murdered two lads who pissed him off. He won’t go into detail but it was a very close thing. His hand almost opened his front door, the lock knife was in his pocket and he would have been with the lads in 2 minutes by running up the hill. But something mercifully stopped Fred from doing the evil act, he turned and went to his room and wept. He used the knife on himself cutting a pentagram on his right leg, releasing all manner of pain. Many times over the confusing days he did it, he was so lost and alone and hurt. His friend Sara called round, she saw how upset he was and the cuts on his leg. She thought, What the hell? It was like you needed me there then at that moment. What would Fred have done if Sara wasn’t there? Suicide? A pretty young Goth gal called Betty did all this. Fred never forgot her, always loved her.

Then in mid 2010 Fred saw Betty's lovely face online again. Old feelings of lost love rose to the surface from deep within. He still felt for her, loved her. In love? What to do? She had a different last name now so she must be married. A guy had his Betty, was where Fred should be. Why? Why was it like this? He wanted to tell her that he still loved her after all these years, that he wanted a 2nd chance with her. He wouldn’t ask her himself because of the fuss, after much soul searching he asked a trusted friend to help for she understood his predicament. Miracles can happen after all.

But his friend let him down and he acted himself, sending Betty a message and friend add. She accepted and replied back, asking how he was. Fine he replied, at least she still cared. He mustn’t confuse sympathy with love. Then it became too much for Fred when she ignored his messages and he deleted her, another overreaction by him. Why did this happen?

His old mate is still the Yank gal’s mate; Fred blocked them both on the online site. He sent Betty three emails to her separate accounts saying how he wanted a second chance, how they had lived just thirty miles apart down the A-12 road in Essex, she near Southend and him in a few nearby towns over his time there. He moved down south and was there for three years, living a lie with another girl.

Betty and Fred’s lives ran on parallel paths, never crossing. So close yet so far. She never replied but must have read his words and known his views, did she care? He found out she left England in March and he missed her; she was in the States with her new English husband. What would have happened if he had been with his girlfriend who he had a child with and they all met in Southend? It would have been kaos. Some sleeping dogs are best left alone.