(Written by Jer)
After the breakup between Aly and her fiancé, Aly attempted to isolate herself. She spent some time with her friends and told me she felt it was best that she stopped contacting me. Being relentless and knowing everything she had been through I still tried to be supportive and eventually told her that I loved her. She didn’t reciprocate my feelings at first as she felt terrible about the whole messy situation and confused about her emotions. Things are a bit blurry here but I do remember Aly’s mum (who is a teacher) insisted that Aly go into school with her to help with the class, while Aly worked on recovering from her depression. Eventually she felt well enough to start looking for work and took a job at the local petrol station.
[Aly] I had felt guilty about the breakup with my fiancé. At a time where I felt I should be blamed for everything, this was yet another thing I felt was my fault. My fiancé had been wonderful in trying to support me while I was ill, but such is the nature of depression that I ended up dragging him down emotionally as well. With both of us at an all-time low, I turned to Jeremy as an impartial, objective friend who I could talk to without feeling guilty that I was making him feel bad. At the time I didn’t want to talk to my fiancé and drag him down even further than I already had. There were days where I would sit on the bed and cry non-stop for no reason, I felt constantly nauseous and the only time I could eat was when I was drinking. I practically lived on bananas and weetabix.
When I came home from University I started spending more and more time talking online to Jeremy because he made me feel better and I was able to escape a little from real life. Before we broke up, my fiancé had understandably begun to get increasingly jealous about the time I was spending online talking to Jeremy. Hindsight is 20/20 and looking back I can appreciate how hurtful this must have been to my fiancé – there was this guy who I was engaged to who loved me, and instead of trying to fight through this depression together, I tried to escape from my emotions by absorbing myself in the internet, talking to someone thousands of miles away who I had never even met. Nevertheless it happened and we inevitably broke up. This gave me more to feel guilty about on top of the confusing feelings I was beginning to have for Jeremy. I thought that no-one would take me seriously falling in love with a bum (Jeremy had no job, had never had a job and didn’t think he was good enough to get a job) who lived so far away and who I had never met. Also the longer I spent cooped up, the longer I felt like I was wasting my life – I needed to be busy and surround myself with the people closest to me to try and get myself better. [/Aly]
Eventually Aly realised that she had fallen in love with me. It was with this confession that our relationship took off and was doomed at the same time. We became utterly obsessed with each other’s company online, and looked for a multitude of different things to do together online. We spent so much time together over the following months that we had bored ourselves of the internet itself and run out of things to do together online. We had run up phone bills and talked about anything and everything under the sun. It was a truly unhealthy relationship, but one thing was always clear… we just worked together somehow.
We mainly passed the time by playing Yahoo Games version of Scrabble called Literati , JT’s Blocks (another Yahoo game), playing Nilgiri (by this time we had both become immortal characters in Nilgiri) and talking about these new feelings for each other. We quickly found that we had so many things in common and the things we didn’t have in common were complimentary (for the most part!). I had loved to write, for example, and Aly loved to read. We both fancied a simple life in a big house. We were both witty, opinionated, stubborn, funny, loving, charismatic, and we each thought that the other was the most beautiful human being since Helen of Troy (ok, that might be pushing it), plus a billion other things that people tend to forget when they’ve been together for a long time. The best way to put it really is that we ‘clicked’ in such a way that we became obsessed with each other and each other’s company because we got along with each other so well.
Until the fights came, anyway…