Wednesday, July 30, 2014



"Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently...Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled—and truth?" Virginia Woolf, "Monday or Tuesday"

I have no real idea what I'm doing. I'm winging it. Why do I keep bothering to note that? Probably because everyone is yelling at me, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? What the fuck are YOU doing?, I usually think back silently. Do you know, really?

Aaron is screaming he wants to come home, everyone around me screaming ideas and feelings about that, I will go to work at a hospice today where people scream so quietly it's deafening. Everyone is WRITING IN CAPS all around me. I cry less as the din increases. Is that good or bad? A strength or a weakness? I'm not asking really. I just don't know, is all.

If I had to say right now, to "call it", I'd say the thing that stands between Aaron and I most is not the girlfriend (notgirlfriend, whatever), it's the knowledge of nervous breakdowns. He says completely insane things like "I know my own mind". Anyone who says that with certainty doesn't know anything at all about their own mind unless they added the caveat "and it's an untrustworthy motherfucker". That caveat is what breakdowns teach you, and teach you to watch out for (and that you still might not see it coming, sideswiped totally like this one got me). Live and learn, my man.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

No matter what, no matter how hard you try, at some point your kids will (rightly) think 'I don't want to be like my parent'. I've had a pretty thorough obvious nervous breakdown all summer. The kids have seen it. If they hadn't, and I'd have gone fine-crazy instead, they'd have seen that. Either way I'd have to think if I were them: that's fucked up, I don't want to do any of that..

I love my parents. They're quirky personally pungent forces, each of them. But in the relationship department, I want to be nothing like them. Which of course has led me right into traps of doing so repeatedly. And back to therapy and introspection and transformation I go, until I'm somewhere down the road, some road.

Now I'm just wandering around in the wilderness. No roads, no paths even. These are not my people, I don't understand them well enough to reject them except for their actions, the psychological sources of which are obscure to me. I mean, I don't LIKE my mother-in-law, at all, for how she's acted. But who she IS? REALLY? I have only an intuited idea of that. She must be somebody. And whoever that is, is carved across the mind of the man in my life, who has done things I hate but for reasons that are probably fathomable, even perhaps sympathetic, in a certain light, a light source I don't have, in terrain I don't know, stumbling around.

So I guess which way to go: He says, I love you. I think, as word sounds floating in air, I understand what that means. But words to you are iffy, unreal. They are much
realer to me than they are to you. So, tattoo my name on your ass. Make it a THING. Then in your terms it will be real, a physical and thus not malleable statement. He says, Seriously? And I say, Yes. (armscrossy)


Monday, July 28, 2014

"They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you always expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever." George Saunders, The Tenth of December

Do people, couples, come back from infidelity?  They must.  They have, I know, I've known a few and found out about a few more recently, people you'd never think. I've never been this close to anything like that before.  Not like REALLY.  I mean, maybe as a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, which is hard enough, but not like. I don't know. It's very confusing. And although it seems like most people have walked this road on one side or another, each instance seems as unique as a fingerprint. 

One thing for sure, I am getting the fuck off


facebook.  That shit is fucked up in the way it suggests pearls of universals that are not in my universe.  It just makes me crazy.  Like all of this has made me crazy.  I don't even want to be on this planet, and I don't mean that in a suicidal way, I mean that as in a humans are weird suck ass whatever motherfuckers kind of way. 

Saturday, July 26, 2014


This is not going to be the story of the woman’s recovery.  She’s not going adhere to another regime of wellness.  She is not going to be “stronger for this adversity”. She will not collect uplifting quotes of spiritual healing.  

This is also not going to be the story of a woman who stands around in a haunted house, manifesting her innards in a dwelling that has a soul, though she does do a lot of that.  The hornet’s nest that grew overnight in the spot of her last hug, one full of deceit, to which she goes back in her mind and wonders: if I had known would have I slapped his face, or hugged him and not let go?  There is no answer to a question like that.  She’d have never slapped his face.  And he’d have not let her hold onto him.  So, where there is no answer, a hornets nest is as logical a response as any. Etc.  I only mention this because the haunted house comes in just once later in the story that this will be.

The actual story begins in medias res, it is a Saturday morning in the middle of their lives. This is his first on call weekend as a critical care cath lab nurse, which means that unlike the jobs he has had before where he has gone to take care of critically ill patients and then come home more or less in time for dinner, this time he will stay home and go to interrupt their emergencies if called to do so.  He will not care for them at all, he will stop their need for care or they will die.  He is very happy about this new job, though its effect on his mental and physical health worries the woman, his wife.  For weeks, he has been increasingly absent from home and increasingly agitated.  He smokes incessantly.  He tells disjointed stories of work when he comes home, that do not have beginnings and ends, only middles, wherein something highly technical occurs to stop a stroke, but how the stroking person got there or left is always obscure.  Stories that are not stories.  They’re images only.  Like dreams, a bit unreal.  This is the first full weekend for which he will be on call to rush to these dream sequences. He was home late the night before, already held captive to crisis, and he is already running low on sleep and running high on nicotine.  He cannot be distracted easily because he cannot stray far from home, can’t go to a movie, anything like that.  He lives 45 minutes from work as it is, he has to be able to jump in the car and go.  She is not troubled by this aspect of the day.  In fact, she prefers home.  (Since this is a real story that leads to trauma, I can’t remember what we did that Saturday in truth, but I can make an educated guess.)  She teases him (I do remember this) for wanting an emergency to occur, says to him “it’s probably bad for your karma to be hoping someone has a heart attack to liven up your day, just saying” and they laugh and he admits that is probably true.  Finally she insists he needs sleep.  He says he thinks it is alright to drink one class of wine. They do that and she lays him down and asks “big spoon or little?” and he says “big” and they curl up, him around her, to sleep, which he does and she does not.  As per usual, she uncoils from him to turn and put a hand on his chest and watch him sleep, as she often notes, “as if with a perfectly clear conscience” he’s a good sleeper.  He is an extremely jealous man, watchful of her almost always, a strange irony that she will dwell on in the weeks to come.  He is so jealous that he doesn’t even want her to write, not even to herself, afraid of what she will put on a page that will not belong to him.  Even to write simple work emails, she has to use a locked work pc to save herself the hassle of his constant roving through her words looking for a threat, a double meaning, a betrayal waiting to hatch out.  There never is such a thing, for unbeknownst to him (or not believed, anyway), she lived with a knot in her stomach all her remembered life that he only has finally loosened in her.  He is as precious to her as is the ability to live and breathe at last.  No friendship with anyone else, no anything at all of any kind, is something she would refuse to give up for his sake. As for writing, it never did do her much good to be a daily writer, not in terms of mental wellness anyway, so she has given it up.  But her mind writes whether she puts pen to paper or not.  So this is how she writes now: she lies next to him, her hand on his chest, and she writes in her mind. She thinks of it as internal Tibetan sand art.  She is writing in sand about his heft, that she is sorry he doesn’t like the 15 pounds or so that he has put on in the last year because she likes it.  Having spent almost all of her life up until now feeling as if she might fly off the earth, she takes great comfort in his there-ness, the weight of him on the bed next to her. She is watching her hand move up and down on his chest with his breathing and writing a kind of thankfulness for him in her mind when his pager goes off, and he is up and out.  

In every way that counts, he never comes back. 

Like someone who has a fatal illness but no awareness of it yet, she worries about all the wrong things.  As the hours mount and turn to days, she worries that she did not pack him enough food, that he will become both exhausted and drained, that he may even make a mistake at work and she knows (thinks she knows) if that were to happen, he would never forgive himself.  The man’s mother, the woman’s mother-in-law, lives 5 minutes from the hospital at which he works.  The woman begins texting the mother, forcing her husband to take a break and go to his mother’s house, get food, get rest.  He is texting his wife that he is increasingly exhausted and desperate to be home again, he phrases it this way: “I just want to be in my own bed.”  Again and again, with an increasing tone of lament, he texts that to his wife.  “I want to be in my own bed.”  But she insists, he must stop trying to get home only to be called back again and again before he can get there, he’s never making it home that way anyway, and is just adding what their son calls “desperocity” to the situation.  He must stop and get something to eat at his mother’s.  So he does, he goes there to his mother’s finally, late Sunday and again Monday morning.  Thank God, thinks his wife.  Thank God, he is with you, the wife says to the mother-in-law.  It is Monday morning when he rests once more at his mother’s, showers, and heads for home.  The wife, she is thankful to her mother-in-law, whom she has always found to be strange, strangely overly forthcoming with the “I love you like a daughter” statements.  The wife is not particularly demonstrative by nature.  But at this moment, she does feel a strong bolt of allegiance to the mother-in-law, who has kept her husband safe and sent him home in one piece.  The mother-in-law says “Sorry … He’s all yours”.  The wife thinks nothing about the odd locution of that – the mother is odd – the wife doesn’t care – all the wife cares about is the solidity of her husband back in her arms late Monday morning.  He holds her a long time.  He says, O my god it’s so good to be home.  She puts him to bed and makes him a big dinner, working in the quiet of the house with the kids at school, filling it with cooking food smells before she wakes him late in the afternoon and makes love to him until dinner, putting her nose behind his ear, breathing him in.  

About a week later, the boyfriend of the girl with whom the husband is having an affair will look through that girl’s phone, find emails and texts and pictures, find things that if enumerated here would render the husband character completely unsympathetic to the reader utterly.  So I will leave most of that part of the story untold for now.  The basic facts are that the girl’s fiancĂ© looks for a woman with the same last name as the husband and calls the man’s mother, not his wife, mistakenly.  What he says to the mother, the wife never knows exactly.  Whatever it is, it prompts the husband to bring his wife into the yard, near the potting shed, and to tell her that he has gotten a little too close to a girl at work who is trying to get away from an abusive boyfriend and he was just trying to help, to “listen”.  He tells his wife, “I love you, I would turn my whole world upside down to be with you, you know that, there is nothing to worry about here” and he hugs her and she shrinks from him a little, the knot in her suddenly drawn fatally tight again.  She puts the kids to bed, calming down so they can talk for real, but by the time she is done doing that, he has walked out the door, leaving only a “I lied, sorry” text behind.  And no matter how much she sobs into his voicemail, no matter how much she does not, cannot believe it, no matter how much she stands in the street in front of their house in the dark whispering desperate prayers to any God into the wee hours that night, her husband is gone.

(I will come back to more of those details later when I am able.)

In the weeks following this night, as you would expect, details emerge, more lies are told, more details emerge…but no TRUTH comes forward.  No emotional truth.  The wife is looking for that truth.  Not of what happened, that she knows, he fucked a girl named Stacey who is prone to bragging about how big of a bitch she is, that type. Who wrote many smutty and vacuous emails to the woman’s husband, that the wife catalogs in her folder full of them, one for instance labeled the dumb bitch can’t even spell adultery that reads ‘you defiently didn’t disappoint me in bed’.  All of that is just fog to the wife, through which she is trying to SEE. What is an affair to a man but a pain killing addiction usually? That he is having an affair is a SUMMARY not an ANALYSIS, as the wife would tell any of her students.  Stacey is/was her husband’s preceptor for this new job, a teacher of sorts, and that is a pattern, for the wife herself was once her husband’s teacher.  In fact, she still has some of those notes from many years before, 2006, and she can map his initial disappearance from her life that time to a question she asked him: “With what are you alone?”  From the moment she asked him that question, he would begin disappearing and reappearing in her life, enrolling into and haltingly finishing her classes usually over protracted periods of time.  And the wife, in cleaning and packing and looking and thinking finds those old notes.  And she finds one other crucial thing:  a carelessly discarded set of receipts that proves that her husband was not on call that long weekend, and not at his mother’s house that Monday morning….that her husband’s mother must have known that, knew he was not at home nor at work nor obviously parked in her driveway…and that despite knowing these things, she would act surprised and appalled by the fact of his affair.  The mother is lying.  To her son.  To shame him more with her feigned appalled shock.  (Why?)

Backstory: the husband is terribly in debt, to an extent he doesn’t quite understand and that nobody fully comprehends, not even the bankruptcy judge, so varied are the non-dischargeable versus dischargeable debts that resulted in his mother’s insistence that he be in school throughout his twenties, which he didn’t want to be, that he take out loans to do so at expensive private colleges, enrolling at every local college in succession only to drop out with another loan, for which the mother arranged co-signors across their extended family, and that with each round of that, he faked it more and better that he was actually in school when he was actually not at all so that at least it was only debt mounting and not forgiveness for his failings, for which he increasingly did not want to be known let alone forgiven. That pattern continued until he met his wife.  She herself unwittingly helped keep him on campus, his crush on her mounting just by her allowing him to show back up again and again and again, and letting him balk by half every question she asked him. Suit yourself, she would say.  She is a very tolerant teacher that way, for she is a very tolerant woman that way, for she herself is still a student too, always trying to hold it together, (was) always trying to figure out how to do that as well internally as she was able to maintain the illusion of it in the world.  In her, he found he could be released from the pattern of failing expectations.  She had no attachment to her expectations of him. If he preferred to write something other than what she had assigned him, that was just as well as far as she was concerned. She never thought he needed forgiving.  No harm, no foul, no guilt.  And he finished nursing school, and turned around and asked her to marry him as soon as he’d graduated, much to her surprise (she had not, in all the years prior, committed the proper spelling of his name to memory).  It was he now who was full of questions, which in her disarmed surprise, she answered with complete candor.  And in doing so found that she trusted him. And all her patterns of wary solitude dissipated too (she thought), blown into harmless motes floating in the sunlight of their curtained windows, in the beams shining on the orchid on the mantel by the bed.

(But this is not a story of happily ever after either, apparently, though they both deserved to have one.)

In the days following her husband’s abrupt departure from her life, the wife flails considerably.  In the habit now of caring for him, a groove formed in her mind to instinctively do so, she packs all his needed things, so that for instance he will not be without his favorite socks.  He comes and gets these things, his father and brother tagging along to carry them away, and she cannot watch and can hardly bear it, so the reverend who married them handles the transfer for her as the wife curls up inside the house, weeping in a corner.  It will be weeks before the wife goes upstairs in her own house, weeks before she looks at and replaces the bed….in this time, there is only one kind of communication between the wife and her husband, and that is his increasingly hostile insistence that his photo album of baby pictures be returned to his mother.  The album is upstairs with their wedding album and with other painful mementos, such as the ultrasound photo of the daughter that they lost at 11 weeks 2 days the previous winter.  She cannot bear to go and retrieve these things immediately.  And as he pressures her to do so, wanting only his own baby book back, noting no attachment to any other sentimental objects at all, and never once asking to speak with his stepchildren let alone have a keepsake of them, her anger mounts.  And mounts.  And mounts to a deadly quiet furious.  He is insistent he get back what is important to his mother.  And what is important to his mother is none of the son’s current life: lost wife, abandoned step-children, and increasingly dire options of living conditions, given that he is bankrupt and has fucked his boss in a scenario not likely conducive to his employment conditions.  In fact, the only person that the husband has screwed over more than he has his wife is himself.  About this, the mother-in-law is interested not at all.  In fact, it seems convenient, forcing him to provide plentiful demeaning manual labor, during which time she can console him grudgingly but “generously” that she never did like the wife anyway, infertile and diffident, and thus “understands”.  

Eventually when she is able to even touch them, the wife puts all things of sentimental value into storage in a church where nobody can have any of it, baby pictures, wedding rings, all of it.  She just so happens to have started working at a hospice, where disputed sentimental objects is a common challenge and temporary safe storage a common solution.  Not even she herself can have those things, she has made the keepers of the things promise this, not until the fog clears, burned off by her anger perhaps or at the end of her sorrow or however these things work themselves out ...  But more than anything, the wife instinctively feels protective of these things from the mother-in-law who wants them so badly. His mother, who did see it coming and didn’t say shit and acted falsely surprised and is still lying that she didn’t know to her son’s face to make him feel even more indebted for the help she is providing him in a place to stay; the mother wants her alibi.  Proof of his happy childhood.  Proof that it is, of course, none of what is happening in his life now is the fault of his upbringing.  A cover story is what that is, the wife’s gut tells her, filling with black tar anger every time she thinks of it.  Not the mistress (too common to bother hating, like the common cold, the wife just wishes it would go the fuck away).  Not even the husband, whom she is very angry at to be sure, but she can think of nothing worse to wish on him than his own life currently.  But the mother-in-law, she is who the wife want to slap the shit out of.  The mother-in-law, who just after he blew his entire world apart, through him a backyard birthday party.  A cake from Eileen’s.  Is that to invite the extended family over and pretend his has not just lost an entire family, an entire life, or to rake him over the coals for doing so (plus frosting)?  That is fucking crazy.  That is enough to drive anyone crazy.  

If this were a story about the wife’s recovery from all this, it would proceed through her whopping PTSD symptoms currently, including sleeping with boots on and pepper spray and tazers on the end tables, and then rehash her daddy issues, and then forward again through “learning to love herself” bla bla.  Fuck that shit. This isn’t even the wife’s story at all mostly, the possibility of which in her arrogance she overlooked from the beginning, that she was a minor character. Why is it that the husband is so irrationally jealous? Always tremblingly so, struggling with the constant fear of emotional and sexual betrayal?  The wife has known him for a LONG time now, through several relationships before their own, and each time the fear of betrayal (each time ungrounded) has plagued him.  While he himself was cheating on her, the wife complained off-handedly one day about his never being home, that for all he knew she could be holding roman orgies.  It was just an offhand remark.  And he grew white lipped hurt livid at it, and she felt terrible, she didn’t mean it like that, OF COURSE NOT, she just was missing him that’s all she meant.  What kind of emotional sense does that make to be Othello-like jealous of a woman on whom you yourself are cheating and want to get rid of?? Having her own daddy issues indeed, she knows from experience it’s the parent to whom you are most similar that you will have the most struggle.  She is thinking of these things, and it hits her: the mother-in-law cheated on the father-in-law….with one of Aaron’s teachers maybe?….
(And as soon as the wife thinks that thought, the light bulb in the kitchen above her head literally bursts and smokes and sends the whole house into darkness with a central circuit breaker tripped.  Her son was standing in front of her, his eyes wide. That’s the only haunted house bit, relevant to the degree you believe it.)  

The rest of this story (that is not of the horrendous present, I mean) takes place in south Buffalo, circa early 1990’s, where a boy at a formidable awakening age loses a teacher to whom he is attached to a mother with whom he shares that attachment behind the back of a father he loves (but is nothing like). 

Friday, July 25, 2014

"This gonna end, even if it end by me stop breathin. That is what I want sometimes. Sometime I hurt so bad I want to not wake up, want breathing to stop in my sleep. Other times I start to go a huh a huh ahuh ahuh A HUH AHUH and I grab my chest cause I can't breathe, then I WANT breathin bad." Push, Sapphire


"Cold, Cold Heart," Lucinda Williams

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

I ventured out today for the first time, aside from fake-work-okay, excruciating to hold like an uncomfortable sitting position on a tack. This in its way was worse. I had coffee with a friend, in whose eyes I saw myself reflected back. A quiet composed total fucking wreck.

I am really not going to be okay. I will not "recover". Sunlight shines right through me back to front through rent holes.

Whoever I will be in the other side of this, if at all and not dead of heartbreak syndrome cancer whatever (a real physical way to die fyi), is not me now nor me before this, and not someone I can imagine yet at all. That me is not someone I know. I don't even know what to hope she will be or be like.


Monday, July 21, 2014

come a little closer



Sunday, July 20, 2014

 
 
I didn't dream I could ever be happier — until I found the bottomless pit

my heart was dying from inherent weaknesses. I trimmed the unwanted anchorage roots
— they were thick and fleshy, it was really a job for two people —
then I kissed it goodbye.

no window box or greenhouse, kitchen garden or orchard, no digging deeply in autumn

I sunk my heart in the sinkhole..

if words were piss you would drown

you jacked off in my flowers
you sunk your fist in my face

you jacked up in my forest
you sunk your teeth in my fruit

you ate my heart and it choked you

"Sunk", Penny Goring


Chet Faker, "Lover (you don't treat me no good no more)" - this guy is the shit combo of heartache and buttshake

bonus track, "No Diggity"

Friday, July 18, 2014

Thursday, July 17, 2014

left for dead is dead enough




I never saw him coming, that was the thing of it.  He was literally the last man on earth I thought I had anything to expect from whatsoever for a bunch of reasons.  So I let my guard down, which I never fully do, or had done I should say.  I have walls, inner and outer and perimeter, with jokes set up all around to trick you into thinking I’m “open”.  But he was so seemingly harmless as to be almost inert.  So I told him all about it all, all about FPH and my weird walled-offedness I could never figure out how to get around, and attraction to people who were as bad or worse, until I was like the human wall of China. And anyone who wasn’t walled off wound up beating their head against me (unsuccessfully and painfully) and anyone also walled off like that, well we’d just mostly stand next to each other never really touching (less immediate damage but not particularly satisfying over time). And Aaron listened carefully to all of this.  And then he took me right down, I’d told him how to after all, and he did.  

And what did he find behind all those walls?  Well, I’m pretty boring, that’s what.  I mean, if ya like house projects, I might be a dreamboat.  My idea of a good time is making pot roast. Going to cabins in the woods and playing board games as vacations.  Going out to dinner sometimes. My perfect day has mostly nothing in it.  I like to feed people and plant flowers.  If this were my last day on earth, I’d: get up and make bacon, watch something funny on tv with the kids, do a few household chores (creating order makes me happy), maybe go buy wine to go with whatever was for dinner, make love all afternoon with a nap chaser, then get up and cook/eat again, watching something on tv again (something DVR’d, episodes of the half a dozen favorite shows, or maybe just an episode of Chopped on a weeknight), maybe play a board game (Cards Against Humanity is my favorite), then read a good book and go to sleep preferably curled in a hairy armpit.  Repeat repeat, etc. = The Good Life to me. For all the scaling of the walls, all he found inside was a small courtyard.  I have to give it to him: that is not terribly exciting.

And as for Aaron’s role inside that courtyard, I had for him quite a bit of pent up care I wanted to bestow.  That he was broke and hadn’t a clue how to do much for himself suited me okay.  All he had to do was be kind to me and the kids, to pour safety on me, and to let me do for him.  I could make him meals, make sure his clothes were clean, make sure he was and appeared claimed and cared for by a woman, by me.  A big fat thumb-proportioned ring of my own design.  Like I said, he had listened carefully, and he gave me everything I had been missing, which was some of what I had not been able to take but mostly was what I had not been able to give. And then I sent him to work, a nursing field full of women, to whom, looking like that, complete with his packed breakfast and lunch each and every day he’d look completely harmless.  Obviously not “on the make”, not drinking his favorite strawberry milk out of lunch bags sometimes containing random little love notes from his woman, right?  He’d be just the kind of guy you could let your guard down around then, eh?  And he’d listen carefully.  And take as many women down as he wanted.  As long as he hid it well from the woman at home who would never ever suspect it in a million years, which wouldn’t be all that hard now would it?  

No wonder he could never quit smoking (?)  

And how much can I bear to know?  It was real to me, my life, the some very hard but/and a lot of quietly good times in it, a decent nonviolent cherished little life.  Just the one mistress (which considering how many times he lied and still was/is lying about her until I refused to answer the phone anymore to listen, counts as one time like malaria counts as one illness, striking again and again to shit your brains out over) – jesus, that’s plenty to take both my life and the illusion of my life away from me in “one” go.  And from the perspective I have now, looking back, it’s possible he’s been ‘providing a harmless ear’ fuck-shopping for my replacement for God knows how long, how many times.  So I have to give it to him again: I’d rather not know.

"Call Your Girlfriend (Robyn cover)," Lucy Wainwright Roche (9.5 on the pain scale)