The ex is on the phone in the dark in the room-- in bed, the bed that was our bed. Where I had felt safe and at home for 2.5 years. I can tell from her tone of voice that she's talking with CB. Now, in my opinion, this is shitty behavior that lacks class. It's fucking Valentine's Day, right? And I have been in my recovery mode. I am working on being right with the world. And she's cozied up in bed in the candlelight talking with her new paramour. It is so surreal for me-- I can't begin to describe to you how strange. I feel gutted.
After she hung up I knocked on what used to be our bedroom door. I went in.
"That was CB wasn't it?"
"I don't think I'm going to answer that."
So that's the kind of situation we have here. I sit down on the floor and have a little bit of a go around until I just collapse into uncontrollable sobbing. She is unmoved and unmoving in the bed. I then reveal that I've been depressed, I think, that I've been thinking about suicide, that I'm a mess-- I feel old and diminished and less of a man, jealous and hurt and destroyed. Finally she does indeed open up a little bit. But still so distant. She won't, for example, say she loves me. She won't reassure me in any way whatsoever, actually. She just expresses what sounds to me like a barely concealed pity. She also adds the ever-so-helpful "I really hope we can be friends when this is all over. I will still want you in my life."
Now that is just not really what you want to hear. I mean-- it's nice. But yeah. No.
I stayed in the house for two more weeks and I kept thinking maybe something would open up.
One of the times I went to stay elsewhere (I got out of the house a few times just to try to get some peace), she hugged me and said "you are an important man."
Now, I ask you. what the fuck all is that supposed to mean? "You are an important man."
This is just awful shit.
Here is a person who I thought was capable of much more than this.
Anyway, it was quite the Valentine-- and a scene that really still hangs in my mind like a fuliginous shit cloud of surreal disorientation and grief. I might as well have cut through the skin of my abdomen, through the rectus abdominis, through the peritoneum, and just piled all of my guts right out onto the floor.
I remember looking for answers and not getting any.
ReplyDeleteThe night she moved out, she said, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm fucked up." This was also the night she TOLD me she was moving out, as well as the night that she confessed to being in love with a man she spent most of the time - when he came up in conversation at all - complaining about. I said, "Well, go do what you need to do." By that I meant: "You have got to be fucking shitting me, but if you need to go fuck this guy to get it out of your system, go ahead." It never crossed my mind that it might be more than that.
Over the subsequent months I got prevarications, half-explanations, and (worst of all) not-so-veiled suggestions that I should be willing to enter into a kind of competition with this guy. Despite my increasing desperation, I rejected that idea out of hand. There was also marriage counseling ("I don't know, I just can't be in a relationship right now"), phone calls to ask me to proofread her papers, assurances that I was her favorite person, and the constant knowledge that because this other guy was her boss, she was seeing him every day anyway, whether or not they were fucking in the bathroom. Have I made it clear how much fun I was having?
Realizations settle in over the course of years, like geologic deposits. I understand now that, however all this worked out for her, she had no fucking idea what she was doing. That doesn't mean it was the wrong thing for her to do. But she was making it up as she went, and most of her explanations to me, which I parsed like they were literature, were improvised and uncertain. The biggest thing we ask of people is to know who they are, and that might be too much to ask of anyone.
In the end, I spent a lot of time trying to make her feel guilty. One afternoon I came home early and started drinking. By nine o'clock or so I was properly drunk, and after seventeen thousand attempts I got her on the phone. I was frantic, crying, breathless. As soon as she finally started to cry too I calmed right the fuck down. She called me on it, but I didn't even feel bad. I'd wanted a reaction and I'd gotten one. Of course, this was quite a turnaround from my initial attitude, when I'd said "go do what you need to do," and meant it. I thought her going to do what she needed to do would eventually lead her back to me. When that turned out not to be the case, and when I wasn't offered any explanations I could understand about why, I began unplugging my self-respect, cord by cord.
The weird thing is I didn't know what I was doing, either. I knew I wanted her back, I knew I felt abandoned and abused, I knew I loved her madly and had been happy with her and yet had often wondered whether she needed me more than I needed her. Years later, I can simultaneously hold in my head the things I did to drive her away, and the way she treated me in her leaving, which scarred me in a way I may never get over.
The night I drank too much and called her and then passed out, I threw shit all over the house, candlewax splattering on the walls, broken glass on the brick, and I picked up one of our four heavy rush-seated chairs and slammed it into the ground until it broke. I still have the three surviving chairs, and I sometimes remember with a jolt that one is missing, and then I remember those months when I wanted a reaction and didn't get one. And I wonder if her leaving without seeming to miss me hurt more than the fact that she left.
thanks for the honest story of the real deal. I think people with a switch they can flip seemingly at will are fucking dangerous. I am going to write about The Switch in the next few days. But the completely unbalanced lack of reciprocity when it seems like there used to be total reciprocity is jarring and awful. It's so deeply painful to think about someone, feel so attached to them and want to be with them and have them not even show any sign at all of remembering your existence. It's so diminishing and negating. The only remedy I know is complete detachment, which takes time and a lot of work.
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