Unhapiness

I remember unhappiness.

The problem with unhappiness is that feels like happiness if you you're trapped in it at the time.

You think that 'throatchokingawfulhotpotatoinmythroat" feeling is okay. That's how you think it's meant to be.

I remember the perfectness of it all. The Islington flat, the sheer unbridled gorgeousness of my husband, the Farmer's Market we used to go every Sunday, the anxiety over the Scandinavian designer sofa they should deliver that week. My £40K salary and his £70K one. We were the mortgage man's dream.

He was a greyhoundish beautiful man with chocolate hair, freckles and weak eyes and I was his pretty skinny high cheek-boned blonde wife with big blue eyes full of life, smart, kicking out all the time.

We were so lovely we were unreal. But, because we were and none of it was real, nobody asked any questions.

When the chips were down, it was me, swaying my hand imperiously around the designer flat and saying simply: "But what about all this?" Because it was not about him, or love. It was the concept I built up in my head and good Lord, nobody, even him, was to take it from me.

All I wanted was the deception of it to tell me that I was 'happy' and all he parameters of happiness were there.

*It all ended in tears. He had a tawdry affair with my best friend's  neighbour. When we met for the last time I said "I always thought my marriage will be something out of E.M. Forster and it was Eastenders"

"Life is always a bit Eastenders, I suppose", he said, his beautiful face gathering up a look of regret.