Sitting on a bench at London Bridge station, waiting for the train to Gatwick after a 10-day flying visit from Mexico to the UK to see my love, $800 rtn from Phoenix, took the bus up there from the boat, flew across, and all because I was madly in love and he had suggested I 'visit my bank to sort out card issues'. It was the last 10 days of his 6 week vacation there and he had nothing to rush back to the US for and as he often told me, 'had so much money he won't be able to spend it in a lifetime', well, I was sad that he didn't pay the few dollars to change his ticket, it would have shown me that he was as madly in love with me, as I was with him, I even chose to fly back on the same day, just so that we might meet the other end, that didn't cross his mind, we arrived at the same time but he didn't seek me out, no, he'd had his fun and was heading back to his world, a world he kept me from via limited 90-day slots, I could never settle, never, and he wondered why I couldn't 'relax' in the end. Anyway, as we sat at the train station, out of the blue he said to me, 'I will always love you, even when it's over'.


I felt like I'd been hit by a train. How could this man talk so casually about love to the woman who had just left her boat in hurricane season, out in the Chubasco-vulnerable bay, and had flown using her Freedom Kitty to be with the man she loved, and here he was talking about how he'd still love her when it was over, and he did say, 'when', not 'if' and I looked at him and said, 'How can you say that, how can you even think about not being with me, this is love, this is special' and he replied, 'Just saying, I could never hate you.'

Well, he does hate me. If ever he saw me again, he'd 'put his fist in my face'. I 'disgust' him. He cannot believe that he ever fell in love with me. And so on.

Anyway, I was thinking about why it all went to shit, on my morning walk to nowhere this morning, was thinking deeply about what flaws I might have to have made this man treat me like he did in the end, why didn't I just get over the things which hurt me and made it hard to 'relax', why am I alone in life, not even my family gives a shit, am I actually a fatally flawed person and did I deserve everything that came to me, and the answer is - no.

Here's my take on me.

I feel that I was born with a very strong sense concerning what is right and what is wrong.
It is the ever-present child in me, my soul untainted by the deceptions that the adult world creates.
There is right and there is wrong and there is always a clear distinction, we always know what is wrong, always.
As a child, and into my teens, it was wrong of my mother to verbally and physically abuse me, and even though I would lie in bed of a morning, crying at the thought of my mother dying one day - I loved her deeply, regardless of her mood swings - there came a day, quite out of the blue, when enough was enough and within minutes I had gotten out of the car with the words, 'Fuck you! I am never coming back!' and that was it, the beginning of a life lived without the support of a loving family base.

I had never sworn at my mother before, indeed, I didn't swear, it didn't 'suit' me, I was actually a child who wouldn't want to do anything wrong, I didn't even steal cigarettes from my mother, like other kids would do, I didn't even smoke behind the sports hall, I was, and still am, a child at heart and those things were wrong.  Anyway, I left home because it wasn't right that my mother took out her personal demons on me, I wanted a chance at life and I wouldn't get that chance if I remained dependant upon mum, we lived too far out in the sticks for me to have done so, indeed, up until that last day of school before final exams started, when I 'ran away' for good, I had been cycling from the house in Marchington to the school bus stop in Needwood, 10kms each way and up and down hills, for months, having grown tired of mum saying things like, 'I'm not your taxi driver!!' and the stress I would feel of a morning having to wake her up in time to get me to the bus stop, she'd more often than not have had a few drinks the day before, she was always in a bad mood and it was just easier if I started to look after myself, and so I cycled instead, on a crappy red Raleigh 14 with small wheels, uh, I hated that bike, I always wanted a Raleigh 17 with big wheels and a basket.

Yep, I had been cycling for months, twenty clicks a day, would leave my bike at Needwood Farm where my school friend lived, yes, for months I had been looking after myself, and then the night before the last day of school, it's a big day, we get to write on the shirts of our friends, mum comes into my room that night and says that she'll drive me to the bus stop tomorrow, I told her that I was fine, that I'd cycle, but she insisted. The following morning it was hard to wake her up, here we go again, and when she finally got up she ranted and raved at me for having not woken her up sooner, and then in the car she went on and on and on about how I was a failure, how I could never do anything right, how all I cared about was make-up and clothes, and well, when she hit me for touching the temperature control thing in the car, that was it, I'd had enough, this was wrong, how she was treating me, her daughter, was very wrong, and even though she was my mother, I did not play with wrong, and never would, and so I left. Just like I should have left him in March 2008, when I the man I loved told me he was busy and then watched me take my dream out of the water.

After leaving home, 3 years later I had successfully entered university, the first person in our family to do so, and after graduation, even though my mother was about to enter a losing battle with cancer, I left the UK and moved to Japan, had we had a better relationship, I would have stayed, but I left, I needed to be able to survive, to support myself, and getting out of the rut that I had landed in upon graduating in a year that had record high numbers of unemployed, where I found myself working in a factory in Salford, packing plant orders made by Sunday magazine readers, was more important than staying with my mother because she was still being mean to me, putting me down whenever she could, and it was just wrong to treat another like that, so I left, and she died whilst I was drinking two pints of Guinness in the old airport in Kuala Lumpur, on July 2nd, 1992. I also think that when my mother left me in the care of a lady called Joy when I was 18-months old until I turned 3, created the survival blueprint in me.

My family, who I had been very close to, especially my uncles and aunts, having lived with both sets, first when I was 8 years old, and then from 16 to 19, when I lived in London and took care of my younger cousins, whilst retaking exams before taking more exams to enter university, well, they pretty much dropped me when mum died, unbelievable really, just when you'd assume that you would be brought closer into the family fold, it wasn't like I had a father for support, nope, suddenly I became the Black Sheep, 'galavanting around the world whilst your mother was sick!' and other suburban myths. Whatever. How they treated me was wrong but I was strong enough to continue to survive with happiness, out there in the big wide world that I loved so very much, so very, very much.

My flaw is being a stickler for what is right and for what is wrong. If you wrong me, I would expect you to change for the better, I would expect you to make it up to me, depending on the gravity of the wrong. If you cheat on me, which is the worst thing anybody can ever do to the person who loves you, who has moored their world for you, then you make up for it by making sure that I feel loved and desired by you, that you are so sorry that you cannot wait to make it up to me, that you are sorry that you lied about being busy for an entire year, that you now realise that my going back to Japan because you were 'busy' was because I was in love with you, my boat dream was over, it was all about you now, and being practical and never secretly tingling with glee that I was dating a millionaire, so I would not longer have to worry about saving money, I went back to WORK to save more money, as it is in my DNA to survive having always had to do so alone, but taking the boat out of the water after all the work I did on it, new rigging, the lot, wasn't because I needed to work again, it was because I was so in love with him, and then he did something very, very wrong, he had sex with another person in my 6th week of returning to Japan, he even wrote about her to his friend, not a mention of me in the email, 'Kak wants me to stay longer, what do you think? I've been partying hard with the Huns, too' - yep, no mention of me, no mention of how he was winding things down so that he could meet me in the summer vacation, nope, and his friend replies, 'You can't go wrong with a Maltese in the bay with her own boat (the woman had read my blog and been inspired to get her own boat, the problem was, she had no savings and in the end she stripped the boat of all its gear, selling it to keep going and having to leave town because she couldn't pay the owners in the end, she was bad all-round, especially for fucking him, she knew how much I loved him, indeed, I had cried when telling her how in love I was with him and then she did this to me, as he too did this to me) and the friend continued, 'Plough on in, buddy!'

Wrong, so very wrong. And wrong of the man I loved to then go off on a solo trip to Panama for three months just when I had attained my freedom from that year of work. And he expected me to get over it, to 'relax' and then made it even worse by inviting the aforementioned buddy and his wife to come and live with us, like really, who was I in his world?

Yes, it is a fatal flaw to have been born with zero tolerance for the hurtful mistakes of others. It is my downfall. I wish I was different, I wish that I had not felt so hurt by that second blow to our love - the first being the 2008 'busy' lie, then the infidelity - but I was hurt and yet I stayed with him and had forgiven him until, that is, the third blow, Panama, it was like a fist in the face, that's for sure, and made me so sad, so very sad, I could not enjoy the leaving party, I could not enjoy my time in Thailand whilst he hung out with the Hun and German chicks on the boat, sailing to San Blas, living it up in Colombia, and he thought that okay, that I would be fine with his plan, that it fit into his definition of 'busy until June'. I wish I was not a person who would become so hurt by such choices of another. But I am. And it killed all the delight in me and turned me into a monster.