More happy things since Jon died - 2015 in All Good Things

Last night’s entry about good things helped my state of mind a lot. It hasn’t changed anything practical, obviously, but right now the only thing I can change is my state of mind so I’m going to focus on doing that. In this entry I’m looking back at the months in 2015 after Jon died to remind myself of some good things that happened.

Three days after he died, I went to Glyndebourne to see E in his opera. There couldn’t have been anything more perfect right then. He knew Jon, but hadn’t been in a show with him, didn’t really know him personally, so he understood why I was so devastated but wasn’t that personally devastated himself, which made him a wonderful person to comfort me. It was a bizarre experience, the only opera I’ve ever attended in a really elegant location in the countryside where everyone had fancy picnics outdoors during the interval at sunset.

The next day was the last good memory I have of Annette. She invited me around to her house (an extension to her elderly parents’ house which I hadn’t seen since it was built) and it was nice to get out of London for a second day running. We talked about the day of Jon’s death, working through it a bit, and watched old videos of him dancing, and it was our version of a wake, I suppose. Unfortunately her sister crashed it after a couple of hours and things started turning toxic. I had no idea at the time how horrific they would get during the following months.

A week later, the day before I had to leave for Singapore to resume work, I went to Coventry to see a show Andy was choreographing. He wasn’t dealing very well with Jon’s death (and certain other things that had happened during that tour) and had thrown himself into his work. It seemed to mean a lot to him that I’d come to see the results of his labour, even though he wasn’t performing himself. I enjoyed the chance to see his choreography and it meant a lot to see him too. Shared mourning and clinging hugs and brave smiles before I had to return to my own life.

I spent a month in Singapore. It’s mostly a blank in my memory. There was a lot of crying on the bridge at the Esplanade. I do remember that. I remember that the Coffee Club over Clarke Quay, my favourite place for people watching, disappeared and what a blow it felt like. And I remember the thick, swirling smoke from the forest fires across the sea in Indonesia that made it impossible to breathe, making me feel nauseous and dizzy most of the time. I was lucky, because I didn’t have to stay. I could ask to go home, and I did. It was such a joy to return to England and fresh wonderful September air.

But I was only home for eight days before heading off to Dubai for several weeks. The change of seasons in Dubai is unpleasant. It was still scorchingly hot, but misty in the mornings and as disgustingly humid as Singapore. When I had four days off, I remember hardly eating anything because the 15-minute walk to the mall and Carrefour (grocery store) made me feel even more nauseous than the smoke in Singapore had. It felt like the air had no oxygen. (Interestingly, I’ve never had such bad experiences with being unable to breathe in either Singapore or Dubai before or since, and it’s interesting to correlate that with how I felt emotionally at the time, like I couldn’t breathe from the grief.)

It was my birthday while I was there. I turned 38, the last age I would share with Jon since he’d been six months older than me. Already seven weeks of those six months were gone and I knew all too soon I’d be older than him. With Jordan (my former fiance who died), it had taken eight years for me to be older than him, but I remembered how hard it was and knew that was coming very soon for me with Jon. My birthday brought another realisation as well: Annette was in Dubai that week too, I heard from the office. She knew I was there completely alone, but she ignored me until sometime after midnight when she sent a generic “Happy Birthday” text message. That hurt a lot.

But this is supposed to be good memories in this entry, and there were two very good memories from my weeks in Dubai. The first was that I was sitting outside the courts in a little grove of trees by some fountains to eat lunch one day. The worst of the humidity had lifted, so I was making the most of getting some time outdoors after all my time trapped inside hotels. I remember sitting beneath the trees and loving being outside. There was no anxiety at all. And I thought, regarding my agoraphobia: am I cured? Turned out that I wasn’t, but that moment was a turning point in my recovery, and I rejoiced in it. To celebrate, when my case ended early two days later, I was able to spend the rest of the day at the beach in the sunshine, swimming in the Persian Gulf and feeling happier than I had in months.

The day after I got home, I continued to celebrate by meeting up with an old friend of mine in the gorgeous town she’d just moved to by the sea in Kent and getting to know a whole new section of the English coast, and then going to see some other ballet friends perform in Canterbury. They were doing the first show I ever saw Jon do (this was his former company) and it was really hard to hear that music again and watch someone else play Heathcliff, but it was another essential step towards healing. Towards moving on.

Two days later I headed north from London on the train up to Sheffield to spend the day with another friend of mine who was about to move to Europe, then spent the evening watching E in the opening night of his new show in Leicester. That was such a happy day full of laughter and joy.

A few days of working in London followed, then I got to see my all-time favourite play (Noises Off) at the Bridewell before heading down to Plymouth with Jenna for the opening of the new show of Jon’s company. Other than Andy, I hadn’t seen any of the others since the day Jon died and I didn’t know how I was going to handle it. Jenna and I took a full day to drive down, stopping to explore the misty rocks of Dartmoor along the way, so we breezed into town with a few minutes to go before the show began, no time to think about it.

This is supposed to be happy memories, but that week in Plymouth was the beginning of the end, although I didn’t know it. I kept ending up sitting beside Annette’s sister (hereafter known as the witch), and I couldn’t cope with her seething hatred of me. In Lyme Regis I bought a bracelet of pure obsidian, which is a very strong protective stone, blocking negativity and psychic attack, and I quickly learned how to channel it for protection against her. But the gutting discovery was that the place that had been my home for the previous two years, watching this company dance, was no longer safe for me. Ironically, it had been the only place I’d felt safe, and now it was my greatest danger.

I don’t want to think too much about that week. The good things were exploring the Dorset coast with Jenna and learning how to hunt fossils, and sitting high on the cliffs above the sea in Plymouth beside the lighthouse.

I was home for two days, in bed with a searing migraine from the stress of the week, then it was on to Leicester, the second venue of the tour. That was even worse. I still can’t really think about that week. But I got to catch up with Chris’ family again. His new mother-in-law was definitely one of my favourite people, and she helped me, a lot. She’ll never know just how much she’s done for me, and I’ll always be grateful to her.

This time I was only home overnight before heading to Vienna for a short work trip. The sky was unbelievably blue, I remember that. It was exquisite, and felt very healing.

Finally I was home for longer, about ten days. I did a bunch of jobs in London, got back in unexpected contact with Simon only for him to blow it all up, making me vow to stay away from him again. I went to a couple of other theatre shows, and then discovered there was a job available with the company. Jon’s company. Chris’ company. It was a job I knew I could do, I knew I’d be really good at it, and I flew to Dubai for a week of work feeling hopeful about the future for the first time.

Home for three days, then off to Manchester to see Chris again, who was now back from his honeymoon. We’d struggled with our new relationship in Plymouth and Leicester, but we managed to fix things a bit in Manchester. I was only meant to be there for a day and a half, but he asked me to stay longer, so I did, and he was spectacular on stage and I absolutely loved him. It was strange watching him dance a role Jon wasn’t sharing with him, but I was finally getting used to it. I had even more hope after Manchester.

Home for a day, then I flew to Kuala Lumpur. I’ve worked in Malaysia several times and I quite like KL, so I wasn’t very concerned about going, just happy for the work. In the plane on the way, I wrote my application for the job I was so hopeful about getting. The arbitration in Malaysia turned out to be awful, featuring a lawyer I’d first worked with in 2003 and then lived in deathly fear of ever seeing again. I managed not to for all those years and then in November 2015 I walked into the KL courtroom and my heart plummeted. I couldn’t believe it. He was just as bad as I remembered, and unlike when I’d had him in London, I couldn’t request to be put on a different job while someone else took over for me, because I was the only person in the country who could do the job. There was no one to take over.

Fortunately for me, although horribly unfortunately for him, the lovely Indian lawyer on the other side announced on the fourth day that symptoms of cancer that he thought he was rid of had come back and he needed to be tested. If positive, the job would come to an end. We took a day off for him to be tested, and soon got the news I was dreading for him but desperately hoping for for me: the rest of the job was cancelled. I don’t know what’s happened to him since. I really hope he’s recovered fully this time. I’ll probably never know unless I happen upon him in a courtroom somewhere, because I didn’t keep a note of his name. I hope he’s fine. But I was very relieved to escape KL, where we were virtual prisoners in our hotel, able only to walk across the road to the arbitration centre but nowhere else due to canals and railways and highways. As a vegetarian I’d been existing on taking boiled eggs from breakfast to have for lunch, then having nuts and powdered soup brought from home for dinner, so I was so happy to leave.

• (One thing I didn’t mention above was that the flight to Malaysia was the final nail in the coffin of my fear of flying. It started a year earlier, when Annette and I flew home from Milan piloted by a horrific female pilot who did pretty much everything wrong. I literally thought we were going to smash into Milan just after takeoff and I kept mapping the Alps as we flew over them to see where potential routes out would be if we crashed into them and miraculously didn’t die. By the time we landed way too fast at Gatwick and the plane skidded and bounced and nearly turned over, this insidious little fear had been sparked within me. I didn’t pay it much attention until two months later when Annette and I flew from Seoul to Hong Kong in a totally full plane by a cheap Asian airline that had crashed twice in the month beforehand (and crashed again the following week). We weren’t flying it by choice, but because our work was too cheap to fly us on a decent airline, and we spent four solid hours believing we were going to crash at any moment. The plane felt so heavy and sluggish it was hard to believe it stayed in the air, and we were both shaking violently by the time we landed. Then on the way to Malaysia, I was flying Malaysian Airlines for the first time. This was a year and a half after the infamous missing plane, and after we took off from Heathrow, instead of flying directly east over France and Austria and Romania as indicated on the interactive map, we flew south, down over Spain and then over Egypt. I was panicking so badly because what if it was happening again! When we finally turned east several hours later, I was in such a state of panic that I had to lock myself in one of the plane bathrooms for about two hours because I was virtually hysterical. I needed to get off that plane, I needed to get off right at that moment - but I couldn’t. I was trapped. For another twelve fucking hours. It literally took me four years to get over all the flying fear that those three flights created in me.)

But I got to Malaysia safely and got home again safely too. The next two weeks are a blank in my memory. Due changing time zones every week for a month, my body clock was shot to hell. I was completely out of it. I sent in the application for the job with the company on the day I arrived home, and somehow made my way through a bunch of court cases in London that I was barely aware of. I was doing a deposition in Canary Wharf when I heard I didn’t get the company job. I didn’t even get an interview to plead my case. I was devastated. I knew in my heart it was the only way I could stay, given how unpleasant the witch was making things, and not getting the job meant the end of everything.

I bumped into the general manager two nights later at the theatre. I knew him vaguely, not well, and I was stunned when he came over to me and pulled me into his arms for a big hug and proceeded to explain the reasons why he hadn’t been able to give me the job, apologising profusely. But it didn’t help. I literally felt like I’d been slammed into a wall. I was in shock. I’d been so sure this was the point of it all, that I’d be able to escape my career that I still struggled so much with and finally, finally, finally get to do a job where I’d be fulfilled and happy and be able to be creative and do so much good. But no. It was over. All of it was over.

I kept missing Chris during that time. Our timing was off, but then so was I. It took until December 18 before we finally managed to connect. And reconnect. The next few weeks were about nothing but him. I knew this was the end. Even though I had dozens of tickets for the tour over the next six months, I knew deep inside that it wasn’t going to happen. My time with that company was over. I gave myself those few festive weeks while he was performing in London to watch every single show he was in, revelling in him on the stage and growing every closer to him off the stage.

Right now those memories are all so good that they actually hurt to remember, because I know the context. Because I know that Annette and her sister were actively bullying me every time they saw me, verbally and physically and emotionally, even though I’ve mostly blocked the details from my memory. They were trying to turn all our other friends against me, friends who I had brought together, a group I had created and invited Annette and her sister into. Every day got worse as 2016 began until it culminated a few days after Jon’s memorial show at the end of January and then it really was the end and I fled to New Zealand and have never really gone back.

It’s hard to write about happy moments of late 2015. There were some, sure, but they were all within a context of mourning and ominous threat. By the start of 2016, I was completely broken and defeated.

So much for cheering myself up!