Sunday 10th August 1980

I finally decide to go to the youth club.  
Almost the first thing I hear is that Julie is now going out with someone else.
I am emptied of feelings by this news.
Turned cold. 
Julie is mine. She is my girlfriend. What the fuck is she doing being with someone else?  
A little later I ask one of her close friends how it came about. 
The answer makes me feel worse. 
Much worse... 
It seems Julie came to the youth club on the Sunday I came back from Devon. 
Sunday the 27th July.
That same Sunday that I felt too tired and fed-up to visit the club.
But even worse news follows...
Her friend reckons that Julie came up the club to see me.
I don't know what to think.
I feel a strange but distant sense of panic.
I ask him, "Why? Why did she want to see me?" 
He doesn't know what she wanted.
I ask myself, did we have a chance of getting back together? And I answer myself, it MUST have been that! 
But....  
At the end of the night, I was not there, and someone else was. 
And he walked her home.
Did she ask him to?
Did he 'volunteer' himself?
Her friend does not know.
And a few days later they were going out with each other.  

So.
What do I do now?
Go and see her? It's late. He might be there. On the doorstep. No! Not that!
Phone her? No. What if she is out somewhere with him? What then? Where are they? What are they doing?
In the end, I do nothing. 
Because I do not know what to do.  

Music: Ray Charles, I can't stop loving you

A little later I wonder - as I have before and since - how can it be like this? 
How can two strangers become so close. 
And then love one another.
They share thoughts. Feelings. Physical and mental contact.
And then - as now - something happens which makes all of that impossible.
If the split is mutual, I suppose it makes sense.
But where the split is not mutual it feels rather like having a limb torn off.
How and why is the world like this?
Needless to say, I hear and find no answer.
It strikes me then as a sad and rather callous world.