Here's one I wrote over the weekend.....


Rosie, I owe you one.

I never thought it would happen with me and a girl from Sixmiletown, out on the windy beachfront that night I ain’t forgotten. That summer with no passion, she dealt out the rations, I said you are a farmer, perhaps she said I maybe....(apologies to Difford and Tilbrook)

We drove out towards Culmore, she pulled over. I told her that was it, it was all over, there was no-one else (lies) and that it had just reached a natural conclusion. She cried. The only emotions I’d ever seen her express were through anger and sulking so this was quite a turn.
But I was going to ask you home for Easter to meet my family.
The concept of meeting the family that turned out someone this emotionally stunted was not at all enticing and quickened my resolve.
I thought it was going so well.
How? I asked, stunned.
It’s the best relationship I’ve ever been in.
It may well have been but... well let’s recap. I met her ten days after my girlfriend of three and a half years had dumped me for another fella. I was still crying. She asked me to slow dance and then didn’t want to kiss me. Said she wouldn’t come home with me but did and shagged me, then moved into the other bed in my room for the rest of the night. During the year’s courtship she had slept with two of my friends (no loss, gobshites anyway) and I slept with her best friend. Granted she didn’t know of this rebetrayal and I had only done it for revenge purposes but still.
You said you loved me.
True I had but...
The most I was ever in love with Maggie was when she wasn’t there. She was in America for the summer and in those three long months I fell in love with her, Absence indeed does make the heart grow fonder, that and the fact that I was apparently the most unattractive man in the whole of Donegal. Misery is not attractive and I was certainly miserable. So I wrote jolly letters and longed for her return. It was a disaster.
This is the first time I’ve ever thought I had a future with someone...
I knew we didn’t when I asked her to get me a Simpsons T Shirt and she asked what kind of band they were. Really, even in 1990 that was out of whack. Our long planned reunion became a night of no passion and during the following week she slept with the two (ex) friends. The fact that it didn’t bother me should have been a sign that I didn’t care much about her, or me, but hey all lust is blind. And sure skin up there man, it’ll be fine.
How have things changed, why don’t you want me now?
There were three things that drew me to her: one I was seriously on the rebound after my girlfriend of three and a half years had just left me for another man. Two, I was taking a lot of drugs which numb the critical faculties while enhancing other areas. Three, nice breasts. It’s recently come to my attention that all through my life I have lived with the unconscious belief that nice breasts equals nice person. You would think i would have worked out how erroneous this was earlier but like I say it was unconscious so how could I? Anyway, she was offering sex,, I was taking it. She was emotionally stunted, I was emotionally stunted, at least temporarily. How could it go wrong? How could it have gone right?
And yet I had led her to believe there was a future with us. I’d transferred over all the feelings and intimacies from my previous relationship to this one. And I’d been determined, for a while at least, to make this one work. What I’d overlooked is that she was a very unhappy person well on her way to having a serious alcohol problem. Nice breasts you see. They cloud everything.
What had changed? I met someone else, someone who didn’t want me to share their misery, somone who wanted a laugh, a bit of fun, someone who rescued me. Life is serious which is why we should laugh. I’d forgotten that, Jenny reminded me. It all ended in tears, happily Maggie’s not mine, and a disastrous intervention attempt by her when she landed in Portrush to win me back- I bolted leaving her sitting up all night with my flatmate Rosie while I stayed with Jenny. Rosie fed her whiskey and tissues and told her what a terrible person I was and why she would be better off without me. When I came back the next afternoon she was gone and Rosie was fit to kill me, I talked her down with whiskey and cannabis. Don’t think I ever did enough to repay that debt. Rosie if you are out there, I still owe you one.