She Was Ernie. I Was Only Bert.
So I turned around. And left. No tearful scene from some Tuesday-night melodrama designed to make lonely housewives reach for the tissues. No screaming hurricane of insults and hurled vases shattering against walls papered with stolen posters. Just the street, the sun, me walking. The last time we ever looked each other in the eyes.
Admitting you’ve failed with another person is harder than anything. Harder than showing up at Berghain on a Sunday morning—fat, naked, drunk, human shit smeared across your face, rabid pitbull in tow—and still coaxing a friendly ass-pat from the doorman on the way in. You made the investment: time, emotion, and yes, something that qualifies as love, even if it’s not the version that announces itself in heavy language and permanent obligations. The light kind. The good kind.
The kind where you hug each other like tomorrow has been cancelled. Where you drink every drop of red wine within reach, smoke until your eyes go heavy, talk and laugh and build impossible plans. On a pep trip you fuck each other stupid—stupid grinning faces, every available hole, the weekend charging past the fogged window and waving goodbye.
The problem: I was the only one feeling any of that. Out of the two of us. And I didn’t even want to feel it. Right up until that last day I refused to admit that something had gotten inside my head and was screwing with it. Being in love is fine, whatever. We urban emotional cadavers practically celebrate when we manage to squeeze some fragment of feeling out of our concrete-encased, long-abandoned hearts—pus and pain and everything that comes with it. But if you’re going to catch feelings, at least do it for someone whose emotional intelligence didn’t plateau at age ten somewhere between PlayStation addiction and casual cruelty.
What’s worse than admitting you’ve failed with another person? Knowing you weren’t the first. Knowing there’ll be plenty more after me. That you’re one entry in a long list of people who tried not to fall into the trap—tried to stay cool, stay friends, stay above it all. She’s a mate. You fuck sometimes. That was the deal.
So you join the procession of tragic non-starters who never made it into that heart everyone finds so irresistible—who didn’t even want in, who fought it the way people fight Kreuzberg gentrification with their bare hands. Because the person across from you is an emotional cripple of the fascist-communist variety, and it’s not even her fault. She has great hair. And a nose. And feet.
Which leaves you with nothing but to grab onto every other conceivable explanation for why you’re suddenly an idiot who can’t think straight, jealous as a man watching his neighbor’s enormous equipment get all the attention, screaming unhinged ultimatums at parties, crying on the walk home, losing it over situations that are completely, stupidly, tediously normal—for everyone else. Just not for me.
Then occasionally you catch yourself. A good song. A day of the week you don’t hate. KFC that somehow fails to destroy your intestines for once. You breathe. You swear that tomorrow will be normal again, like before. And then you jerk off to her photo. Just the once. Last time. Promise.
What’s worse than all of that? The helplessness of finally understanding that none of this is her fault. Never was. She is Ernie. And I am nothing but a humorless Bert who put his need for control over everyone else’s happiness, including hers.
She never made a false promise, never lied, never pretended to love me, never understood what my fucking problem was or why I’d been conducting myself like an electrified idiot making mountains out of nothing for weeks. All I wanted was for her to understand. Or better: for the whole noise to just end. Not a semi-detached house with a garden, a dog, DNA thieves in the spare room. Just the static in my head to stop.
The situation was always going to break. I’d half-convinced myself I’d find the ending in some disgusting club toilet—her sucking MDMA off Black cock somewhere in the dark, me a few minutes later a voluntary U-Bahn statistic with Lykke Li’s Let It Fall in my ears. Instead I took that day, that minute, and decided it had to stop. The pressure. Her expression. My personal downfall. For good. So I turned around. And left.