“Du bist immer so inkonsequent”
Once upon a time I had a very annoying friend who, whenever we fell out, used to admonish me with the phrase, “Clare, du bist immer so inkonsequent!”. At the time, this used to annoy me considerably, but with the benefit of several years distance I am able to admit that he did have a point. “Inkonsequent” is a very good word to describe me. My dictionary translates it rather inadequately as “inconsistent”, which is a translation I don’t like. In English, inconsistent is a word I would only tend to use in mathematics or logic. A set can be inconsistent if it gives rise to a paradox, and any logical argument I have the misfortune to attempt to forumulate generally ends up being inconsistent too. “Inkonsequent” seems to me to have a much richer meaning than this. It implies that I don’t know my own mind, which is regrettably true. 
I have been putting off writing this post for the best part of twenty four hours now. I did actually start drafting it last night, but I was so exhausted after having grabbed only a handful of hours the past few nights that I was off in the land of nod at the embarrassingly early hour of half eleven. I have been trying to make time to continue it all day at work, but a key member of client staff at the job I am working on has tomorrow booked as holiday, and so I had to utilise the hours up until her home time at 4pm as best I could in order to extract all possible information from her. It was rather like trying to get blood out of a stone, but there you go.
Anyway. Yes. Hmmm. Indeed. Well, it seems that I have been just a teensy weensy little bit stupid 
I would like to flatter myself that I am normally pretty good at manipulating words, but on this occasion my imagination is failing me.
To start at the beginning, I had agreed to meet up with Babel yesterday evening after work. I hadn’t really spoken to him much since we split up on Saturday morning, and the efforts to stay in touch had slightly confusingly come from his side. Being the friendly sort of guy that he is, I figured that he was suggesting he came to visit me in case I was so terribly depressed I needed someone to talk to. I didn’t actually feel a great urge to talk to him, but it occurred to me that it was perhaps more civilised to conclude the splitting up on a face to face basis, rather than using Instant Messenger, and thus we agreed on an evening when we were both free.
Fortunately, I was so stressed at work that I didn’t have time to dread the encounter all day. I would definitely have been dreading it had I had time to reflect on it, so that was really a Good Thing. Seeing as I am a bit depressed at the moment anyway, it is perhaps rather meaningless if I say I have been desperately unhappy since Saturday, but this was an additional sort of being unhappy on top of the more general sort. I started trying to make a blog post listing reasons why it was cool to be single, but I only got as far as the fact that I would no longer have to shave my legs before my ideas ran dry. That was, in fact, a pretty major consolation to me, but nevertheless not quite enough to wipe out the distress of losing Babel. Babel is incredibly useful, you see. Not only for mending my website and correcting my Esperanto, but for providing an object to practise punching when I am in a bad mood and providing an easy target to laugh at when I am not 
Nah, seriously, he is a nice sort of thing to have around, and sometimes he even thinks for me which is incredibly helpful because my attempts to think for myself are wont to end in disaster
Anyway, I met Babel at the train station where he was busily drinking a bucket of coffee. Rather strange behaviour for someone who doesn’t like coffee, but never mind He was also wearing a shirt, which I took to be a bad omen. Last time I remember him coming to see me in a shirt it was an attempt to mitigate the shock I was going to get upon discovering that he had shaved all his hair off Being honest, I wasn’t actually 100% sure whether we had split up as far as he was concerned, and I was anxious to find out. After all, it was me who had said it, me who had blogged about it, and I had noticed that he had logged into Facebook but not changed his relationship status to single. Possibly this was because I hadn’t changed my own relationship status to single. I really wanted to, but Facebook has become so complicated these days that I can only get the WAP version to function on my phone and that doesn’t appear to have the ability to allow me to change my relationship status. I could, of course, have used my home PC were it not for the fact that my father has managed to delete Norton Anti Virus yet again, and so it is out of action. In any case, any doubts I might have entertained as to my boyfriend’s feelings on the matter were quickly destroyed when he attempted to present me with a book he had bought for me and I had given back to him for safe keeping. There is a certain finality about returning possessions to their rightful owners.
We proceeded to do what we always appear to do when there is an important issue we need to discuss; that is to say, avoid discussing it. We went to our favourite pub and I tested out a theory which a friend of mine had passed on to me that you can’t cry whilst drinking. Apparently this is the best way to involve breaking down in tears whilst someone is giving you a bollocking - taking small but frequent sips of water. I’m not sure it worked entirely but I was very anxious to cry as little as possible - firstly so as not to further irritate my now ex-boyfriend, and secondly so as not to make the situation visible to my parents, who I hadn’t as yet found the courage to tell.
We talked about this and that, I don’t really remember. Eventually we got around to my depression and it seems that it might have been more sensible to actually tell my boyfriend what was wrong rather than talk about it to other people so as not to annoy him. To be fair, the other people concerned had pointed this out to me at the time, but I chose to ignore them on the basis that I thought I could keep everything under control. We talked about whether or not I ought to go to the doctor, the outcome of which is that I have an appointment for 8.30am tomorrow morning. I’m still not entirely happy with the idea of taking medication, but for the next month at least until I have my annual appraisal I feel like I am in an uncomfortable sort of limbo, and so I guess it might help me to get through that. We’ll see. In any case, it should be noted that Babel made a big effort to understand the situation. As someone who doesn’t understand lack of confidence or the inability to do something competently, it’s quite a big ask to suggest he should try to emphasise with how I feel at the moment, but he did really try to make helpful suggestions and not get irritated, so thank you 
Actually, the exact order in which things happened I don’t remember. At some point we ordered food and at some point after that I worked up the courage to ask whether he actually had decided to split up with me before the point at which I suggested we called it quits. It transpired that he hadn’t, at which point I was totally gutted. I mean, he had understandably been very annoyed with me but it hadn’t specifically occurred to him to split up with me during that conversation, and so perhaps if I hadn’t suggested it it needn’t have happened 
That really wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
In fact, it transpired that the misunderstandings between us had been quite numerous. I’d spent several months feeling, as I said in a previous post, like a catalogue product which was on trial and liable to be sent back at the first sight of a defect. It turns out that being on a last chance didn’t mean that the first time I stood on a cracked paving slab I was going to be dumped, but rather that it was going to be over if I did something randomly dreadful like, erm… I dunno… decided to fake my own death, for example. Hmmm.
By this stage I was sitting across the table from Tim and severely wishing I had had the self restraint to keep my mouth shut on Saturday. I mean, what had happened from my point of view was that in the course of our argument I had come to the decision that he was definitely going to split up with me, had probably already split up with me in his own mind in fact, and so my outburst of “let’s call it quits” was half frustration at the situation and half a pre-emptive strike to make it look as if I was as totally unbothered as he presumably was about the idea that we were going to split up, and it wasn’t like I was going to lose any sleep over it or anything like that. I was genuinely very angry on Saturday, possibly without any real justification, and I posted a rather cruel facebook status, for which I now apologise Once I had calmed down a little, I made the blog post which you may have read here, sitting on a marble block in the Bull Ring with tears running down my face. The idea of that was to sound reasonable and rational and to convince both myself and other people that this whole splitting up business was for the best.
I actually think I dealt with it quite well, by my general standards of dealing with break ups. In particular, I didn’t cry myself to sleep every single night (only most nights), I managed to eat a reasonable amount of meals, and I at no point got in touch to suggest we get back together. For me, that was an achievement I was, however, as already noted, terribly upset. Quite clearly, whatever I might have said to the contrary, I had absolutely no desire to split up with Babel. I couldn’t possibly have a desire to split up with him. I wouldn’t like to feed his ego by rhapsodising about how amazing he is, but suffice it to say that I fell hopelessly in love with him rather a long time ago and no matter how disgustingly he burps have never quite succeeded in overcoming this regrettable affliction
Despite my best attempts to be rational there was, therefore, a part of me that was hoping he might be disposed to change his mind and decide we hadn’t split up after all. Halfway through my sandwich, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be the case which rendered the rest of my sandwich inedible. Luckily, I hadn’t paid for it
I don’t actually know how it came about, but just as I was about to suggest we wrapped things up and went home, it finally seemed to sink in for him what I’d been trying to say all evening - that me splitting up with him had sort of been a mistake and of course I hadn’t meant it in the slightest.
There followed several minutes during which he laughed at me in a cruel and unnecessary manner, and by the end of that… well… we appeared to be back together again. There are some more things which perhaps need to be said, but those will be better in private.
My Facebook status currently reads, “Clare has had a lucky escape. Next time she attempts to be rational, would someone please stop her?!”. There are many morals which can be learned from this story. Not to try to pre-empt what other people are going to do, as they have a nasty habit of behaving unexpectedly. Trying to be a bit more honest about problems rather than letting them build up and explode. Not putting pressure on yourself to live up to expectations which don’t exist. That sort of thing…
Most crucially, however, is this: if I tell you Tim and I have split up, please clarify whether I split up with him or he split up with me. If he split up with me, feel free to regard the event as permanent and commiserate with me accordingly. If I tell you it was my idea, take my head and bang it up against a brick wall in the hope that this might knock enough sense into me for me to realise that I don’t actually mean it