Let me back up a bit. Last week, things seemed to be working out for me. I was finally back home in Ibiza, my flat is in the process of being plastered so it no longer looks like a backdrop for Armageddon, I've got a few gigs leading up to the start of the season, and there's design work flooding in thick and fast. The whole mess with Dad back home has finally been sorted out, with him now legally not allowed back in the house. In fact, the only thing that's not perfect in the world of Fus is that Marisa is 6000 miles away back in LA.
Having a long distance relationship is not easy at the best of times, and when you factor in 9 time zones worth of difference, and the fact that you've seen each other 24/7 for virtually the whole of the previous year, things start to get really hard.
Under these circumstances, I become crap. I mean really crap. Whereas when Marisa was with me, I could have a conversation and keep it up for a bit (I'll not profess to be the best conversationalist in the first place), when faced with astronomical distances, and an unknown time span before we'll next meet, I just seize up. All I can think is "I love you" and "I miss you", and before you know it, I'm avoiding her instant messaging conversations for fear of boring the tits off her.
So.. eventually it came. I had a feeling it would. And yet I did nothing to stop it. WHY??
The email saying that I've been crap at communicating, and that Marisa has no intention of coming back to Ibiza, and where is this relationship going? Is it a relationship if neither of us are prepared to live where the other does? She's right, of course, I have been crap at communicating, and we have barely spoken since she's been back home. For that, I'm sorry.
I end up staring at the email on screen for about 5 hours. I knew it was coming, and yet nothing could have prepared me for each and every word slicing through my heart like a dagger. Practically everything that was in that email, I agreed with, and yet my instinctive reaction was to fight it. Here in front of me, ASCII text was ending a chapter of my life, and all I can do is dumbly hit reply and seal my fate.
So is this it? Over a years relationship over just like that? A million conversations, a thousand "I Love You's", a billion thoughts of the other person culminated and encapsulated by 2Kb of text? And even though I still love her totally and without question, there's not a single thing I can say against it. If she doesn't want to live here in Ibiza, and I can't live there in LA, what are we going to do? What can you do other than the fair thing and let each other get on with their lives? Am I ready to get on with my life?
It's easy, retrospectively, to look back and think how stupid you'd been. I had this dream in my head that I'd get the flat ready before Marisa came back over, and we'd live happily with our wee cat round the corner from the beach. But really, thinking about it realistically, what is there for Marisa here? There's no Marisa music, no Marisa bars, no Marisa people, no Marisa food. No wonder she hated it.
So given the current situation, the only right thing seems to let it go. We helped each other through a lot of shit. We had a lot of good times, and not many bad. Seemingly, the only things stopping us having a perfect relationship are 6,000 miles and my inability to say anything of any remote interest to her ridiculously clever brain.
I can only hope that one day this island releases it's grip on me, and I'm able to function as a normal human being somewhere where she is too. Until then, everything I see and hear seems to continue to remind me of her... fragments of Tegan and Sara songs, every time one of her millions of pictures appears on my desktop, a memory of how I used to look into her eyes and feel her crazily brilliant mind ripping my soul bare... and thinking that's all I ever wanted.
On paper, the list of things in my life I always imagined would make me happy are nearly complete... House by the beach, an island full of free and easy people, house music, our cat, and Marisa. Now none of it means anything because I'm crap and she hates this place. How can you possibly have some kind of resolution from this situation? I never stopped loving her. She's not dead. She wasn't a bitch to me. Suddenly... she's just not there any more, except in a sepia memory of our relationship constantly looping in my head.. taking MDMA at Ben's house... a diagram showing the relationship of hot chocolate and.... something... a mattress on the floor of Moby's. Watching House... Walking to Bora Bora... A 90km taxi ride out of Granada. Chipping paint off the walls... Did I just make all that up? Where did it come from? Where did it go? I can only take heart from the fact that I don't regret a single moment of it, and I loved her for every single second we were together, and that I tried to be the best boyfriend I could be. I'm sorry that turned out to be not enough. I love you Marisa Prietto, x.
