13 Ways of Waiting for an Ibis

Noelle S Oszvald, "Prejudice"

I'm observing myself in the current change of circumstances and reconfirming that I am an emotional, sensitive, nostalgic, sentimental and not particularly "functional" person. That I am working my way through a painful separation for the second time in 10 months simply seems absurd. It feels like piling on. Raise up off me! por favor, Universe. (and the Universe replies, "well, you chose all of this.") It's especially weird to separate without ever truly having been able to be together in many tangible ways, and for the exact nature of the change itself to not be crystal clear. It's weird, too, that this one hits at not even six months into the relationship, yet feels more difficult in some ways than the one with A, way back on February 28th. 

Awww, look at how cute February is!

What was difficult about that dissolution with A was the loss of home, security, comfort, routine, structure. And the loss of dignity— betrayal with an old friend of mine, complete cut off, sudden turning of the switch, a severing that felt to me like it was absolutely without compassion. I was unhappy in the partnership, and since then it has become increasingly apparent to me that a major change had to occur, and was bound to occur. In fact, there were many times in the last 18 months or so of that life that I would lie in bed and think to myself "I can't do this anymore. I just can't bear it. I can't do it anymore," and then, like a Beckett character, I would get up and do it. But even with that level of unhappiness, the way the breakup went down was rough as fuck. 

This separation is hard to untangle, in a "chain analysis" kind of way. She hit(s) me like a tidal wave. A few days ago we were talking on Facebook Messenger and we just sort of tumbled past everything into the process of mutually breaking up. It was, like most things with her, completely natural and we understood each other entirely as it unfolded. Simply, I guess she said "I don't want to feel evil and nefarious anymore" and I said "I don't want us to be the cause of you feeling that way, and I love you too much to be having that kind of an affair with you." And that was that, pretty much. 

Realistically, people usually don't leave their existing partnerships or marriages for the person with whom they are having something on the side.  I resist the word "affair," since it seems base and ordinary and of course I want to prop my ego up with something more. Is "love affair" better? Yeah, no. I don't know. Maybe? No. 

It is far more common for people to leave their existing marriages for internal reasons, and that process can take a long, long time and is extremely complicated, many times. And I authentically do not want her to leave her husband in order to be with me. That is a kind of pressure and responsibility I honestly do not want, and that I know would offer far too much material for guilt and self-loathing, acrimony and suffering all around. I also have come to believe a weird little folk wisdom saying I recently heard: "How you get them is how you lose them." Reflecting back on a lot of the breakups I've had, that ends up being true a lot of the time. 

This oddly hilarious link provides a mountain of data (of questionable worth, but since when did that stop anyone?) regarding affairs. I also tend to avoid the word "cheating." All of the language around the deal is cheap, juvenile and stupid, it seems to me. But, as she would say, I am a hopeless romantic, so of course I want to find some poetry in a messy reality. And as I do honestly feel in my marrow, we two were and are up to something altogether different, in spite of the similarities. Yes yes, I hear you snickering. Whatevs. 

Hahahahaha! haha. ha. 

As much as I imagine we two being together "someday" and knowing in my bones that it would be great, I also thought we could sustain a romantic connection while waiting for circumstances to change. It seemed doable for a while. But it became more and more fraught. Especially in light of her husband being a good man, a good father, a provider, stable, grounded, reliable and kind. It makes no ethical or moral difference, probably, when one's spouse is a fucking dick and you cheat on them, but it definitely paves more of a rationalized and at least temporarily forgivable path. 

I guess some people do go on for years in an affair or series of affairs under such circumstances, but maybe that is also without a lot of emotional and spiritual connection. "Just sex" is maybe more forgivable or less devastating to the conscience and to the marriage itself, especially when there is little sexual spark in the marriage. But she and I got way more than either of us bargained for out of this. It seems like actually falling in love with the person with whom one is having an affair is the special thing that makes the affair impossible. Nice.

Has everyone known this shit for decades except me? 

When I did my sex inventory in AA recently, I found that, out of the multitude of entanglements I've had, I've only been involved in an affair twice. And *both* of those times, the affair ended the marriage or relationship of one or both of us and we ended up together, for years. Most recently, A was emotionally cheating on her husband of 11 years with me, but with lightning speed separated from her husband and filed for divorce. We were playing a sort of silly sexual game of waiting until she separated from her husband to become lovers. Looking back, I have to admit that I took credit for her leaving her husband and it was a boost to my ego. It felt like a victory, like I won some kind of ugly competition. She and I had only been emotionally involved for less than a month when she burned her whole life down (for me, I lied to myself). In spite of the usual reassurances, "Oh I am not leaving him for you, the marriage has been awful for years, this was in the works for a long time," which I wanted to believe, I also felt powerful and important, to have such an effect on someone's life. That's pretty unpleasant to get real about, but it's what it was. A was also in the habit of denigrating her ex-husband and talking about how much better I was— a combined potent ego boost and super red flag. "Pay attention to how people talk about their exes. They'll talk about you that way someday," my first AA sponsor told me. Being the language poet euphemizer I am, I pretended I was merely a "catalyst." I was in fact a catalyst, but that is not all I was. I was also a selfish, egotistical asshole. 

My sane and sound ideal would function differently, if I had a time machine and could go back to September 2011. I would have held some ground and said "Why don't you see if you can salvage your marriage? Or at the very least take a year or two to be on your own and heal? Then let's see if we still have something." It's something along those lines that seems to be happening with the Loml, so that's progress. In spite of how shitty I feel and how difficult it is. I woke at 3:30 this morning gasping for breath, in the midst of a nightmare where I was having the skin of my back removed one layer at a time. For example. Which was you know a little unpleasant. 

So what to do. 

Nothing to be done.

Sam you handsome devil, you sure look amused

Yet again, I'm reminded of the first step of Codependents Anonymous: "We admitted we were powerless over others— that our lives had become unmanageable." Nothing says "powerless over others" than to want someone 100% and end up on a back burner. Even when the good, sound, sane and healthy, loving and real reasons for that compartmentalization are perfectly clear and mutual. Even when I myself decided that I no longer wanted to cause the harm of dividing her (who, on our last visit, said she felt like Stretch Armstrong), or enabling a situation where she felt evil and nefarious. For myself, since I am definitely not entirely some kind of noble and altruistic tough guy Rick Blaine, I no longer found it easy to deal with the realities of her existing marriage, or with the constant reminders that I was in practical and understandable but no less jarring ways pretty far down the list, even on the best days. 

Decision trees come to mind. At the top, maybe: are you waiting or not waiting? Yes, I'm waiting. That much is clear. 

But at the very next set of nodes, the ramifications become much more complex. Because there are a lot of different ways to wait. You might be thinking, uh, yeah, Percy old man, you should not be waiting. Give it up. You're out of the picture. That's all well and good. I've thought of it myself, in that kind of impulsive "fuck this, I'm out of here" way, because I don't know about you, but that is one of my defense mechanisms against excruciating pain. But as in so many things, there's de jure and there's de facto. No matter what I would try to do, the fact seems to be that I am waiting, so I might as well accept that for now and figure out exactly *how* I want to wait. 

And that is where I get all spiritual and shit. In a way grounded in recovery, of course. Since July, I've been waiting by accepting the trade off of the boundaries of the affair. We had loosely agreed to see each other every two months. I had even scheduled a 5 day visit to her city before last week's visit was even over. One of the desolate things in the current situation: I keep thinking about going on that trip and then remembering that I canceled the flight and the lodging. So, anyway, fundamentally, I'm not waiting in that particular way anymore. That kind of waiting has been canceled. 

Is it possible for me to wait but without attachment to the desired outcome? Paradoxical as that sounds. It could be 19 years. You know, I could be dead by then, considering the cohort I'm in, even in light of eating my Brussels sprouts and being obsessed with my Fitbit. 

My counselor told me to sit quietly for a while and imagine that what I wanted were available, rather than unavailable, and see how I felt. I did so, and every molecule of my everything hollered hell yes, please, yesterday if possible. He was impressed, since he had been theorizing that I only wanted it because it was impossible. I would jump for it tomorrow, if it were possible. So it seems a precarious position to be in. I can't control the situation or make the desired outcome happen. I can't manipulate or deliver ultimatums or turn my wooing powers up to 11 or any of those things, as tempting as they all are. I can't force myself to close off, reject, become cold and just move on. Well, I could. I have done that before. The truth is, at this point, I don't want to. 

I'm reminded of lines from Eliot's East Coker: 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony 
Of death and birth.

The two of us have acknowledged that we both want the same thing. There doesn't seem to be any healthy or sustainable way to reach that same outcome anytime soon. And remaining in an affair meanwhile also no longer feels healthy, right, sane or sustainable. So, by necessity, the waiting has to be without attachment to outcome. The other kind of waiting would be quite different. "Just wait for another year, then we can get married." That's the promise of an outcome and a timeline on which it would occur. We're not doing that, at least not at this point, for entirely understandable reasons. There has been wild and impulsive speculation, but it always ends up counterweighed by sobering reality.

Anyway, it is what it is. 

Here's a pic of a baby scarlet ibis to look at meanwhile. I'm sure it will still be adorable, even, say, 19 years from now.