Sadness.

I feel abundantly sad and then I feel confused that I feel sad because I’m rational and I knew it was coming eventually. It was never going to end well for him but now that it’s happened it’s no less sad for the anticipation.

He’s been arrested in Bali and thanks to social media and the abundance of phone cameras, there’s a lot of footage.

I empathetically feel his darkness, trapped, frustrated and confused; I know he’ll be fighting himself. I’m sure he just wanted to get home; he often said he just wanted to be ‘normal’. He hates Bali, I’m sure he just wanted to get back to Australia, to ‘normal’, to some kind of sanity after being stuck there, no doubt on a bender, for months. He would have identified he’d had enough, he was tired, but his brain didn’t find the rational solution to the problem.

Looking at his face in those pictures; bloodied, barefoot and broken, I know that vacant, pained look and still 5 years later it hurts my heart.

And whilst I know I can’t help him, not now and not ever, I still feel like I want to cry with him and tell him he’ll be ok, he just needs to try and stay sane.

He hurt me so badly, he hurt my family, he abused my trust, he used me appallingly and whilst it would be so much easier to be a cold-hearted person, I can’t. I feel his pain in this moment, I feel his confusion, his brain won’t be working and he won’t fully understand what he’s done because he is a broken human.

It didn’t need to end like this… maybe it did, maybe it was always going to, but my rational, healthy brain can’t make sense of that. He had choices, he had opportunities, he had good people in his life that wanted the best for him. He just couldn’t and wouldn’t and I don’t know why and I’ll never know why because I don’t trust what he says and I don’t trust what he says to others. It’s all mired down in lies. I think some of which he believes are true and others that he needs to work at convincing himself are true.

And now he’s alone in an Indonesian prison and this won’t help him and it won’t help society. Society doesn’t know he won’t see the light and change after a stint in prison; we don’t want to think that there are bad people out there that are un-fixable; we want to think everyone can be responsible for their actions and learn their lessons. We want to think people hit ‘rock bottom’ and change. But these people do exist and he is one of them. Prison won’t help him, he can’t be alone, he has spent his life going from one woman to the next without a break, he can’t not have someone in his life trying to make him better. It’s like a sick game, he thinks he’s in love and finally found someone that understands him and will make him ‘normal’ and we try and fix him, to make him better, to be the one person that breaks through. But it’s Sisyphus, relentless, unending, painful and pointless. 

He won’t see this as a time to change his life around, his brain doesn’t work like that. Sadly, I’m not sure he’ll make it in prison. Trapping him in a box won’t save him, he will get worse if he has ready access to drugs and no one listening to him. Eventually, maybe after not even that long, he might just lose his mind completely and succumb to his worn-weary, exhausted body and mind.

Despite it all, I don’t wish him ill, I wish him peace. But I don’t think peace will find him until he has taken himself out, one way or the other.