Christopher Wild

June 10th, 25 years ago, I got dumped by my then girlfriend.

It was a trau­mat­ic time for me, so much so that I found out later that my par­ents had me on sui­cide watch. Not that that was some­thing that was on my mind. But I know that I became moody, I did after all go five days without sleep. (Look­ing back, I’m sure I did sleep some!) I just lay in my bed listen­ing to sad songs while wear­ing a large pair of Headphones.
The girl at the time, let’s call her Y, was­n’t my first girl­friend, that would have been Vic­tor­ia Mel­lor. She was­n’t the first girl i kissed, that would have been Sarah Wright. She was­n’t the first girl who dumped me, they all dumped me. She was­n’t even my first teen­age girl­friend, that would have been Tina Ker­shaw. She was how­ever, the first girl whom I loved. Now I use the term love loosely. It was­n’t love like they way I love my chil­dren, it was­n’t love like they way I love my fam­ily, it was­n’t love like the way I love my wife, but it was the love of a 15 year old boy, who was just start­ing to form the concept of love. She was the girl I would pine over, over the next few years, the one who got away, the girl I would start writ­ing bad poetry about. Really bad poetry!

We had­n’t been dat­ing that long, just a few months, and in fact she had been on hol­i­day for the pre­vi­ous few weeks, and that had been the start of one of my best sum­mers. I met new friends. I star­ted hanging out with Jason Tweedy and his posey at the time: Mark But­ter­worth, Mark War­b­u­t­on, Bri­an Rostron, and Chris Hard­ing. It was­n’t even a rela­tion­ship that was ever destined to last. We were very dif­fer­ent people after very dif­fer­ent things. But it was a time in my life that I was devel­op­ing and thus sus­cept­ible to so many of the things that plague a young adolescent.

So, on that sunny June day, sat in the liv­ing room of her par­ents house, with Ian and Car­oline out of the way in the kit­chen, while I was star­ing out onto the fam­ily garden, she said that she thought we should split up, and all i could answer with was, “if that’s what you want.”
She teared my heart out and firmly fixed her­self into my memor­ies for the rest of my life. I walked out of her house and took out my frus­tra­tion on the fence across the road. It was­n’t all bad. It was def­in­itely life form­ing for me. The bad poetry lead to my Eng­lish teen­age spend­ing more time with me as she encour­aged me to write. This in turn improved my Eng­lish and thus my abil­ity to write. Any aspir­a­tions that I may have of being an author must come out of that time.

So, that all happened on June the 10th. I don’t remem­ber the date because of all those things, and I don’t remem­ber all those things because of the date. I remem­ber all those things because they happened to me and they had a pro­found affect on my life. I remem­ber June 10th as the day I got dumped, because it is Simon Hunter­’s birthday.

Simon was one of my school friends with whom I hung out with, quite a bit at the time. We spent a lot of week­ends at each oth­ers house. We were both into com­puters and we would spend a lot of time work­ing togeth­er on com­puter related pro­jects. As the fol­low­ing few years pro­gressed, he was one of the friends with­in the inner circle. We drank a lot togeth­er. We clubbed a lot togeth­er. We had a great deal of fun.

Simon’s birth­day is the only friend’s birth­day, old or new, that I remem­ber out­right. I know that cer­tain friends have birth­days around a par­tic­u­lar time. The only oth­er friend’s birth­day I remem­ber is Lind­say’s, and even that I only remem­ber because for some reas­on, that I have nev­er been able to fathom, I can­’t untangle it from my broth­er Andrew’s. Lind­say’s is March and Andrew’s is May, and the dates are the 23rd and 27th, but I can nev­er remem­ber which way round. As March approaches I have to do this men­tal jig thing to try and remem­ber the cor­rect dates. For the record, and for pos­ter­ity, Lind­say’s is the 27th!

But on June 10th 25 Years ago, I got dumped, and I happened to know that it was Simon’s birth­day, I don’t even know why I knew that on the day. It was a Tues­day ( I’ve just looked that up on t’in­ter­net), so we must have made some­thing of his birth­day at school.

So because those two things happened on the same day, the neur­ones in my brain formed some path­way that in turn was much stronger that the two indi­vidu­al events. Had the two events not occurred on the same day, then I am con­vinced I would remem­ber neither of the dates.

Memory — it’s a funny thing.

Related Posts:

• Of June Bugs and May Beetles
• The Dreams of Anna­belle Cloud
• Lily Wood Trail
• e‑Dreams
• And here it begins…