Almost to the day 6 months later, here we are again, and he's gone to where he was last time for ostensibly the same reasons, and from what I can remember of that day, I am very like I was then, snug in bed with a light undertow of anxious, glad to be off work, thinking about him and where he might be in his work tasks, thinking about puttering stuff like the boys being out of clean socks again already, thinking about how nice it is to simply be home, thinking as I often do (and now more than ever) how frightening it would be to be homeless and crazy instead of home and only neurotic, pretty content with an undertow of sorrow shot through with bolts of something like pure joy to be breathing and not in immediate peril. He texted me sometimes but less than usual, less and less that week, as he slid off his mind and out of his life, me tethered for an impending shared drowning in harrowing cold murk. He was orienting toward his first call weekend a few days later, and he told me that he'd have to be late to do that, and I had a brief knot in my gut about it but I talked myself out of it. I said: "Ok. I love you."

I said that again this morning, as did he. And I must rely on the truth value of statements like that, because I no longer have a gut check. He has to offer to show me his phone, and not just to heal my distrust, he must want to be known too, or he will not be and will thus be on his own all alone with himself. ("Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool." - Robert Brault) There is always a knot in my gut to some degree now, so I can't always check it and you can't assume I will "know" you or what you mean or intend unspoken. If you were to ask me how I felt or thought about anything you might wonder about, if you ever do, a thing that happened long ago or a state that was created because of it and that still abides, and if I were to check my gut about it, the answer would be the same no matter what it was: a little panicky and pulpy-tender. In that way, I no longer have emotional memorIES exactly. My mind is intact, relatively, but emotions are no longer adhered entirely properly to thoughts. I wonder, is there such a thing as purely emotional dementia? I remember when DmS's mom started to really lose her knowledge, she had a moment where the toaster mystified her, and she looked at it like what the fuck is that, it was slightly terrifying in its half-familiarness, so Kel at first tried explaining and demonstrated its function but that did not assuage her confusion or anxiety, so then she just gave her the toast (peanut buttered, I think). That's how I look at people a LOT now, especially Aaron but by extension everyone I love or ever did, like what are you exactly (?), but then again it might increase my anxiety to try to puzzle it out on my own, so I might want to butter and consume your presence instead and leave the life force that creates that presence inexplicable as it is, just hug you then sweep up the crumbs nervously. But maybe in that there is an opportunity of relationship in general. (?) I can no longer intuit anything reliably, if ever I could. And my feelings about people are no longer reliably tied to reasons that I can claim are reasonable necessarily. And I know that. So the tsunami of feeling of the last half year, among other things, washed away what there was in me of explicable grudges. The only grudge, i.e. clear REASON for a feeling, in me I could still attribute to uncluttered cause/effect is for my in-laws, otherwise God only knows sometimes what or why I feel the way I do when I sit down to reflect. Everyone feels dead, if I had to name it, since what I feel a lot is grief, if I had to name it. Accompanied by a searing intense pleasure to Be, too, still. Physical material presence. Aaron and I touch constantly. And even the boys suffer my need of it too, Bruno scrawny and his muscles always tense-poised as if to leap into his life, lets me hug him and gives me the patpatpat and I thinkfeel at him, "I have no idea what all you are, really, but you are alive, and your smell is good like toast (and dirty socks)".

look closely, he's focused inward

In other but related news, Aaron bought me a diamond and is hoping this day of away-from-home overnight-for-work will help pay it off. And we begin again, this time trying to fathom each other's sign systems and meld them into a coherent shared language. Of course, there was the shopping, which was absurd, as I am quite literally afraid of jewelry stores and nearly traumatized by clerks in them, especially the dazzling women with all their appraising-you-face behind which are criteria that might as well be in Hebrew for all I can fathom of it. Aaron is at home in such places while I back up from jewelry counters like I would from the bat displays at the zoo. I learned a little about diamonds (of course I did), and I learned that there are good reasons for them to make a person nervous besides the obvious politics. Like for instance, the more they are not-there, the more they are worth. The perfect ones refract light and are not their own anything to get in the way of that - they have no color no flaw (substance), they are like little holes in the universe through which light gets bent around to dazzle your eye with the illusion of thing-hood. They weigh nothing, and it causes a pit in the stomach to feel that nothingness on your hand at the same time your eye is apprehending a ball of brilliance, kind of like the feeling you get when you look up at a skyscraper from the ground. I started looking at everyone's rings at work, noticing relentlessly, and feeling a little awed that all these women had withstood it and learned to be comfortable with it on them all the time. And I wanted to be comfortable too, to take their rings off and hold them like glittering tarantulas. To be brave. But I kept squirming in parking lots outside jewelry stores instead, nervous stomached and eyespying the Barnes&Noble :/ Finally he talked me into going to the depths of Mordor, his mother's jeweler where he got his last engagement ring set. I remember that story, which I heard mostly as an aside to the story of going to NYC sometimes to visit his cousin Keith who by being gay had escaped The Family, who didn't have to go to any lame birthday parties or assuage his own crazy mother about anything of his own choices/life since they tried not to talk about it, and who instead of dicking around with attending some dumb wedding did way cooler shit like have brunch with Anderson Cooper (who has terrible skin up close, fyi). I remember finding this story very funny, adorable really, the focal point of a trip to the diamond district being to pick up a bargain quickly and then get back to buying good ass jeans with Keith, as his mother was back home in Buffalo gearing up to fuss her face off over a wedding that if Aaron weren't going to be in it he'd resent attending (and actually resented attending anyway). By the time I heard that story, Aaron had built a bridge in his mind from the diamond trip to the honeymoon trip (he does love to travel), eliding the marriage bit almost entirely, and I laughed outright and teased him. But I didn't judge - my own sister, smartest woman I know, had one of those in it for the honeymoon weddings, meh people do it all the time. Like my mother said to me recently, "The only people who've never done anything to regret died in the womb".

But now I'm not so smug about any of it as to tease anyone. I'm not outside or above or below a wedding and a marriage and how it feels to be in this one and what that means to me and to him and how what it means might put asunder how it feels or even if it IS or vice versa, all of it. So it is probably fitting that I find myself there in front of a gruff hefty middle aged Polish-jewish gemologist who listens to the one good diamond story I have to tell (well, there are two: once my mom won a diamond by picking it out of a display of hundreds of zirconia embedded in a giant shit looking pile of clay in the lobby of a bank when I was a little kid and lights went off woowoo, and she took it home and my dad bought her a matching one for earrings that Christmas - I was maybe 6 years old and my mom was embarrassed to own the little diamonds, what she called 'real grown up' jewelry, and my dad was proud and made her wear them and she sewed a tangerine crop-topped pantsuit to go with the earrings for date night), about my grandmother's wedding set.

look closely, he's licking her (repost)

It had a modest round diamond in a square-ish setting, at which point the gemologist lights up, he knows exactly what I mean, a specific setting common in the early-mid 20th century and he starts opening books and rattling off history. What he doesn't know is that my grandmother's marriage survived her husband's adultery and lasted decades thereafter as the benchmark of love-enduring unions in my family.

the ancestor alter on my kitchen counter; they all suffered adultery, and/or dealt it

That my grandmother still cried and was pissed to talk about it, even after he'd died and she was 90. That on my right hand I wear the ring that came from that time when they were young that he gave to her in amends, a chunk of turquoise, and that his affair was with a Navaho woman whose people made this ring.
.

That my grandmother lost her mind and that my mother remembers it. That my grandmother got pregnant in the stormy waters of their reconciliation, and that in a crazy stressed response to pregnancy-caused cavities had all her top teeth pulled at once in her 7th month when she was 26 years old. That I bear the name of the aunt who was born of that, who was never right in the head. That I loved my grandparents fiercely and admired their long marriage, despite her lifelong scary storms of resentment from time to time. That he would say to her when she freaking out, "Lay down, I want to talk to you". That I cast a spell to bring a lover into my life who would be like my grandpa (little able to imagine what he was actually like for a woman to be with, now could I?). Only Aaron knows all those things.

taped to the wall in my office

The gemologist is thrilled with my preferences and dislike of the diamonds we've seen elsewhere. He goes into the safe, gets a little folded up piece of paper and dumps out of it a diamond dirty with human detritus. He hits it with windex and holds it up for me. It is 100+ years old, each facet handcut, as perfect as only a human artist can craft such a thing. It came from the estate sale of an old lady who was surely loved by someone somehow but it predates the whole American engagement ring DeBeer's thing (according to TJ, who knows of course).

keeper of human historical outrages lists

As soon as I see it, I know two things: I want it (and what it means that Aaron has given it to me, knowing full well that much of that meaning will only be clear when I'm 90 years old); and that it's haunted.

it's sitting in a vault in south Buffalo under the eye of that storm, purring sibilant