Lessons in love

chapter 2- those initial coping mechanisms

From the moment joe left, the car they had brought with children in mind leaving the driveway, the house was empty.
Dianne was left with smashed glass all over her bedroom floor, many half drank bottles of alcohol that she was thinking of downing and ultimately a broken heart. Her own broken heart.
She knew she had done the right thing. Time apart from eachother was needed. They needed space. They both did. And that was going to hurt but Dianne was hoping that in the long run it would bring them back together. She believed in soul mates and knew joe was hers but she had to let go of him for just a while. She had plans to get back with him, of course she did but the universe would tell her if that was the right thing to do. And if she was that certainly wouldn't be for a while.

She stood up from where she had been laying in bed, not realising she was on Joe's side rather than her own. A deep breath flowed through her body but it was shaky and scattered.
Finding a pair of trainers next to the bed, she put them on in order to track over the shattered remnants of a mug he had brought her as a birthday present and also a picture of the two of them from around this exact time 5 years ago. Making her way past them and along the hallway she eventually made it down the stairs and into the kitchen, despite her legs feeling like jelly. She grabbed a bottle of gin and an unopened jammy red along with a wine glass. Wine consumed first, straight from the bottle and then a few shots were taken. She wasn't doing it to hurt herself or drown in sadness, she just needed to relax. Her relationship of 5 years had just ended, quite abruptly too and she had told him to never contact her unless it was an emergency. She needed to feel elated somehow.

This somewhat reckless behaviour was similar to Joe's stint in the summer of 2018 where every night for him was a drunken night.

Dianne knew about Joe's struggles with alcohol before he met her and knew she couldn't let herself get in the same way he did because the only thing that could save her from it was joe and there was no way she would be seeing him anytime soon. She promised herself this night of drinking would be a one time thing, a mechanism she would use only once to numb the fresh heartbreak before returning to her dancing on monday morning.

This night of drinking though wasn't just a night as it developed into the early hours of the morning and she soon found herself at the table overlooking their garden, her 11th shot in hand. By now the sun was rising and her phone read a time of 6am, a time perfectly rounded enough for her to calculate the time in australia. 2pm.

Picking up her phone, she opened her WhatsApp and looked for her mums profile but instead stumbled over something much more difficult to process.

A message sent at 11:45pm from joe who was still under the name 'my jospeh' followed by 3 emojis; a purple heart, a globe and an angel with a halo on the top of his head. She realised she hadn't picked her phone up since their call when she was still on the train which was when this message had come through.

It read:

I've just left now, I'll wait at the entrance of platform 2 for you, in the carpark. I've missed you so much. I'm going to cuddle you so hard. I love you, forever and always, no matter what this horrible earth throws at us. Cant wait to see you xxxx

Choosing to ignore it, she let her heart break more and her finger began to hover over her mums number. She wasn't sure if calling her mum was the right thing to do. She was sure Rina would fall into panic mode if she heard her daughter had just broken up with her boyfriend of 5 years and now she had spent the night alone surrounded by alcohol and was still drinking at 6am.

She ignored those thoughts and finally those annoying, Brain drilling sounds echoed through her phone. She took that shot whilst she wanted. Number 11. The one to send her over the edge just as the line connected.