every Saturday or stroll along the same stretch of beach we had visited a hundred times before. But I wasn’t interested anymore in sitting with him on the swings at the children’s play park, watching the sun set in a glow of colour across the river. Perhaps I had grown so complacent in my belief that we would always be a couple, I felt safe wanting to go to parties and do all the other things 16-year-olds want to do rather than what I saw as mundane ‘couple things’.
I sometimes got frustrated with Diyan and told myself he was stupid. But it was only because I was angry with the world and sceptical of his belief that love and kindness could make bad things better. The truth was that I loved him. He had been my whole world for almost three years and the only good thing I had ever had for as long as I could remember. So although I sometimes lashed out at him, it hadn’t ever crossed my mind that, when he came back from Iran, we wouldn’t find the middle ground and be together forever.
The first time I went to see Diyan after he returned from Iran, I slept with him. But I knew that day that everything had changed – for both of us. He was married and planning to bring his wife to England as soon as she got a visa, and I had grown up and moved away from him. We were two totally different people – different from the way we had been three years previously as well as different from each other – and we didn’t really understand each other anymore. It was incredibly sad. After we had been together for so long, it was hard enough to admit, even to ourselves, that it was over and neither of us wanted to say it out loud. During the next few days, we gradually drifted further and further apart, and then stopped seeing each other altogether.
Despite the heartbreak of our separation, I hadn’t actually been faithful to, or honest with, Diyan while he was in Iran. There had been a funfair in the local park about a week before he came back and when I went to it one evening, I bumped into a guy called Baashir who worked in a takeaway food place in town. I had chatted to him before, and when I went back to his flat with him that night, we both got paralytically drunk. Even though it was after Diyan had told me on the phone about his marriage, in my mind we were still technically together, so sleeping with Baashir was like cheating on him. Maybe that’s why it felt almost like a punishment and why I hated every minute of it and kept thinking, ‘I don’t want this. I want Diyan.’
Baashir was the first person other than Diyan I had had sex with for more than two years. We didn’t use protection that night and I was very worried afterwards in case I had caught an STD or got pregnant. I had grown up a lot since the days when I used to lie on a bed in someone else’s house waiting for the door to open and the next faceless man to walk into the room and have sex with me. Being 16 years old and aware of the risks of having sex without contraception might not sound like a very significant marker of responsibility, but it was a real turning point for me.
After that first night, Baashir started following me around town, offering me bags of chips and drinks, and eventually I went with him again because there was no one else. I had no feelings for him at all. It was just that being with him seemed like a better option than being on my own, and I needed someone’s company at that time, because I had recently stopped drinking during the day.
I really wanted to control my mental health and it had become clear, even to me, what effect alcohol was having on it. If I didn’t have a drink in the morning, I would get the shakes and feel physically sick. I was getting fed up with not being able to cope. So I began to wean myself off drinking by telling myself, ‘Get through the morning and then you can have a drink.’ Then, when I had achieved that first self-imposed goal, ‘Now just get through the afternoon and you can have a drink tonight.’
Baashir was 19. He had arrived in England as an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan about six months before I met him and had been given a temporary visa. He was actually Pashtun, which is an ethnic group of Muslims who have their own specific religious and ethical traditions. None of the other Pashtun boys I knew had relationships with English girls. But when I became Baashir’s girlfriend, he was very protective of me and I knew no one else would dare lay a finger on me. In fact, most of his mates simply ignored me, and I quickly learned to ignore them too.
I didn’t love Baashir. What appealed to me about him was the fact that he was everything Diyan wasn’t. He liked parties, drinking vodka and doing all the other things I thought young people were supposed to do. After the pain of my break-up with Diyan, he seemed to offer me the perfect opportunity to take life less seriously and lose myself for a while.
I was still clinging to the dream of having a home and a family. Now though, having lost Diyan, I had decided that it didn’t really matter who made that dream a reality. Baashir had a flat overlooking the river and one evening, when we were watching the sunset from his window and he was standing behind me with his arms around my waist, I suddenly thought, ‘Yeah, this will do. I can make it work with Baashir.’ I think it was at that moment I realised that, for me, what was really important was the dream itself. If I couldn’t make it become reality with Diyan, Baashir would do instead.
In fact, I had become so fixated on chasing my dream of having a home and a family as soon as possible that I allowed it to obscure what should have been the bigger picture. And, as a result, I made a decision that is perhaps my greatest regret.
It was while I was seeing Baashir that I met an English boy called Adam – a normal, 18-year-old teenager who liked to go bowling and whose idea of a meal out was a burger and fries at McDonald’s. Adam and I became good friends who enjoyed each other’s company and had great times together, laughing and joking around, like normal teenagers do. That in itself was a huge landmark for me, because I had begun to believe that I would never have any ‘normal’ friendships with people of my own age.
I know Adam thought I was his girlfriend. But when it came to deciding who I really wanted to be with – Adam or Baashir – I chose the dream instead of the more sensible option of waiting, getting a good education, then a job, and going through all the other stages that would have prepared me much better for becoming a wife and mother.
I actually sat down one day and weighed up all the pros and cons on each side. ‘Okay, so Adam … I’m happier with Adam. He makes me smile. I feel safe with him. I think I could quite easily fall in love with him. Then there’s Baashir … I don’t love Baashir. I don’t even really care very much about him. But he has got a job. So he would be a better provider and therefore a better father.’ When I looked at it like that, in simplistic, black-and-white terms – and bearing in mind my fixation on having my own home and family – the choice seemed obvious.
It was the wrong choice, of course. And although choosing Adam might not have turned out any better, for either of us, I wish I had given it a try. At least then I would have had a few years to be young and the chance to rebuild the childhood I had lost, to stay on at college and get some qualifications that would have given me real choices in life. So yes, when I think about it now, not giving my relationship with Adam a chance is definitely my greatest regret.
One of the many mistakes I was making was trying to run when I could barely walk. Losing Diyan felt like losing my security. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that, after my experiences during the first 16 years of my life, security was the one thing that really mattered to me – security and the longing for everything just to be normal.
I think it was when I was struggling to understand and copy the behaviour of my fellow students that I began to realise, that despite my relatively easy relationship with Adam, I was never going to have a normal life like his, even if, by some miracle, he did become the person I shared my future with.
For a brief period, I had options and opportunities to make a good life for myself. The problem was I didn’t have the self-confidence to make the right choice. Instead, I decided that I wasn’t cut out for qualifications and that it would be better to stay in my small world. So I dropped out of college and chose Baashir. I still sometimes wonder
