I was 14. I was sitting in a toilet, at school waiting for a pregnancy test to show one line or two. I sat there, waiting, watching the second hand on my watch click. Tick. tick. tick.
I waited the allotted 3 mintues, peering at the stick intently. Turning it on an angle, just to check.
At the end of the 3 minutes, it was negative. I could breathe again. The next day, my period started.
Now, at the time I was in a steady relationship and I was on the pill. We were however, busily involved in exploring the differences between girls and boys and because I have a latex allergy, well, you know how things go.
While I was with him, I spent an awful lot of money on pregnancy tests. Luckily, my pill worked beautifully and I didn’t get pregnant.
Then I was 15 and busily exploring the differences between boys and girls with another guy. An older guy. Before I had the decency to break up with my boyfriend.
The older guy, he didn’t like the word no. It was easier to say yes than no and for a while I did. Until he pushed it too far and I said no for good. He sulked and threatened to tell everyone what we were up to. I invited him to, he had more to lose than I did. I knew he was seeing another girl as well as his currrent girlfriend.
The other guy’s girlfriend and my boyfriend were brother and sister. We were all living together at the time. It was complicated.
Because the other guy didn’t like the word no, when I told him that I didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore, he refused to listen to me. He thought that ignoring everything I was saying (which was along the lines of “I can’t do this anymore, it has to stop”) was the best idea. He seemed to think that I was pliable.
I am many things, but insecure and pliable are not them.
I avoided him from then on, which was harder than you’d expect, seeing as he was living in my boyfriend’s house.
Everytime he thought I was being nice to him, he thought things could resume the way they were. So, I stopped talking to him. I left the room when he came in. I left the house when he came home. I ate dinner in the bedroom and I avoided him like the plague.
My boyfriend knew something was up. I told him that I was sick of the sexist comments. He chose to believe me because it was easy. He chose to ignore everything, including me.
Now, I can hear you asking, what does this have to do with anything? Well, this all ties into how I met Nathan.
When I was avoiding people, I used to run away to my best friend’s boyfriend’s house – she stayed there most nights. K’s boyfriend and my boyfriend at the time were mates, so there was nothing unusual about me heading down the road to sit and visit with them for hours until the guy I was avoiding went out.
This is how I met Nathan. K’s boyfriend was Nathan’s baby brother – Adam .
So, all those nights when I was avoiding my life and how I was living, I ended up sitting for hours talking, not to K, but to Nathan. He would make me cups of tea and we would talk about nothing for hours. Many nights, I fell asleep in the armchair watching movies with Nat and his family. Many nights my boyfriend would wander down the road and ask if I was there. I always was.
He chose to ignore the fact that I was avoiding people. He would come down and play the playstation with his mate, but he ignored me mostly. It was an awesome time in my life y’know?
So all those nights I sat there, getting to know Nathan. We were friends, we talked and connected and it was EASY.
Time passed and I finished school with a big formal. Instead of going to a piss up at a friends house with my boyfriend, I organised to have a few drinks at Nathan’s house with him, his brothers and K. When I got back from my formal, I changed out of my dress, brushed my hair out of it’s curls and washed off all of my makeup. I was comfortable.
K and I grabbed our drinks and headed down to her boyfriend’s house. When we got there, Nathan wasn’t home and I was completely unprepared for how disappointed I felt. I was so tired, I ended up having one drink and falling asleep on the couch. K headed to bed.
When I woke up hours later, Nathan was watching me sleep. We talked for hours, then I headed back to my boyfriends house and went to bed.
Shortly thereafter, school ended. I bummed around with my friends, doing much of the same things I had always done, including spending a lot of time down the road at Nathan’s.
I worked, casually and used to spend 2 hours after my shifts finished waiting in the bus mall for a bus, in the dark. That was insanely creepy. It was also how Nathan and I got to know each other even better, when he decided that it wasn’t safe for me, at 16 to be waiting in the dark for buses. He started meeting me after work to drive me home.
And our friendship moved on from there.
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I’ve had this in drafts for almost 2 years. It wasn’t easy to write.
Part II soon.
