I'm thinking a lot about the nervous breakdown I had when my marriage to A broke, when I BROKE IT. I remember so clearly the moment sitting in the car in the driveway knowing I could not stay, that I could not be that person. And I could not see forward either, to another person I might be. And my mind broke. I watched myself have a good old fashioned nervous breakdown. And calmly, I killed myself. With no afterlife in sight. I left.

There were key differences. I had said, many times, "this is killing me" and A did not care. He wanted me to die and admitted as much later, much to his credit I still give him for it - he could have played the victim and manned up instead and did not. And there was Fph, as a ... thought experiment? He was not my lover and in most ways never would be and I already knew that and I preferred it that way: I left my husband because I left my husband because I had to, not because I had faith in a new thing, which I did not have. I would not let fph anywhere near that marital collapse. I had to own it myself by myself. That I had even had the thought I might commit adultery was enough, the last straw - if I had actually done so, maintained a double life of actual physical intimacy while married and lying, that would have killed me and I was already dead. DeadER seemed like a very bad idea and to this day, as shitty as it all was, as unhappily as I was in the liminal relation to Fph I had thereafter, as long as the healing took, as ALONE as I was with it, I am still thankful that at least I just went ahead and lost my fucking mind. At least it was clear. I needed to be humbled. I was NOT OKAY. Not "in love". Not "finding my independence". Not any narrative at all other than the truth: I was broken.

Aaron has very little of that now to work with. He did the double life thing, which I can't imagine having to live with, plus (I could be deluding myself, granted, but) how often does true love blossom in hotel rooms as you simultaneously text home, her watching you bring lovingly packed lunches with strawberry milk to "work", and she lets you, for weeks, her ass in the air not giving a shit about your sanity or your soul whatsoever? Pretending that is viable only obscures the central fact of the nervous breakdown underneath. Plus he left a relationship and family life that was keeping him alive, as much as it was killing him, so he half loved the people and self that he murdered/suicided. Plus, this sounds mean but, frankly his people are about as able to fathom any of that as guppies would be. To them probably I just kicked him out or something easy to understand because anything more valenced than that would be like trig. He is alone in a box somewhere and can only hear his own voice and added layers of obscurity too, like white noise over screaming.

So we go out to dinner, my family, always around me family and friends in a protective clump. I've lost soo much weight that herding me to eating places for at least some bites is a ritual of necessity. As you can imagine, everyone hates Aaron at this point. They've not heard from him at all, have been summarily rejected by him thus, feel betrayed/hurt on their own accounts rightfully, plus they look at me and are scared and protective. And for the first time, I try to describe what losing my mind felt like. How terrifying it is, and how once you've killed yourself there is nothing to do but live through it. They try to buy it, struggle to feel more compassion than fucked over, dubious. Then I say, "we are here, he is not, imagine if for WHATEVER REASON you FELL OUT of this family FOREVER". And it's Ears, again, who chokes around feeling for Aaron. Empathy seizing him, and loss. "That would be horrible." And I am proud of my son. That Ears feels more empathy than self-pity. Because in the end, if all you can feel for is yourself, you can't feel a damn thing I don't think.

Amy assigns me the making of lists of what to be grateful for. That's my insomnia treatment. It's nearly 3 a.m. and I can't sleep. So. Grateful for: a sturdy spirit. Life is a kick in the head a lot of the time. If my spirit broke every time, that'd be a pain in the ass. Like having a hand that you could only use to lift nothing more taxing than a tea cup.

Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognised and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic act follows, consummating it. ― Georges Bataille. Death and Sensuality.

I blog and unblog, blog and unblog, whenever anything hurts me. I don't know why I do that, write and unwrite. Because I want to understand and settle on a version before I commit to it, or something. And mostly, for a long time now, I just haven't written a word, here or anywhere. He was jealous of even my words, so I gave them up. I gave up speaking to all male friends, and gave up writing anything down, and pretty much anything that might be a different me that he could not see. I never understood his jealousy and thought it would fade, as he would come to know clearly that the last thing I ever do is fuck around or hide shit. I've always stuck too much and shown too much, not the other way around (duh). I do now understand the jealousy now though, I think, and it was never really about me. People able to betray other people expect that everyone is so able and will do so. Nothing can talk them out of that belief. To them, it is as real as air. As real as they are to themselves.

Maybe everything works like that...? Like, if a person is afraid you'll get clingy, does that mean they're liable to be clingy? Etcetc. Maybe. I really don't know.

Here's what I know: Aaron was good to me, made me feel loved, and he was present in small ways that I most wanted, like to bbq stuff and to watch television (Game of Thrones, episodes of things, to wait for each week, are the one I like best) and to laugh at the kid's jokes, which are raunchy and endless. Simple daily things are what I like best. He never raised his voice or a hand to me. He never was anything but playful with the kids, a good kind of paternal that was brotherly mostly, not overbearing, with the boys, who are such good boys, such good gentle decent men coming up...Aaron never did anything to harm or undermine any of that daily beauty possible here, and added to it by seeming to enjoy it so much also, enriching our sense of ourselves as a good thing/place to be in this wide world.

And then at some point, something happened, and I don't know what it is and I will never know except the most basic fact of it, like an accidental death: he fucked someone else and disappeared one day. And traced back to when/how that happened, it was that he got a new job, and the next day pretty much (literally) he started texting-nonstop/fucking someone else who worked there also, and lying when he was here about it, that he had to work longer hours for training, my gut telling me something was off, but ... what?? I can only report all that in retrospect. In the moment, a man looked through his girlfriend's phone, called, and Aaron walked out the door and disappeared before I could even get the story from his point of view. All I had was a man's mother, the grandmother to a woman's children, hysterical and wanting me to stop a family I'd never heard of from coming apart because of what Aaron and she were up to. And when I turned around, I found my own life had come apart. That fast. In minutes. We'd been talking about what to have for dinner. I wish with all my heart that I had kept writing and had written down what we did that day, the day it started, the day he might have said he was taking out the garbage and maybe I would have been surprised at his uncharacteristic helpfulness and noted it in a journal and it would have been then, the first texts, when he was outside (?) ...but like I said, I'd given up the recording of days to be in days instead, so I believed.

And there will be no better fuller version than that. The details of my family packing his things and his family getting them are incidental in terms of illumination; they included no conversation whatsoever. I can think of many versions of what caused what Aaron did, but I will never know really. He is simply gone now. That is all I will know with certainty. So I can stop blogging and unblogging now. At least that part of it. The dead don't talk. He taught me that. "Dead is dead, get over it because we need the bed" is what nurses say. Since then, well you can imagine, I've been doing whatever people do when something happens to them like a sudden death, a terrible accident, a loss of control in a moment of how things were and no pre-planning for how anything should be afterwards. Sometimes I am livid, others sad, sometimes numb, I DO A LOT when I can, clean shit, burn sage, go to the doctor, act responsibly. My friends, my KIDS, wow, they are fucking awesome, their there-ness, their solid simple there-ness. Stalwart is my new favorite word.

And for my own understanding, MY version, all I can say at this point is that in every story I tell myself, we are both imperfect people of course, and he is a sympathetic character who when faced with a temptation did the wrong thing about it. People do the wrong things all the time, lamentable but human. But then he did much worse than a bad thing: he acted without any integrity about that thereafter as well. Hit is one thing, hit and run is another. So in my mind, I sort now: people who have personal integrity and people who do not. There are no other categories of humans or relations to me right now than those two.

You've got the Crossfire - Florence and the Machine and Brandon Somebody Whatever.

In the midst of it all, the day, this and that to feel but mostly to do, tuna casserole I'm making, TJ corners me in the kitchen and out of the blue says, "I did the math. I was birthday sex wasn't I?" And it all comes back to me, that day, the one time in months and months, Trojan Horse sex, a "gift" hiding a taking really, I took TJ himself for me. And I couldn't help it to hide it, I busted out laughing. "Yup", I say, in my new commitment to radical emotional honesty, laughing my ass off.

Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. ― Toni Morrison (any explanation is better than none at all) another Artpark gig coming up, to which Amy is making me go, unless it too cancels, like the last one, for relentless rain. If I were a Superhero, it'd be Storm, booming down the gorge

That's my father's response to grief, like look, things aren't all bad, you can still make fun of Canadians....

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself..."― James Joyce

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, so that they may have existence."  --Léon Bloy

I keep rereading that. It sounds good, a good take, so I reread it. Trying to feel, ok now I'm ROOMY. But then I imagine a weird real estate agent lady in a Chanel knockoff, clicking around inside my chest cavity, cheap heel sounds echoing, observing cheerfully, "look how ROOMY". And I think, Got anything SMALLER?