"Hi Percy,
I've gone through the house and gathered up several practical items that belong to you. Would you like to stop by next week sometime and pick these up? I understand that you intended to leave your gifts behind; I'm not referring to those. Along with the household goods, I have your painting on canvas, and your map of Santa Fe. Your square dining table with the white legs and your study bookcases are also available.
Let me know what would work for you."
What I wanted to say: You can put this shit out on the front yard and light it on fire if you want. I never want to see you or the house ever again. You could chop it all up with an ax and fucking flush it piece by piece down the shitter. That would work. Or you could tie a rope around it all and tie the other end to the back of your fucking car and drive around in circles until there's nothing left. Really, whatever you want, as long as I never get another officious, cold, distant, absolutely flat and unfeeling email from you ever again.
But I do love the old map of Santa Fe, which was a gift from my ex wife. So I just told her to put it on the front porch and I would get it Monday. I didn't tell her that I don't want the square dining table with white legs because it belonged to a poet I knew who killed himself and every time I looked at it in my study it reminded me of his lifeless body hanging from the end of a rope. That I don't give a shit about bookcases and never did and as far as I am concerned they are basically glorified kindling.
"Your gifts" is referring to a huge pile of the elaborate love letters and cards she wrote to me, the mix CDs she made, a silk scarf she gave me early in our relationship that I used to wrap my tarot cards and a necklace of Buddhist prayer beads that one of her poetry teachers had given to her. Yes, I intended to leave those "gifts" behind. She's responsible for all of it, whether she wants to accept it or will ever deal with it. As for the rest, let it fucking burn.
My favorite moment: sitting on the back porch of what was apparently now my house, rather than ours, and her looking at me through sunglasses and saying: I learned a lot from you and I'll always be grateful.
ReplyDeleteTwo weeks before, I'd fled back to my parents' house. It was as far away as I could manage to get on short notice. After a week of no contact - and no alcohol, some anti-anxiety meds, and lots of cigarettes - I was ready to return home. I made a reservation. Then my father got sick. He was taken from the ER to the ICU, pasty-faced, hoarse, an oxygen tube under his nose. My mother slept at the hospital for days. I looked after the stuff she couldn't take of and came by the hospital once or twice a day. From New Mexico, my wife texted to ask if I wanted her to come out. She didn't mean: I know our relationship may be ending, but I love you, and you need my support right now. She meant: this is a crisis and you know I love to respond to those. Or maybe she meant: I am still involved in your life on paper, so should we continue to act that out for the sake of your parents? I said no. What I meant was: my family is trying to deal with the fact that my father might die, and you think trying to fake us all out at the same time is going to fucking help?
After my father was stabilized, the danger over, I flew back. She picked me up at the airport. I didn't want her to, but she offered, and I gave in, because the part of me that didn't want to learn yet was ready to be schooled. We had lunch. We went back to my house. We sat on the porch. I made a plea - I don't know what's going on, I said, but I know I love you and I want you in my life. I was proud of myself for not crying. She said, from behind those sunglasses, I've learned a lot from you and I'll always be grateful. Her voice was completely flat - no emotion, no effort to hide emotion. The-time-is-one-twenty-three-PM. I-learned-a-lot-from-you. I hadn't flown back to my home. I had parachuted into the uncanny valley.
Whenever I'm tempted to reach out, to apologize for this or that should have or shouldn't have, I remember that moment on the porch. I think about The Switch, and how The Switch is a self-preservation device for people who don't have any other. It's like throwing the main breaker when you can't figure out which fuse is blown. Except when you turn the power back on, it's for a different house, and everything looks new, and there are no pictures of the people you used to love anywhere, not even in a shoebox in the closet.
This so totally resonates. It reminds me of the ex hugging me sort of reluctantly and saying "You are an important man." Just-- what?
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't mean anything. My ex-wife did learn things from me, but that's not what she meant when she said that. It's a thing to say because you think it sounds like the kind of thing people say. You are an important person, but that's not what she meant. The closest I can get to what I think she meant, in my case, is this: my inner life is hell. I cannot share it with myself, and so I cannot share it with you. Please stop trying to love me. It's too hard and I can't call you on your bullshit because I can't call myself on my own. Because it's hell in here.
DeleteWhat do you do then? Walk away. We can't save the people we love. And we can't save them by our sacrifice of walking away, either - we can't save them. We are immaterial to them. There is no comfort in this, except that it reminds us of who we are not. I've been told many times that eventually I'll just feel sorry for her - and mostly I do. But I will never, I think, forget the anger and the hurt. The same self-respect that makes me feel bad for her reminds me to be furious. This is not who I want to be.
The startling thing about it up front is the jarring dissonance between this deadness and inability to show up for authentic connection and the historical very high functioning emotional intelligence, communication skills and at least appearance of the capacity to love. It is a manifestation of such a complete break from the concept I had of this woman previously. It shakes trust in my own ability to assess someone's character, right to the core.
DeleteI don't think I know much about my ability to assess character anymore. I know that we trust people we like, and then rationalize the trust after the fact. I also know that not trusting at all is not an option for me.
DeleteWe live in a culture that fetishizes Love - we only have that one word for it - as well as things we see as the accoutrements of love: sex, commitment, monogamy. We fail, linguistically and emotionally, to distinguish love as a feeling from love as an action. And when we find ourselves failing at something that is supposed to accompany or exemplify love, we panic.
On top of that, at the same time we fetishize love, we emphasize self-care and the "you do you" philosophy that's meant to save us from codependency and toxic relationships.
All of this seems to me like a guarantee of balls-to-the-wall fuckery.
Was I wrong to trust my ex? I tell people yes, but I'm not sure. I would be wrong, as I am now, to trust her as she was then, but that's not the same thing. Do I still love her? Depends on what you mean. We're so fucked in our ability to discuss these things with ourselves that we can feel we love someone while tearing apart their character, or convince ourselves that we hate someone while staying away from them so they can go on with their own lives without our trying to make them feel whatever guilt we sincerely believe they ought to feel.
We all carry a checklist in our heads. The checklist isn't about whom we trust, but whom we like. And we don't usually have any idea about half the shit that's on it until long after we've added to it.
I hear that, and think that, on a practical level, being drawn to people who hurt us is fucked up the most. There is a lot of cultural baggage around this particular form of codependency. And, for me, it's easier to get myself away from someone who is outright abusive than it is to extricate myself from someone who is indifferent to me. The indifference of those I like toward me is the unkindest cut of all for me. Especially if it is vaguely spiced with intermittent reinforcement- 6 weeks of indifference peppered with an email that has a couple sentences of affection and I'll love you forever.
ReplyDeleteI hear you, man.
DeleteIn my case, time has made it harder for me to distinguish the ways in which she was right to be dissatisfied with me from the ways in which her leaving me was dysfunctional. Someone I know wrote on FB recently, "Being blamed for hurting has everything to do with the days I walked out." I know I did that - blamed her for hurting. Not at first, probably not for a long time, but eventually, when something always seemed to be wrong and I felt like I was being asked to reinvent happiness for her again and again. I know that eventually I turned her own trauma-induced angst against her. I know it made her feel that she could not express herself. Maybe part of what frightens me is wondering how long before she left she unplugged from me - how long was I falling for an act?
But, yes, being drawn to people who hurt us is fucked up. I forget this a lot, but early on, I put a cigarette out on my arm over the pain our relationship (her behavior towards me) was causing me. I'd never done anything like that before, and haven't since. Nine years later, if I associated that impulse with anyone, I'd run. I know I blocked it out for a long time, first because I wanted to ignore the toxic signs at the beginning, and later maybe because I just didn't want to acknowledge that I'd done that. I had a physical scar for years, but it's gone.
It seems to me that people are going to be unhappy together. I mean, that just seems like an axiom to me. The crux of the biscuit is-- what do people decide when they run ashore on that reef of being dissatisfied with their partner? I know all of the various things I have done. Oddly, I have very rarely turned *toward* the other person and said "I love you but I am unhappy right now in our partnership. Let's reconnect somehow." Most of my strategy when I am unhappy in a partnership is driven by self-centered fear and is self-seeking, dishonest, oblique and ineffective.
DeleteIf I needed women less I could enjoy being in relation with them more, I think.
And yes, self-harming in literally embodied ways due to emotional pain is one of my great hobbies-- or used to be. In particular, the pastime of "drinking at" people who hurt me. "I'll show you! I'll drink this here whiskey until I vomit!"
As far as that goes, I've come to believe that our whole model is wrong. In the same way that over the last fifteen years or so I've had to re-think the way that I see religion, and human cognition in general, and capitalism and patriarchy and pretty much every other aspect of what I was raised to consciously or unconsciously accept, I've had to throw out much of what I once believed about love and sex and dating. I haven't been in a monogamous relationship since my marriage ended, and I seriously doubt I could ever want to be in one again - even when my partner has other partners and I don't. I could write a lot about this, but I don't want to be that guy who pops up every time a relationship ends and announces, "Your problem, sir, is that you are trying to be monogamous. Take my card and join the poly revolution." I just mean that I think much of the received wisdom about these things is wrong. I remember struggling desperately to find anything to be even slightly hopeful about in the midst of my misery, and the only thing I could come up with was: Start over. Question everything. Build it all back up from the ground. And that ended up taking me places I didn't expect.
DeleteThere's nothing wrong with needing women. That's part of being a human. But turning emotional pain into self-harm of one form or another - that's a hell of a fucking monster, isn't it?
We are on exactly the same page regarding poly. I will at some point write more about how the ex and I had a set of poly agreements and were not monogamous, but how she twisted that at the very end of our partnership. Briefly, here, I will say that it floored me when she told this story to the couples counselor: "Non-monogamy was just your way of always having an out or an escape route from our relationship, and I never wanted it. I only agreed to it because I was in love with you at the time." How fucking fucked to the fucked up nth fucking power is that, nearly 6 years after the fact? Very very very.
DeleteEspecially considering that I assumed and trusted that she was operating according to our poly agreements as she formed the new relationship that obliterated our partnership.
Delete