Strands

One

I love my GP's surgery. It's a five-minute walk around the corner, tucked away inside a community centre, and always immensely peaceful. The most people I've seen in the waiting room at any one time is three - a far cry from the over-subscribed circus Leo and Alba attend.

The GP herself is marvellous. Her bedside manner has struck exactly the right balance between matter-of-fact and sympathetic; too much of either tends to intimidate me. I visited her yesterday for a duplicate medical certificate, an update on my counselling referral, and more medication. She gave me an extension on my certificate without my needing to ask, apologised for the long waiting list for counselling services, and corrected my repeat prescription to show my correct dosage. I was in the surgery less than five minutes. My GP seems to be the exception that proves the rule within the NHS.

I collected my medication from the awful pharmacist, who looked far from pleased to have a customer so close to closing time. Earlier today, the Jobcentre faxed my certificates to head office whilst I waited - taking no risks this time - and later sent me a text message to confirm that my back payments would be released within three working days. I won't feel a sense of relief until the money enters my account, but the promise is there.

Two

Truman has been over several times since I cleaned up his room. Unfortunately, my own hatred of conflict barred me from confronting him about the mess he left, but Leo conveyed the message for me. No apology has been forthcoming yet, but this comes as no surprise.

Meanwhile, Truman is already regretting his hasty decision. Both Poison Ivy and the person in whose flat they are staying - an old enemy of Leo's - are frustrating him to no end. I can happily report that Leo has told him to lie in the bed he's made for himself.

Three

Since writing that I neither have bad dreams nor recurring themes from night to night, I have experienced both. I dreamed that I had killed a monstrous person in self-defence, and was running from two things: the police, and the dark fog slowly covering the city. Despite my overwhelming guilt, the people I met all sympathised with me and hid me from the police, but the fog was awful. It moved slowly, mockingly, in that near-sentient way it does in horror movies. It was inescapable and evil.

The next night, I dreamed I was ill and unable to walk, so I had to be driven everywhere by my family. We left the house in the middle of the day only to confronted with the darkness and the fog again. More horrifying still, the fog was somehow refracting the moonlight so that there appeared to be three full moons overlapping each other in the sky. I've been disconcerted by dreams about planets appearing too large in the night sky before, but combined with the creeping fog from the night before, those three moons absolutely terrified me, even upon waking.

I am considering starting to write a dream diary to help with analysis. Perhaps it would be useful.

Cleanup

Leo and I cleaned up Truman's newly vacated room. Leo stacked the remainder of Truman's belongings on the bed, then fell over something and broke his toe, putting him out of action. He wouldn't put ice on the swelling, and spent the rest of the day alternating between swearing profusely and talking nonsense through a haze of codeine.

The vacuum cleaner broke down once and for all, pitiful specimen that it was, so it was me and my asthma against the carpet of dust, crumbs and cigarette ash Truman had so thoughtfully left behind. Thankfully our flat has laminate floors throughout, so all it took was a broom, a Swiffer, several inhaler breaks and a long string of curses.

With the hard work out of the way, I was able to set up my beloved Wii once more, complete with balance board and yoga mat. I rewarded myself with an evening of BBC shows via the Wii, with a pile of crochet in my lap and Lola, the youngest cat, asleep amid the stacks on the bed.

I despise feeling angry - I have never found a way to express it constructively - but Truman's actions have enraged me. I am used to people in this city being mercenary, being selfish, yet having that sort of behaviour in one's home feels like a violation. We took Truman in when he had nowhere to go, yet as soon as another opportunity came along, he dropped Leo and I like a hot potato. We still cannot contact him, yet his belongings are still in our home. If he ever paid us rent, as per our agreement when he moved in, I certainly haven't seen any of it. He left the flat with no warning, no thanks, and no thought to the trash he left behind him.

This is not the first time that Leo and I have offered hospitality, only for it to be abused. But coming from Truman, this hurts - Leo especially. He often defended Truman to me, particularly through the trauma we all went through when he first moved back in. They have been best friends for years; in his desire to create a family around himself, Leo often called him "brother". After the many betrayals and upheavals he has experienced since I have known him, Truman was his last remaining "brother".

Just this once, I am able to look past what I fear is a burgeoning addiction to painkillers in Leo. In his situation, I would want to shroud myself from reality too; from personal experience, codeine is a short and sure route to comforting illusion.

Crochet and television have put some time between myself and my anger, but I wish they were so effective at solving the underlying problem. This is the second time that Truman has made my home feel unsafe and unwelcoming to me. My home is my refuge from the outside world and all the people in it that scare me so much, and this sense of violation I now feel does all sorts of damage to my state of mind. Truman never considered the effect of his leaving on my depression, just as he never considered how the state he left his room in would affect my asthma. Having written about his tendency toward self-destruction, it deeply grieves me to have to write now about his destructivity toward the people that care about him. Neither Leo nor I can tolerate any more destruction than that which this year has already brought us.

Before medicating himself, Leo told me he was washing his hands of Truman. Knowing what that must have cost him to say proves how deeply Truman's offence runs. A few days ago, I feared for his future. Now, I only hope that he can lie in the bed he's made.

Truman

Truman is all heart and no head. Despite his shyness around strangers, he is sweet-natured and will do anything for anyone. In fact, his people-pleasing seems to know no bounds - to the point where he often does things completely out of character, or reckless to the point of life-endangering, just to gain the approval of others. When pressed, he will admit that he hates doing the things he does, but he knows no other way to behave. Logic, reason and common sense are not terms to be readily associated with Truman's personality.

In January, Truman moved in with Leo and I for a second time. He had lived in our spare bedroom for a few months over 2010, moving out the following January to live with his girlfriend of two weeks. A year later his relationship had quite predictably gone asunder, and the person he had been living with since - another former roommate of ours - evicted him under false pretences. Luckily for him, Leo and I had long since agreed that Truman would be the only person we would have live with us again, on account of his not being a thief, grossly unhygienic, or a violent racist.

Unfortunately, he was about to completely outdo himself with a series of catastrophic blunders.

Just after we had agreed that he could move in, he needed to speak to me on my own. There was someone, he said, that he had been in love with for quite some time - over this last relationship, and even through the end of the previous one. This was no great surprise to me, considering the speed at which he had moved out last time to be with a woman he barely knew. Still, I was curious to know the object of his affections, hoping against hope that his choice this time was a good match for him.

I was to be disappointed, of course. With great difficulty, he admitted that he had wanted to be with me since meeting me almost three years since. He knew that his confession would not change anything - I had met Truman shortly after Leo and I got together - but he wanted the relief of not having to hold in his secret anymore.

He was to be proved wrong. The changes that followed could not have been predicted by anyone, not by him and certainly not by me. I went into freefall, seeing longing stares from Truman every time Leo's back was turned, and hearing innuendoes in his conversation that might well have not been there. Playful insults that I could have laughed off had they come from Leo cut like daggers. Leo himself did not notice that anything was wrong until it was too late, when I tearfully announced that my discomfort in my own home and his indifference to the situation were forcing me to break up with him and temporarily move in with another friend of ours. Even now, Leo and Truman cannot agree which of them was most shocked at this.

Under circumstances that deserve a separate post to describe, I was forced to return only a week later and resolve the conflict that both Truman and I had both been avoiding, out of instinct. I mistook his awkwardness for being obtuse; he bristled when I pressed him for an apology for what he had put me through. The accord we reached was tense and unsatisfactory, but there was little choice available to either of us. He had nowhere else to live, and Leo would not have seen him anywhere else. Yet it was my home too, and I had a right to be there without being made to feel uncomfortable.

Still, after a few days he and I became friends again. He kept mostly to his bedroom as I did to mine (Leo's domain had been the living room for months before our split). Life became easier, even if living inside my head became increasingly difficult.

So it was a shock when Truman announced last Friday that he was moving out the next day. Leo and I were both aware that he had been visiting his ex-fiancée, a thoroughly toxic woman with severe mental health issues that she seems to be able to turn on and off at will. She and Truman have a child together, currently in foster care, as her other two children are. She is full of excuses regarding her way of life, and she is either incapable or unwilling to look after herself, yet she has no qualms about bringing innocent lives into the world  in order to destroy them.

To illustrate: Truman is HIV positive. When they first became a couple, he refused to sleep with her for fear of infecting her. She told him not to worry; she too was HIV positive. Yet when she fell pregnant with their child, it was discovered that she had not had the virus before sleeping with Truman. The child was taken into care shortly after birth for fear of further negligence.

So you can see why Leo and I were concerned for him. He still pined for his most recent ex-girlfriend, as he often told us at volume and length, so what could have possessed him to return to such an awful relationship? He could not answer this question for us, but what is clear is that his self-worth is so low that he believes he does not deserve anyone better. His ex-girlfriend moved away after their relationship ended, and Leo and I were - had been - together. His crippling need to be in a relationship with someone, his inability to live and function as an individual, the depression he suffers from and his slowly declining physical health all led in one direction - backward. The frustration she causes him and the utter lack of affection he feels for her are both secondary to his need for a partner. He is destroying himself because he cannot bear to be alone.

He left on Saturday with promises to visit the next day, but since then he has not been seen and cannot be reached. Whether out of shame or defiance, Leo and I cannot tell. It would be impossible to try and convince Truman to change his mind, simply because his mind never comes into the equation. He truly is all heart, and he wears it on his sleeve for all to take a piece and keep none for himself.