A killer crush

But why then, why there, why him?

That's not hard to explain. I was coming out of a period of exhaustion. I had worked relentlessly in a lonely, secretive job for a year exactly before pulling out. He was one of the first people I met after that. That was how it started.

It persisted because he was unknowable, a big Pandora's bag of complexes and issues that he fought to suppress and hide. Occasionally they burst out of him in an incandescent rage that he unnervingly denied or perhaps genuinely forgot about within a matter of hours. People talked scurrilously behind his back and stuck ridiculing pictures on their walls. One former colleague stopped me in the lift to tell me he was a "waste of space." Another said "He's just take take take." Gossips talked of his bodged track record and the time he wasted hanging round young women's desks trying to strike up flirtations. Truly a figure of hate, workers avoided him and when his promotion was announced a resounding silence filled the room. But once promoted, he was suddenly not someone you could mock and ridicule any more. He had the lot of them by the balls and how he knew it.

I was there in the early days when he was just a flagging, failing workhorse with a shocking reputation for incompetence and selfishness. I knew all this and yet I saw something in him, something special that made him a misunderstood man in my eyes. I saw the face and gazed at it at every opportunity, gathering little cuttings and clippings, even purloining a passport photograph. I saw his body and watched him move and there were many telling gestures to observe. But I never found out who he was. Honest or liar, idealist or cynic, clever or stupid? No idea. Did he love me, hate me, fear me or is it vain to think he had an opinion at all? I don't know and it seems certain that the inevitable will happen and one day I will be confronted with the fact that I never will know. One day I will hear that he has died, or I will learn that I am dying, and I will know it is all over. By implication, until one or the other of us is in a box, I will never give up trying to find him.

Because, at the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld, knowing unknowing goes against all human instinct. The brain fills the empty space with made-up stories of gods or laws of nature, things that cause other things to happen. Like an eager spider working on a web too large for it to see in its entirety, I spun string upon string and linked them all up into a big mesh complex and deep enough to capture any passing fly or speck of pollen. My explanatory framework was, essentially, this: that he is a mirror image of me: a misunderstood idealist who needed someone to love and nurture and be loved and nurtured by. And so my spider self stared at its own image in the dew and thought it had fallen in love.

Enough. I tell myself that writing is helping me recover but I am doubtful. Is it not just another way of stretching out the one spoonful of sugar I have nourished myself on these last three years? Is there a part of me that feels gleeful at throwing out these little clues to his identity, he's asked for it after all? Shall I stop?

Not just yet. It's too early to say that "jump" won't return and the crush won't turn out to be the crush that killed me. I have to keep writing because that in itself is a form of excretion, toxins pouring out of my brain and into this blog. I can only apologise to anyone who ever reads it but I really do feel it could be saving my life.