No More

I have a lot of pain. This is how my therapist ended our first session. Just reminding me that I had a lot of pain. Like I needed reminding. Is there a direct correlation between how painful the recovery from the breakup is and how deep and true the relationship once was? When we fall deeply in love, is the fall out measured in equal but opposite emotions?

 I thought I’d been handling things pretty well.  I’ve had occasional moments when I’ve been blue but overall I’m trying to plow forward. True, forward is very blurry. In a month, I have no idea where I’ll be living. Or how. But I’ve tried to remain positive about it (as best I can). And just when I do start to get down, something or someone gets me back on track again. Whether it’s hearing from Dear’s brother how much the family still loves me and how they want to keep me part of them (and would rather get rid of Dear). Or last Sunday after a very blue day, meeting an impossibly handsome half Latin guy visiting from Switzerland. It was one of those perfect evenings, at the time we were cursing how we wished we’d met on the first day of his visit and not his last but thank god, we didn’t. He was just the sort of guy and it was just the sort of perfect connection that would have ended up in a heart-wrenching long distance vacation romance which is the very last thing I need right now. Although, he was everything I do want at a later date: handsome, hairy, tall, witty, manly and boyish at once and did I say sexy. Ah, well. It ended my weekend and started my week on a really good note.

This weekend didn’t end so nicely. Dear was supposed to come over today. We were going to sort through things in the house, go over our finances and help get my expenses in order so I can start the apartment hunting process. He never showed, nor did he call or even answer my call. I don’t know why I’m so upset by that. It seems to have hit me on multiple levels. Over all, it’s so reminiscent of all the times this happened when we were together. Those terrible long nights and days in the early years when I’d pace the house nearly out of my mind with worry. Or the nights of the later years when I’d  just think, not again. Not again after everything having been normal for so long. I know that now it shouldn’t bother me as much because well, I don’t have to worry. He’s not my responsibility. And I’m glad for that. It brings up so many different feeling. Yet really helps me once again see why it is I can never return to that craziness no matter how much I may love him.

What do I imagine happened? The first scenario is that Dear and Twitch went out last night to a big dance party. A party that friends actually tried to get me to go to. Anyway, one of Dear’s broken record tracks from his mid life crisis rant is how he never has any “fun”, how I was the “fun” police and how he and Twitch want to recapture that “fun”. The primary definition of “fun” in their gay mid-life crisis self-absorption is: going out and dancing on ecstasy. You see, Dear is trying to recapture a time in his life, in his early thirties before he had ever encountered crysyal meth and before his addiction issues had become fully manifested. A time when things seemed more innocent. I supposed you can’t blame him. Who wouldn’t want to go back to moment when they were more innocent, especially if they’d lived through some very dark days? But life doesn’t work like that. You can’t go back. He couldn’t see that no matter how much I tried to point it out. To point out that while all that was fun when he was 30, it was a moment in time and just as much about the people around him as anything else. I said how could he ever recapture that when everyone else had moved on? That all our friends had grown up and out of that and that he’d  be the tired old thing on the dance floor he’d always warned his friends not to let him become. I did say this in somewhat more tactful manner.

Anyway, Scenario One involves them going out last night and then spending all day today in bed, in post-ecstasy bliss, cuddling and talking babytalk (have I mentioned they have this nauseating language they use with each other?) This vision makes me ill mainly because it was something I would have loved to do with Dear but never could. The few times we tried either started out in fights because he couldn’t see why we should have to wait to get high at the party and why it wasn’t an open invitation to do anything he wanted all for days in advance. Not a pretty series of arguments where he would suffer through days  up to the night we’d go out and low and behold, it was actually fun just doing one hit of ecstasy and being in the moment with your lover and then going home but the wear and tear of getting him there was too much for me. It took the fun out of it. Then there were the times that ended up with him going off on a Meth bender. So that was it, I packed up my cha-cha heels and said goodbye to that part of my life. It wasn’t hard. I was growing up but I did miss it. It was such a nice feeling to be able to dance shirtless in the arms of the man you love, surrounded by hundreds of other hot happy men. But it was a small price to pay for earned sanity at home.  It’s nice to know I can put that back on my to-do list if I want.

 Scenario Two is the more tragic version of the same scene. In this one, they are out dancing but this time they run into the friends I was with last night (including the drop dead gorgeous mountain of a man that used to work at Dear’s company who hugged me in his big bear grasp while I melted in his soft eyes- more on him later - I hope!) These friends include the guy that planned our fabulous trip last year to a Peru. (It was an amazing, no expense spared surprise to thank Dear for letting me take time off to write my book. Needless to say, he is paying for half of it now.) So seeing these friends and others all asking about me spun him off into a depression and then he went off on a Meth bender. It’s tragic but certainly not that far-fetched.

Scenario Three involves his visiting former therapist who treated him right after he got out a rehab. They had dinner last night and she is a lovely person but sharp as a tack and really would see right through his shit. This scenario also ends in him going off on a bender. And honestly regardless of what actually happened, there is no excuse for him treating me like this. He is either a very selfish self-centered person or a very sick person or both. And I need him out of my life.

I know facing each one of my pains, addressing it truly and then trying to work through it is the only way I can ever move on but boy does it suck. I’d rather be six months down the line from all of this but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. I have to live through it to actually gain and grow from it. Is growth always painful? And is pain really that bad? When the pain helps you come to terms and move you towards a closure that’s a good kind of pain. Not easy but good.

 

My Funny Valentine

Valentine’s Day marked the one month anniversary of my breakup or as I like to call it My Independence Day.

It had all the earmarks of being a miserable mess of a day. First Valentines Day alone in 6 years. One month exactly from the breakup (what are the odds of that?). I’d kept my spirits up and conveniently avoided the manufactured holiday fast approaching. I’d been chatting for a few days with a guy that had hit me up on-line. Cute-ish, 29-ish, intriguing because of his perseverance. Smooth, hot little muscular body and exotic as he hailed from, of all places, Kazakhstan. My own little Borat.

He’d been texting me for a few days and really wanted to hook up. Now to me, “hook up” means we get together and have sex. He clearly had other ideas in mind. When he suggested we meet this Saturday night at a bar, I wasn’t having any of it. There is nothing worse than meeting a “date” out at bar where his friends or yours may be hovering and ready to rescue you from an unattractive situation. And the very fact of meeting him at a bar was moving this away from “hookup” into dateland. A territory I had no interest in journeying through anytime soon.

I explained my hesitation around meeting in a bar and we rescheduled for Thursday night, which just happened to be Valentine’s Day. This fact escaped me at first but once I realized it, I used it to my advantage. As in, when I had lunch with Dear and he said, he’d just be working late and not doing anything special with Twitch for V-D, I said, that was too bad as I would be doing a 29 year old from Kazakhstan. When he nearly spit his salad nicoise on the table, my heart grew a little warmer. Perhaps it wasn’t quite my heart.

So I showed up at Borat’s place, a rag-tag artist’s pad if ever there was on, and instantly liked his energy. Funny, sassy, with a weird sing-songy accent that was charming. He was much cuter than his photos with a very, very hot little body. He asked me if I’d like a beer, I said sure (while my brain quickly calculated how many empty carbs were in a glass of beer). The beer turned out to be imported ale and was fabulous.

 So after loosening us up a little, we started getting a little more comfortable which pretty much involved kissing and getting naked. Now we we both had rock hard erections but the focus of the evening turned out to be not so much sex as it was sensuality and intimacy. It was the opposite of my fifteen minutes from earlier in the week and in many way’s exactly what was missing from my own relationship. We caressed, kneaded, licked and mostly just held each other, exploring each other’s bodies and marveling how nicely we fit together. This went on for about three hours and to be honest, I did begin to wonder when we’d Make Sexy Time. But we never did. And that was okay. Sure there were moments that were very sexual and it was all erotic but more than that it was extremely intimate. The intimacy born of really being present in the moment with another person and not looking forward to some preconceived outcome.

My contacts began to dry out at One am so I got ready to head home. We’d lost the sex in our relationship but more than the sex, Dear and I had forgotten how to be intimate with each other. I left feeling perfectly satisfied. A satisfaction not born of a self-gratified release but from a evening of living truly in the moment. It was the perfect Valentine’s Day.

Over and Over Again

Is it common for the one who has been spurned to pine for their wayward lover to come back to their senses and verbalize all those tragically romantic thoughts they are harboring? ”I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life.” “I’ll never love anyone as much as I love you.” “I feel like we’re tangled up in someone else’s lives.” “I don’t know how I can live without you.” And finally, “Maybe we’re meant to spend some time apart so we can really appreciate what it is we have.” Isn’t that the call that everyone wishes they’d get so you can rush back into your lover’s arms and forgive all for the sake of love? How few of us ever really get that call?  I got that call Monday morning at 7:30 am. 

I think I must either be a cast iron bitch and my heart has turned colder than Cybill Sheperd’s snatch or I’ve begun to move on. In the normal course of events, a call such as that would have had my heart strings tugging but there was nary a plunk. Honestly, I thought it was rather amusing and vindicating in a way. You see, I knew he was feeling those things so it came with a sense of satisfaction to actually hear them. And yet, they didn’t move my in any way. In fact, the very act of hearing them allowed me to address them as a fact and then put them away. Dear has made a big mistake. A fact. Dear still loves me and more than he will ever love Twitch. Another fact. But it doesn’t want me to rush back into anything. It just let’s me feel sort of pleased (in a slightly malicious way) that he’s coming out of his befuddled fog. 

Are our lives made of patterns that we’re destined to repeat?

I’d like to think not but evidence points to the contrary. We seem doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again until we finally address them and move on. Will I ever be financially secure? Not if I keep frittering money away and not truly facing the fact that I simply must learn how to balance a checkbook. It ain’t pretty but I’m 41 and if I don’t figure out how to live beyond paycheck to paycheck, when I’m seventy-five, i’ll be living in a velvet lined cardboard box. 

A few weeks before all hell broke loose, Dear became quite frantic one night and insisted that he was about to repeat a pattern of his and I must help him. He begged me. At the time, I didn’t get what it was he was trying to say and what he needed of me. His pattern seemed to be that he’d get into a relationship and then the sex would evaporate and instead of facing the issues and dealing with it, he’d find someone else and leave the first behind with the first lover blind-sided and furious. (There is one that still won’t speak to him, over ten years after the fact.) I knew we were having issues with our sex life. The issue: no sex. But I thought if we actually worked on that, well, it might come back with time and nurturing. I thought we could beat any pattern. After all, we’d stayed together through the early years after rehab. If we could get through that, we could get through anything. And this was the longest relationship for either of us. We should be able to break a silly old pattern.

I’d been warned. Dear’s last serious boyfriend. The one that came two guys before me. Old Turtleneck warned me one day Dear would just throw in the towel and hit the road. I thought it was bitterness speaking as we’d been able to make a success of it, when Dear had driven Turtleneck into rehab.

Now between Turtleneck and myself was The Liar. The Liar is one of the chief reasons Dear ended up in rehab. The Liar not only was a rampant Meth user, he also would have sex with other guys every minute they weren’t together and then lie about it and swear they were monogamous. This slowly eroded Dear’s self-assurance and equilibrium and precipitated his slide down the slippery slope. The Liar had done quite a number on Dear and I had a lot of work to get him to a place where he could trust again. Now, the bizarre thing is that Twitch reminds Dear of The Liar. Not only in personality (secretive, non-communicative) but also the fact that Twitch is less than honest with him about his activities. Another pattern of Dear’s picking lovers that are dishonest to him.

Twitch has patterns, too. Twitch, it seems, has a history of leaving a steady, solid, stable partner to run off with a high-energy and extroverted, yet, unstable partner. It’s nice to know he’s fulfilling his pattern as well.

We can spend our entire lives swinging over and over again on the same trapeze. But what truly makes us break our patterns? Self-awareness? Strength? The will to change? Or just growing up? Facing your demons, realizing they no longer hold power over you and laughing them away. I feel I am moving forward. I feel that by truly living on my own and thriving, I will have broken a pattern. But what patterns are still spun around me like a web? Are we ever truly free? 

Throw it Away

Yesterday was a trying day.

I’ve never cared for Sundays all that much to begin with. I think it dates back to the time when I was in school and you’d just had the entire glorious weekend to do whatever it is you pleased (read, daydream, listen to showtunes) and then Sunday evening comes and with it the awful realization that another entire week of doing things you don’t want to do is about to commence again. Of course, when you’re a kid, time stretches itself out so the weekends seemed to go on forever before the thud of Sunday night came crashing down and then an eternity would go by before the next glorious weekend. I never entirely lost that sinking feeling that came with Sunday nights, it just was tempered a bit as the years grew on. As my life become more filled with pleasures and I carried the responsibilities with a sense of understanding.

This Sunday was a trial. Dear and I were set to meet to go through our storage locker. To throw out stuff and get me a storage unit that I could start moving the things I wanted to keep into (I’m something of a pack rat). This seemed a rather innocent way to start the dismantling of our life together. After all, these were things that hadn’t been part of our daily lives. Some things we’d packed up long before we’d been together. Other things we’d put aside as we melded our lives and found these items didn’t quite fit. And then there was a bunch of weird odd and ends and a whole lot of Burning Man paraphernalia.

No matter how innocent and far removed from our daily life these objects seemed to be, they turned out to carry a great deal more weight than expected. Or more accurately the act of sorting through these items brought the reality of what we were doing and what we were about to face into sharper focus. I felt I’d prepared myself, knowing it might be a painful experience. To Dear it was far, far more difficult (more about that tomorrow).

Why do I hang on to the things I do? I found things in there that I hadn’t looked at in five or six years. I’ve saved almost every piece of writing I’ve ever done (which makes sense) but all those print outs of websites long gone, magazines (dirty and clean),  awards and various objects from my old job that seemed too personal to toss and yet what will I ever do with them again? We found at least five comforters in various states of yellowed dilapidation. End tables with half their parts missing. A leather thong that didn’t belong to either of us. Three shoe racks, two air mattresses and one bicycle covered with rhinestones.

We made a big pile of things to throw away and I dragged things I knew I’d want down the hall to my new unit but after a half hour a gloom began to set in.  Dear became more glum and I became more agitated. We gave up, locked the unites and knew we’d have to return in the future to try to face it again.

Why is it easier to hang onto things you don’t need anymore than to toss them? I know I feel a sense of liberation when I get rid of objects I truly don’t need anymore (clothes that no longer fit me because of size or style, old magazines) but there are things I find much harder to part with or even think about parting with. These I pack back up again and always think I’ll go through them another day.

Do we hang onto people too long in the same manner? Should we toss out the people in our lives the same way we would an old pair of jeans we’ve outgrown? Dear can’t seem to decide if he’s throwing me away or just putting me aside somewhere safe that he can retrieve me again from on a rainy day. And I don’t know if I want to truly donate him to someone else’s goodwill or keep him to myself. I know what my head says but my heart is another thing.

Sorting through the old junk, should you listen to your head when you toss things away or listen to your heart and save those things you treasured once that you might find use for again?

A House is Not A Home

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but for some reason our house hadn’t felt like a home in a long time. Was it the broken dimmer switch in the living room? The leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom? The overgrown garden? It was all of the above and yet something much deeper. Does a house stop being a home the moment the relationship is over or long before that? Does home stop existing the moment your lover gives love to someone else?

I didn’t understand why we’d spent last fall having all these fights about Twitch. It didn’t add up. Why was I having to fight for time with him? What I didn’t know at the time was that in a home across the bay, the exact same arguments were taking place between another couple about Dear.

I should have been happy for Dear. He was so excited to have a new friend. He claimed Twitch was turning out to be the best friend he’d made in years. Since he’d moved to San Francisco. Now Dear has many, many friends in SF and many people that care for him. After all, he’s a very charismatic and generous, if troubled, soul. He’s the sort of person that lights up the room when he enters, whether you want that glare of not.I sensed that something was different about this friendship but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He claimed Twitch was the first person he’d met that reminded him of his two best friends back on the East Coast. What he really meant was that Twitch was a big kid and encouraged his fantasies around recapturing his youth. A youth that his two friends on the East Coast had figured prominently in. I like these two friends but they are a study. Not at all alike but somehow they have managed to get into their forties without ever having a serious relationship.

I sensed something was wrong. Dear had become so volatile that, at times, I just tried to avoid the confrontations. This avoidance behavior of mine dated back to a period almost two years earlier. I had taken a severance package from a job I’d been at for years and decided to take some time off to write a book. We made the decision together and Dear was very supportive of this. At first. Then it slowly turned sour and he would get very disturbed about the bills and how he was carrying the entire financial weight of our life. True but also, he had at no time curtailed any of his extravagance. We bought three investment properties during this time. Three! He created an elaborate 40th birthday event for family and friends. We traveled. We entertained. Basically, we lived life as we always had yet now he had a focus to complain about our spending without actually addressing the issue of poor financial planning.

When I started to look for work I didn’t realize how long it would take me, being that I’m in a rather specialized sector. I knew I’d be in a good position when I did get back to work and that’s exactly what happened. However, during those final months of searching he’d grown into such an emotional roller coaster that I did anything to keep him on an even keel. I’d carefully screen the bills and try to present them in stages so as not to have to deal with a scene. In retrospect, I realize I was living through a mild form of emotional abuse but the problem is that often when you’re in situations of that sort, you don’t see it for what it is until you’re on your way out (or it’s grown so unbearable that you need escape). Thank god it never got bad. It was more like a year of walking on eggshells. Not pleasant but tolerable.

When I started back to work I thought everything would go back to normal but instead he got moodier and more irritable. This also happened to coincide with the beginning of his “friendship” with Twitch. Was it guilt the caused those reactions? Did our troubles drive him to seek companionship with someone that was “easy” and had no expectations of him? I know that it was a strange year. Now I realize I was feeling him leave in stages. Little by little, over the year, I felt him slip away and yet I couldn’t put my finger on what was happening. I hate to be the cliche of the spouse that can’t see what’s right under their eyes but that’s exactly who I was. Once he confessed, everything fell into place. Those feelings of having to fight for time with Dear. The rants whenever I didn’t want us to do something with Twitch and Mortimer or didn’t want Dear to go away with Twitch. Every nuance of the past nine months came into focus. The overwhelming feeling that I was the only person in my relationship. The only one living in our home.

And now, I am the only person living in our home. But I’ve gotten my eviction notice. Dear says I have to move out on April 1st so he and Twitch can move in. It seems that Twitch can’t bear to spend any more time living in a sublet so I have to move on. Not at my pace but at their selfish timetable. Dear says he’ll do anything he can to help me physically and financially to smooth the transition (and sooth his guilt). If I don’t leave on April 1st, he insists he’ll go crazy and Twitch will leave him. I told him that’s really not my concern and I also told him that if Twitch really cared about him so much he’d realize that Dear and I have a life to unravel and that takes some time and he would be willing to sit tight in a sublet for a few months more if it makes the separation process easier for Dear and I. After all it’s been six years. If we were getting divorced I’d have more than two and half months to get my life together. But I’m dealing with two adolescents that want their creature comforts. They can have the house but it’ll never be a home again.

I don’t know where I’m going. I know I’ll be taking things from our house but I’ll have to create my home from scratch.