22 // CAMPUS | MEMOIR
Slowly Vanishing AUTHOR // Hamish Blackmore
CONTENT WARNING: discussions of mental illness, heavy drinking and self-harm I met a girl in a Galway pub, once. She would always say that she saw me, and I with spotting her. We gossiped for a while about life in Europe, as eighteen-year-old Australian travellers always do, and after a while I offered to buy her a drink. She replied to me, teasingly, and with a smile, that she could buy her own drinks, thank you very much! Then she looked into my eyes, and said, “go on, then…” It was the first time I ever bought a girl a drink. The whole thing was a fairy-tale. Eighteen months later, I am carving her name into a tree on the side of Black Mountain with a blunt knife, piss-drunk and sobbing for the first time since primary school. I had not been a person to feel very much. Growing up, I never really struggled with depression or anxiety, or anything like that. I have always considered myself to be an emotionally strong person. I’ve had close family members struggle with things like addiction, cancer, and suicidal thoughts, with some of them dying as a result. It makes me feel guilty then, to realise that breaking up with that girl has hit me much harder than anything else in my life. It feels almost like a betrayal to them all – and yet, it’s the truth. Over those months I had truly come to love her and when she was suddenly gone from my life, it was traumatic. Heartbreak often is. And for a rather masculine bloke such as myself, this took me completely by surprise. It was a different, deeper type of hurt. In all the other losses, those loved ones never really wanted to part from your company. The end of a relationship is a rejection of you at your most intimate and personal. It is humiliating. It cuts deeply into who you believe you are. Heartbreak is traumatic in
any capacity, but the more you love someone the worse it is. My heart was completely broken, and in turn, I was as well. It seemed at the time as if everything I had built my life around had suddenly fallen away. I felt completely alone. My guts always felt as if they were tying themselves in knots and I wanted to cry all the time. I began to drink – and I was a heavy drinker before the split. Now, I was rarely sober. I was drunk every night, and every morning, and even during classes and lectures. To my horror, I later found out that there were weeks where I perpetually stank of goon, and that my bottom lip was almost always stained red. At the time it felt as if intoxication was my only escape from the crushing sense of loss. For months, I found that I physically couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat because my appetite had disappeared, and all I would do was retch while trying to keep anything down. Often, I would walk into the bush across the road late at night so that my neighbours wouldn’t hear me cry. I didn’t even get an erection, provoked or otherwise, for what was eventually a 44-day period – which, for a young adult male, is near absurd. A few times in the middle of lectures I rudely pushed through my friends to get outside, feeling that my chest might implode if I couldn’t get away. There was rarely a quarter hour that I didn’t think about this girl: where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with. None of this was helped by the fact that two weeks into the break she hooked up with two blokes, fully aware that she was within a metre of me and in my full view, and left upstairs Moose with one of them. I was never suicidal, but I was very, very depressive.
