Regeneration?

I'm finding it hard to write at the moment. I'm overprotective of my new, three month relationship. It's special, I want it just for me and I don't want to share us.

But I wrote this back in July about My First Love and thought I would share this instead. There is a part two... which I will share in a few days.

July 2007
The fact is I do love him; I always have done and probably always will. I wouldn’t have stomped over old ground by catching the train to Manchester to chat over tea with his mum in the kitchen and remark on how big his little sister has grown if I didn’t. But confused by my motives for coming, he used the open space on the drive to the lakes to question my purpose. And before I could answer, he told me that all he had said last year about how he could definitely envisage having children with me and only me, was no longer true. He was back to not wanting them, he wasn’t ready to marry and he had gotten to a place whereby he saw me as a friend and that was the only reason he could have me to stay with him. I nodded, slightly winded and considered whether I could get him to do a detour to Lancaster station to drop me on the route home. We sat in silence most of the way to Morecombe, which was long enough for him to realise that I was hurt and to start back peddling. He didn’t mean to be harsh, it had taken him five years to get over me and he had only just managed it last year. He viewed me as I had viewed him the year previously, when he had journeyed to see me - driving to London to tell me that he could live without me but his soul couldn’t. He laughed when I reminded him of this speech, “no wonder you ran a mile” he proclaimed. “No, I said, that wasn’t it, I was just getting over somebody else”. We ignored our confusion for the rest of the weekend, we re-visited our caravan tucked away in Ambleside, we ate Tapas in Windermere, which was the place where we sat by the water’s edge six or seven years ago and let the gulls jump for bread. We walked down the pier at Morecombe, his new home and stopped for tea. His choice of home, did not startle me, it made perfect sense. It was how I had envisaged it, knowing him so well. I had been slightly bemused by the cries of “Morecombe is such a dump…you’ll hate it” from my friends but I knew him well enough to know that while he can live in shabbiness, there has to be beauty. And there is beauty in Morecombe, miles and miles of blue sky, it’s a panoramic place, known for its healing properties. The green, calming influence of the lakes on the other side of the bay tells you that you are a million miles from London. And it’s a place of regeneration, half of Morecombe is currently held up by scaffolding, splints repairing the broken bones of the old buildings. There will be a day of glory when the old Art Deco Hotel finally resurfaces and becomes a central point in this slightly shabby but special seaside town. But whether our love can be regenerated, that I don’t know.