cold blooded old times
on breaking no contact
This is the worst thing Patrick has ever said to me: ‘Sometimes I wonder if you actually like being like this.’
— Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss
Tuesday morning in the office. All the high achievers worked from home so it was just the new-ish starters and our business manager eating ice cream and making cold calls. It was our second heatwave of the month and everything felt sticky. Sweat on my throat and the backs of my knees. The dark mastitic nipples of cherries oozing onto hot cobblestones in the park. Little pools of pistachio ice cream on my desk. After work, I’d taken to watching aspirational reels on Instagram—not people showing off their wealth of exploring the world but instead simply spending $200 in a Chinese clinic to undergo a full body check-up in exchange for a detailed report of everything medically anomolous in their bodies. It hurts to see people living your dream.
It was only about nine o’clock, so I was surprised when my phone buzzed, and I tried to be discreet as I reeled back from the name on my screen. It was a name I thought I’d never read again, though I’ve thought about him many times since our last interaction. Whenever I listen to John Martyn. Whenever my bus goes past a certain pub. Whenever I watch season three of Sex and the City, rewinding Chris Noth’s ‘that’s bullshit, I just want you,’ to hear it from the ghost himself. It’s the man who spent most of 2024 trying to whittle me down into something desperate and passive and forgiving. The man who listed off which of my female friends he’d sleep with and pretended to like men to see what it would take for one of my gay friends to fall for him. The man who broke my guitar. The man I’d blocked on everything so he’d taken to making a Substack profile to break no contact. In previous essays, I’ve called him Ezra.
I wish I could say I had a more visceral reaction, that I’d excused myself to be sick or burst into tears at my desk. But I no longer have the time for such outbursts. I’m a working woman, after all. Instead I counted down the clock until lunchtime, took my food out to the park and promptly lost my mind. My actions had a precise, perfunctory rhythm. Sit down. Open phone. Unblock number. Press ‘call.’
The conversation lasted forty minutes. He told me he’d made the profile to check in, that he’d tried to reach out a few times before realising he’d been blocked. He told me he thought about me every day, that he missed me, that he loved me, everything I’d wanted him to say two years ago. He told me how sorry he was that he’d ever treated me as second-best, that he wanted another chance to be part of my life and that he’d do anything to be there for me in the way that I’d always been there for him. He told me I was the only person who had ever cared about him. And then he told me he was naked.
That was always the way with him. He’d start out friendly enough before making a vague suggestion that he saw me as a subject, someone he wished would feed him grapes and massage the soles of his feet after a long day of being himself. He always finished with a dirty, jagged cliff face of a laugh that scraped up against my chest.
What Ezra didn’t realise was that the clock didn’t reset to zero. All that we’d been through together could not be resolved by a few half-hearted pleas for understanding. Now that I’d been through the honeymoon and breakdown of the first real love of my life1, Ezra’s words rang hollow. He told me all about his life at home, how alone he felt, but he was only talking to himself. He didn’t love me, he loved the version of himself he’d seen reflected through my eyes. He loved the charming, rugged, magnetic person I’d thought him to be and hated the volatile, directionless raw nerve he actually was.
I told him it was too late and hung up the phone, but not without a good deal of struggle. I’ve never been good at standing up for myself—I’m usually more of the ‘I must have no needs so I can be perfect’ type—and especially not with him. He’d always been able to reel me back in, no matter how angry I was. Dozens of microscopic humiliations flashed before me, including some I’d forgot ever happened (although my friends hadn’t). When we first met and he told me he didn’t do relationships and the only song I listened to for a month was ‘Silver Springs.’ When he decided he actually did do relationships, just not with me, and I went catatonic. When he told me it ‘should have been us’ after I’d started seeing someone new. That one had been fun. I’d taken a perverse pleasure in his pain and held it close to my chest like an ace. Now I felt nothing but shame that I’d ever let him near me, that I’d ever thought I was worth so little.
I need to stand to the side here to bring to light an important piece of context. There’s been a common theme in my recent relationships. I can no longer stand it when people are attracted to me, nor can I stand it when they aren’t. Both variants make me feel like a piece of livestock, but it’s the difference between an animal that is eaten and one that is left to rot, effectively dying for nothing. It drove me mad when my last boyfriend didn’t want to sleep with me, but it makes me feel sick when other people do. I never believe them.2 I need them to want me all the same, to know I’m dying for good reason, to be sexy but not be seen. I want both and neither all the time.
Over the following few days after that first phone call I tried to hear him out. Part of me, as numb as I was, was unable to treat him the way he’d treated me. I wanted to believe he could be good. After all, he’d never tried so hard to track me down before. Maybe he meant it this time. Of course it wasn’t, because it never will be, so all he could say was that he missed me and wanted to see me. When could he come over? When could we start again? Never mind the fact that we now lived on opposite sides of the country, or that I was semi-seeing someone new, or that I didn’t want to.
The final insult, the moment I realised he’d never change, came that evening.
‘Tell me you miss me,’ he demanded.
Two years ago, in bed, he’d said ‘tell me you love me.’ I’d known him a week, but I’d done it so as not to make the moment awkward. Again, I must have no needs. In a crushing example of the cyclical narrative, he’d tried to steamroll over me once more, commandeering my sensitivity, trying to steal a taste of my greatest strength. The one part of myself that no one will ever get.
Arguably, this is not something I can ‘go through’ as it implies an end point. I’m very much still reeling from it and it will impact the way I approach relationships for the rest of my life. But our language is limited!
Dark confession: when the song ‘Cheerleader’ came out, it made me really upset because I couldn’t imagine anyone feeling that way about me. It literally made me cry every time I heard it. Not sure what that was about but I’m sure glad it’s over!
"The man who listed off which of my female friends he’d sleep with and pretended to like men to see what it would take for one of my gay friends to fall for him. " still reading but this part made my jaw drop on the floor