Ravine

I've talked to him everyday and it seems to be getting worse. Do you know the five stages of loss? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance? I feel like I have been hearing them in his voice.

And I don't know how to sound. It's a little bit fucked up of me, don't you think? I don't know how to sound. A reasonable person would sound like how they feel, right? But I have never been reasonable. Especially where he is concerned. I want to do what's right for him. I want to make this easier. It's not easy, and I won't be arrogant enough to assume I can make it better, but I have to think I can do something.

So, I ask myself: How should I sound? Should I sound as depressed and lost as I feel? I want him to know that I feel that way. I want him to know that I am hurting. That this has eradicated a part of me and no matter what happens in the future, I will never get it back; I will never be whole again. But then I think about what that will make him feel. Will he feel responsibile and take it harder? Will he want me to come right back and pick up where we left off? Will he think I think I did the wrong thing?

And what if I sound okay? What if I ask innocuous questions and use my old terms of endearment? What if I contain every drop of regret and pain and guilt and despair? What if I keep myself together for him? Will he think he means nothing to me? That the loss of our relationship was easy for me? Will he think that I have moved on?

How can I have moved on? How could I ever move on?

And he sounds so lost, and hurt, and angry, and hopeless. And it makes me want to cry hearing his voice. And I think he feels the same. And I don't know how not to hear his voice. I don't know how to do anything. I am so tempted to go back, to tell him everything will be okay, to make it better. But I can't make it better. I can only do my part. I don't know what our future holds, and I am terrified that everyday will dig a divide deeper and deeper between us until one day I am standing at the edge of a canyon, squinting at a blur of him on the other side.

I never saw this coming. I know it's the stupidest thing anyone could say. But I really never saw this coming.

I feel so fucking alone in his lonliness. I feel so desperate.

First and Always

I've gone.

It's Tuesday night and I am at my mother's house. I am living in my old bedroom, only it's not my old bedroom anymore.

The last few days have been the worst in my life. If you have ever experienced death, especially a slow, painful death, you know about waiting, about watching, about time both blinking out and standing still. You know about wishing it was over. You know about hating yourself for those thoughts. You know about the wounds, the devastatingly irreversible pain. I wish for death.

I wish this was about death. Death is a reality. It is inevitable and somehow, in that, there is a fairness.

This is something so much worse. This I did myself. And I did it to someone else. And I have watched him cry, and I have seen his heart break in a way that has changed the very essence of who I am. I don't trust myself. I feel emptiness again. I feel the lack of wholeness I always suspected.

Tonight, when I finally fall into a coma of sleep, I will be alone, but it is when I think about him on the other side of that lonliness that I want to be dead. I can still feel him in my head and in my heart. I can still remember the way his shoulders felt, the temperature of his skin, his short hair against my lips when I kiss the back of his head; I can hear his breathing, feel him shifting his feet. But those will go. In time, it will all go and my memories will be nothing. It'll be like death.

And I asked myself over and over if change was a possibility. And I know that I want it to be. I want it. My heart is broken so small that I can't ever fix it.

I will sleep with his shirt under my pillow. I will sleep with his name on my tongue. I will hope that we look at the same stars and we see a destiny together.

The Medicine Cabinet

I'm sorting the medicine cabinet and it's ruining me.

I don't know what I thought, or how I thought it would be. The way we met, the place I was in. I was lonely then too. I am always lonely, it seems. And for nearly six years I have been band-aiding my loneliness. He has been good at that. Everything I want, or have thought I wanted, he gave me.

I am selfish to be at this end. I am miserable. And I am treating this whole end like I have treated our relationship. I am taking care of the periphery. The core, the broken inside, the bulk of it, I am avoiding. I clean out the medicine cabinet, sorting piles for him and piles for me, thinking about dates and illnesses, things we have gone through together, because I can't bear to call the moving people. He has asked me if I want him to do it, but I said no. I have pushed this to the end, the last days. I am afraid that I will never be okay again, that he won't either.

I get attached. Fucking attached. I had forever plans before we were even officially dating. I thought about our children and what they would be like. In my mind they were strong, sturdy and resilient. They were warm and had an appetite for life, tricky-clever and loquacious like me, an exceptional memory and trememdous empathy like him. I saw them well-liked by their peers, polite and engaged. I never saw the disorientation about their futures, the dips of deep depression and scattered attention, the dissolution of their identities, the fear, the rage, the loneliness. I looked at what I wanted to see.

And it was that way with this, too. I was in college and the future seemed far away. It was okay that we didn't plan tangibly. It was okay that we never got engaged or saved for a wedding, a home. It was okay that he moved between careers that made him miserable. It was okay that he found one he liked that still paid him by the hour and offered no benefits. All that was okay because I thought that the future was far away.

Then, about a year ago, I was settling into my career and I saw the next step. Completion of the present; the ensuing and ever-distant future dropped out of nowhere. I wanted my marriage, my career, my children. I don't think he did. I mean, it was still a ways off for him. We both knew that circumstantially we were underprepared. I think we always felt underprepared. I think we always saw it in the future and the future as something out of reach. We never engaged. We talked about it; we said, "Yeah, we'll get married one day." We planned it in a loose sort of way, but never moved on it.

I wonder if he thought that it would never happen?

I was angry and I never told him that. I let everything I wanted dissolve around me. I called it something else. A search, a quest for some aspect of myself that was missing. I confused myself. Said it was kink. He didn't want that. He didn't want to fuck me anymore. Hasn't wanted to fuck me for a long time, maybe since the beginning. He hasn't wanted to kiss me, touch me.

I questioned it at first. I talked about it with him. I fought it, I accused, I invaded his privacy trying to figure it out, I talked to his friends and family. I begged, I enticed. I guilted. A lot. I was crushed more times than I can remember. And eventually, I gave up. I told myself I wasn't attractive enough, enticing enough. I told myself there was something wrong with him, with me. He didn't disagree. He told me that he didn't feel things like that frequently. I made him see a doctor, a therapist. I made him medicate himself, hoping that fixing the depression would fix the lack of desire. He gave up too, after a while. The pills were forgotten. I stopped talking about it. I stopped hoping, asking. He pushed me away when I tried to touch him.

I broke. I entertained the idea of affairs. I had given up my early twenties to him and he didn't seem to care. It hurt. It hurt more than I wanted to admit. A whole portion of our relationship didn't exist. At all.

We were friends, best friends. We shared the same bed, we held hands when we went to the movies. We ate together, talked about our days, we laughed. We laughed a lot. He is so funny. He makes me smile without trying. We got stoned and watched television; we went on vacations. But it seemed that our future slipped away day-by-day. I didn't think so much about our kids anymore. How could we have kids?

I loved him every day we were together. I love him today and I will love him every day I breathe. I will miss the feeling of his body beside me while I sleep. I will miss rolling over and tucking beside him, listening to his breathing, being able to wake him when I am afraid. I will miss his constant presence. I have gotten so used to his face. He has a beautiful face. I will miss his made-up words, his doting mannerisms and the way he likes to surprise me with things, treats, movies.

Everything about this aches. Everything about this feels like death. Everything feels like abandonment.

Peek, Peek

Oh, but a long time it has been. I have been preoccupied elsewhere and not really prepared to come back to this blog. But I wanted a break from what I have been up to, so here I am. I doubt anyone still reads here, so it's not a big thing, but the last few weeks have been tremendously busy.

I'm moving. And it's all I can do NOT to think it's backwards. I quit my job because my boss is a total cum dumpster (like that, Japan? *we have to practice her English any way we can*) and he never appreciated anything I did (his thankyous at Graduation -- a graduation that only happened because of me, 31 and E, no less -- consisted of the following phrase: There are too many people to thank for this afternoon, so please refer to the last page of the Graduation program. The program had fucking SIX NAMES on it. Just say them, you fat babboon!) and we didn't have the same goals for our students. Oh, and he didn't want to give me a living wage either...though he would drop $330 on 200 programs to get a quarter-sized blue circle on the front page rather than do it in black and white for $80. Anyway, I'll miss the kids, but he's a fucking giant thorn in my ass gone. Shame. I generally don't mind pain in the ass area. Grin.

So, no more job. And no more apartment. I loved this apartment, but part of not having the job was me agreeing to finish the second part of my education: get my MA/cred. And to do this, sigh, I have to live at home for a bit. I'm crossing my fingers it's only this summer, but we'll see. I want 31 to kick her lame-o little brother out of her swank digs so we can be roomies, but le sigh, it seems I am still waiting on Manhattan '07 for that. So I move out in two weeks to go back to my childhood bedroom/"guest room"...though, it's more like teenage bedroom. Ah, the memories. Grin.

And B and I are seperating. I don't know how to handle this. I know it's my fault and my doing, so I feel guilty feeling sad, even guiltier feeling angry. And now, we're sort of in this comfortably numb place where we make the most out of the time we're spending together. It is not part of me to ever stop loving him. I think he feels the same. I think it wouldn't be kicking us both in the nuts if we could though. I think we both wish we had never met sometimes. Losing can be worse than anything else.

And I can't dwell on that, so the other big thing is location. After nearly eight years in LA, I am going back up to where I was born and raised. NorCal, the East Bay. It all feels so backward. I even thought about myspace-ing to get in touch with my old friends. Why do I want to get in touch with them? I was happy to be mysteriously out of the loop. I was happy to have friends of consequence, rather than friends of convenience. And I'm going to give up that higher ground for what? I even thought that at my 10-year reunion, I would send a dirty hooker or a construction worker to be me. I like having disappeared. I like dropping off the edge of the planet sometimes.

As you all have seen. Well, as YOU have seen, Jerk. Thanks for keeping in touch with me. It means a lot to have persistant buddies.

Anyway, shit will be fine. I'm helping 31 throw a party at her daddy's house in a week and a half before I leave. We even got that Russian guy I used to have a crush on to commit to coming. Last night, when he was fucked up, he was giving me his number so I could give him party details and he was all, "You want to know how much of a geek I am?" (This is AFTER he told me he used to wear a fanny pack, liked death metal, almost got a tattoo of a rose with barbed wire for a stem, and sang the Ninth Symphony...damn, he's a fucking cool cat. And much younger than he sounds. Just odd. Like everyone who works where I worked.) And I'm like, "Yeah?" And he goes, "It's when the Turks (I think he said Turks. I had been drinking and he has a thick accent.) took Constantinople under...trailing off here because I am laughing..." I was like, "(His name here), we're going to have fun." It was a good night for goodbyes.

Anyway, no more forced update. Peace.