I hate birthdays. Holidays of all kinds are iffy but birthdays especially. They have all the sins of forced cheer plus a gross dose of self-absorption. My (ex)mother-in-law loves her birthday. "I love when it's ALL ABOUT ME", she says.  On Aaron's birthday, my mother-in-law hung out with his mistress drinking wine coolers while he and his father came and got his stuff. (I cannot overstate how thoroughly that fact has rendered his parents my mortal enemies for all of this life and the next, and no matter how many lifetimes it takes me, I WILL drink and eat cake while they writhe and sob so mote it be.) Aaron had asked if the pick up time could be earlier in the day so as not to interfere with his party. I remember that I read that text and went into the boys' bathroom and threw up. I did a lot of throwing up and shitting my brains loose then.

Today was his father's birthday party. Of course I was not invited and wouldn't have gone anyway and nobody wondered how all that might make me feel, today or as an echo of the last birthday horror, either one. I tried to choke it down. But I failed. In the end, I took his face off. I try to understand. I'm going for dispassionate comprehension. But I only manage nauseated circa homicidal.

Shattered. Heart ill. Making a wish

(and then another on the second blow, just for me)

Tj says my mysticism goes upward with my distress in a relation he could write a math equation for if he knew how. He's right. I believe unreasonably in signs and reasons for everything, lessons I squint to comprehend, all that (which might be crap, I don't know). That child is sleeping at my feet right now, stung to near shock

by wasps the Witch says I'm summoning in pain relentlessly. Five exterminator visits later, poison dust lays everywhere

and still they come, now into the house, chasing us like Amityville. I will have the walls gassed next week through drilled holes...but if it is me, what good will that do?

Meanwhile Aaron's car, on the thruway loses a tire, it comes flying off entirely rim and all,

grounding the thing onto its belly, collapsing the gas tank, and against all odds nobody dies. For the next few hours, he is returned to himself. What you lose in a relationship is the ability to be your actual self, always presenting instead a portion or version that you think is the right one for the role you're playing. When I was nothing to him, and he to me, we had nothing to lose, and it was then, those people, who were the real ones. Those people fell in love. Then we became US. And he at least certainly ceased to be the underneath actual self anymore in relation to me. I became the surface. His real self by definition then was looking for a new me to disclose itself to. We all do this, to some degree. Traumas of various kinds hasten the disfigurement of relationship. The more "normal" the state of trauma, the stronger the homing beacon to it. Maybe a near death experience can shake that mask back off for a moment, when what do you have to lose if by rights you should be dead anyway. And then there he is. There we are (I died long ago, I don't need to be god smacked to be honest). And sure enough, in different shapes than I imagined but still, there are reasons indeed, all that day becoming clearer like a mountain out of mist.

By the next day, he's mostly gone again, and he's depressed about his car. It's totalled. I don't blame him but I'm quiet, thinking it was a car well spent. (A reason for everything.) Like in "A Good Man is Hard to Find", he'd be okay if someone held a gun to his head every day of his life. If only he knew (believed) that gun were actually so, which it most certainly is, with or without me.

And me, I'm in pieces still and don't know how not to be. My understanding increases daily and that does almost nothing to assuage my pain. I don't know what to do with that. Or how I will figure it out.

That's my pond. Circled is a baby fish, born to the white big fish you see on the left, whom we named "Jimmyhoffa" because she hides so well.  And so does baby, whom I had not spotted at all until Aaron came over for the first time last night and he spotted the little guy right away.  He said "I dreamt there'd be a baby, and there he is".  The endless baby thing.  If I had to call it at this point, both getting back together and him leaving me again in basically the same manner feel inevitable. I don't know what to name that feeling, which is very close to the feeling I have about my mortality - a kind of granite-weighted acceptance, shot through with joy and sorrow.

So, I won this grant for 100k to work for 2 years with a team of 5 people, 2 of us from the school (my dean and myself) and 3 from the local largest retirement/assisted/nursing/palliative complex to develop a curriculum to teach care staff how to add ‘spiritual wellbeing’ to the types of wellbeing they were responsible for providing, specifically to the imminently dying population of their residents.  I have no idea how to do that, of course.  But meh, neither does anybody else, so … in the end, if we succeed, I become an expert (i.e. a consultant) for this work, might go to palliative care facilities regularly, who knows.  But we have to succeed first. 

The basic parameters of the project is this: survey staff about what they know/think about spirituality now, teach them some higher level of attunement to spiritual wellbeing, then study the resident populations to see if it has beneficial effect (fewer anxiety attacks, for instance, fewer stress illnesses, etc). 

Okay, so first task: survey what they currently think.  This has to be a quick survey, not some long abstract thing, as they’re subject to just 20 minute training sessions at the longest.  Plus, and I didn’t think about this ahead of time, they read/write at a 4^th grade level overall.  This is what they RN leaders inform me of as I’m trying to write a 5-question format.  Some of the CNA’s are higher functioning than that, but I can’t bet on it.  So I can’t ask “Your spirituality impacts your work?” then give them a likert scale because the word “impact” is above the 4^th grade reading level.  Go ahead, try to find a synonym….Five questions took me days of going round and round about it.  It just strikes me as very odd work, a strange challenge, of taking my Spirituality in Lit course, wherein I throw everything from Emerson to Ginsberg at my students, and getting it into APPLICATION terms and then making those terms accessible to people who are way smarter than I am about all aspects of dying and/but who can’t read hardly.  When I’m not obsessing over my own personal life, I’m obsessing more and more over this project.  So let’s introduce the cast of the team, whose names I have to conceal due to IRB restrictions:

Reverend – she’s a Unitarian, apx 70 years old, formerly a nurse this is her second career and second marriage, both of which she’s been in/going for about 15 years.  Mid-meeting one day, she took a call from her ex-husband, their son was in jail again, about which she sighs and says “he converted to Islam, but apparently Allah isn’t getting his back”

Nurse – she is responsible for adding the care planning codes for spiritual wellbeing into the current system used, so that there are “diagnoses” and then “treatments indicated” for them.  She has a LONG list of everything that could be wrong with you spiritually, such as purposeless hopelessness loneliness etc, which all look like one word to me: Shitty.  Then a short list of symptoms including things like listlessness, to which I added about 25 symptoms that I myself had exhibited in the last few months (that cracked her up, but she took notes just the same).  We haven't written treatments yet.  But her first suggestion was “needs a gin&tonic”

Baptist Lady – she’s an RN leader for CNA’s and another kind of layperson-reverend as well, of the sings in church powerful black woman in the room variety.   She will be overseeing how the CNA’s get talked to, trained, and evaluated.  She is quiet and demurely imposing - she some kind of scares the shit out of me.

DeanJ – he’s my boss, to the extent that I recognize authority, which is not at all except by brute necessity.  He’s a philosophy PhD who hates philosophers for all the reasons he can’t help but be, such as snooty smart and disapproving constantly (reminds me of Ex, a bit, which is fine since I always liked Ex at WORK, just not at home at all).  I think we’ve actually become authentically friendly at this point.  I’m so “what the fuck ever” about everything now, like if your hair ain’t on fire I probably won’t bat an eyelash, which in the arena of academic hysteria is welcome.  I’m back to being work-yoda, basically, by virtue not of meditation and mindfulness so much as by the brute force of life having beaten me into a pulpy stillness.  DeanJ is in charge of measurement, will be running the stats and numbers on the results, etc.  He drinks half a dozen diet mountain dews a day and loves caffeinated play with excel spreadsheets.

We spend umpteen go-rounds on 5 simple questions, then to celebrate finishing the initial survey, we go to the in-house dog show, wherein the staff brings their dogs in and dresses them up in dog fashion outfits (tutu’s and Sherlock Holmes get ups, etc), and then walks them around the “run way” which is walking around the room stopping at each parked wheelchair and wagging tail at each elderly resident.  There is one old man there, so like my grandfather, so fucking happy to be entertained by the littlest shit, and every time a dog comes around to him, he shouts out “well will ya look at that?! Isn’t that WONDERFUL??!!” By the time he’s done it the 5^th time, I’m crying. 

blame it on me

A dream: I reach out and connect myself to Aaron through what I know to be a spirit bond but which looks like a Chinese finger puzzle. I take a deep breath and blow my spirit at him through it. My thought is that I will see where he and our connection are broken in this way, that my spirit will leak out the cracks so I'll be able to see them. There are none that I can see. Then I look down and see that I'm standing in a puddle, and it has all come pouring out of the cracks in ME.

(He should be reading articles on how to unbreak your betrayed heart-battered wife. http://m.wikihow.com/Rebuild-Your-Spouse's-Trust-After-an-Affair)

 

You're killin me, Smalls

From "The Taxonomy of Ghosting"

We have all heard of ghosting (or the fade away, as some call it), probably – that thing when a person you're dating [married to] just disappears. But like real ghosts (which are real, as I just said), there are many different types of relationship phantoms. And fortunately for all of us, these types correspond to famous spooks. How lucky! [such as]..

Bloody Mary: This is a ghost you really believe will reappear if you just try hard enough. Stay chanting in front of that dark bathroom mirror all night if you have to...

 -------- (sigh)

Although I'm hopelessly unprepared for the semester, I'm sure glad to be back at work. Holy shit, thank god for books. Thank you thank you thank you god for books. In fact, I think my main thought increasingly is "thank you". I think it at my shoes, a patch of sky, my growling stomach, almost everything/anything I can. Thank god for meetings, even that - it beats going home smelling like a whopper. I always want to pull back against being dragged anywhere, as to self pity relentlessly. Be thankful for your breath, for legs that work, for something. Have you not noticed that the way you think has not served you well at all? So duh, TRY IT IN REVERSE. I'm digging my heals in the more he tries to yoke and drag me into believing that only his pain counts, that his discomfort of today trumps everything else and everyBODY else. No. It doesn't. I swear to Christ, he's going to start running through the streets hitting ice cream cones out of kids' hands out of all consuming resentment that anyone might have a feeling that isn't conforming to his certainty that his own unhappiness is the sole irrefutable center of the known universe. And what really drives me crazy is that for all his self-absorption, he doesn't really care about himself at all either. What IS that?

(And why am *I*, not he for himself, trying to figure it out all the time? Reading 'Psychology Today' articles like it's my job.) (While his mother - whom we've dubbed Low Cunning - while Low Cunning tries to get him to hook up with his landlady, who in turn makes him meatloaf dinners. Which is fine, whatever/eyeroll, but can we at least thank god for meatloaf then?)

Loving Aaron feels at this point a lot like loving my kids at two years old felt, when at the end of the day all you can do is hold them and thank god they're alive anyway, and think 'wow I love you, wow you suck'. And pray they move on from this stage of development before you crack.

I got this at the Mary - I've prayed it a lot lately - folks usually leave off that last part

Thank you Master for my Soul, Donny Hathaway 

"Why Your Marriage Sucks":
http://www.salon.com/2009/06/24/vindication_love/

No matter what I read, it makes no sense to me. Marriage to begin with, logically speaking. Nor how ours broke, which defied every reason for marital demise listed in that article - by those measures, I'd done everything right, including the downsizing and re prioritizing etc. And/but listening to him (trying trying), why it broke is that I'd done it right and NOT put the institutionalization of marriage higher on my list of things to do every day. Thus/but it had not been enough about acquiring mutual debt, it hadn't been contractual enough, there wasn't enough to "show for it" to him. But everything I read about the reasons marriages fail amount to the contractual/transactional being the killer of love. So it would have failed anyway.

I don't understand much of anything is just about the only thing about which I feel certain. 

So I will go to counseling. Will do the homework. Will submit. And see if it gets me any closer to what I wanted out of this relationship in the first place, which wasn't ease or status or stuff, it was GOODNESS. I wanted to be GOOD to someone, for no other motive than to do that as far as I could in the everyday, having faith in the transformative possibilities of that up close and personal. I'm surrounded by people who are very good people in the abstract. Their outrages are rightly placed, their political sensibilities are moral, their writings and actions bespeak their decency of mind, they clean up rivers and go to rallies against fracking and model thoughtful citizenship (or at least feel endlessly guilty) .. we are all "good people" more or less. Theoretically. But we usually just suck, utterly, at giving a real shit about the people right in front of us. Up close, even good people are routinely awful. And it's not just a matter of blood - we are no better inside our families and intimate spaces than we are to our friends than we are to our acquaintances. In fact, I'd say we are shittiest in that order of succession, kindest at greatest distances. (Like I was yesterday, by accident: I took that old man's hand and said sincerely 'you've been so blessed in such a long marriage', my voice cracking a little with admiration for him really, and he held my hand a long time and cried. Afterwards, Witch and her family were looking at me like I was some kind of materialized aberration. What? He NEVER has held a hand, not even to cross a kid across a street, cold always, "he's emotionally retarded - what the hell did you say??") I wanted to reverse that just once with all my spiritual might, an experiment in radical intimacy. Wherein the constraint of monogamy would drive me into invention in order to achieve a more concerted mindful beauty, like writing a sonnet.

And now I feel cored like an apple a lot of the time, nursing a crying headache usually, wondering if I am still mid that experiment (keeping the faith) or if it just failed miserably (in denial). Or some other non binary option that I'm too blind and hurt to see at all.

()

Half a day at marriage repair therapy, hashing facts and dates that I know by heart and that he'd just as soon forget, us in agreement only that we both hate and suffer every detail.

The second half is now at Roswell with the Witch, holding her dad's hand, her mom riddled. I ask him, How long have you been married? He says, Oh I don't know, she keeps track of all that, facts and dates..

If I could have, I might have just stayed there. Taken up recluse residency, kept the temporary library card indefinitely, walked off the human grid entirely..

But among other things, I've got kids to raise. And when Ears nearly drowned in Minera Lake, where the distance is about 20 ft to the raft, from anxiety and weakness, I felt myself beneath all this shit as firm and welcome as when my feet felt lakebottom and pulled Ears back to shore. Bottom line: you either want to be well, live uprightly, fulfill your karmic duties, love as unselfishly as to break your back, tell the truth to yourself and to others, push yourself to think deeply and carve out an inner life big enough to hold your existence in reflection, to try and try and try again according to those values, or you do not want to walk with me in any capacity. 

Card of the day, it means "respite". I sure the hell hope so. I feel drained to the marrow. And I'm leaving. Taking books and a pen and not much else, kids in tow each with books and a pen, away from the crime scene that used to be our life and into the woods. Unlike usually, I think I truly will not miss home at all. I'm not even sure what that word means anymore, really.

If you hate your partner, cheat on em. I'm telling you, I have been all kinda slapped around, but this shit will fuck a person up like a tire iron. But beware, it's not much easier on the cheater either in the long run unless you have no soul. It is the the most fuckingest up thing on the scale of things you can do before you fall off the scale into no man's land of stuff like shooting up a school or molesting a kid. Seriously.

word?

Relationship is a process of self-revelation; relationship is a mirror in which you begin to discover yourself as you are—your tendencies, pretensions, selfish and limited motives, fears, and so on. In relationship, if you are aware, you will find that you are being exposed, and being exposed causes conflict and pain. The thoughtful person welcomes this self-exposure as a means to bring about order and clarity, to free his thinking and feeling from isolating, avoidant, self-enclosing tendencies. But most of us want to seek comfort and gratification in relationship; we do not desire to be revealed to ourselves, we do not wish to study ourselves as we are, so relationship becomes wearisome and we seek to escape. We seek peace in relationship and if we do not find it then we try to bring about changes till we find what we seek—dull comfort, some anesthesiant or distraction to cover up our emptiness and fears. But relationship will ever be painful, a constant struggle, till out of it comes deep and extensional self-knowledge. With deep self-knowledge there comes the ability to love more genuinely. --Krishnamurti (But what if you're not strong enough to see what you're supposed to be looking at, no matter how hard you squint?)

Take 1: The wife wants to get back together with her husband long enough at least to call his mother a two-faced vacuous cunt to her face and watch her expression contort around “cunt” and go fucktarded around “vacuous”.  She would really like to put her hands around the mother-in-law’s throat and squeeze until she feels what it’s like to have a real feeling.  Do you feel that Maureen?  Does it hurt? Are you frightened?, she think-hisses into her face, inches from it, enjoying her pain immensely. But being who she is (not a real ninja) the damage of her words would have to suffice, which is so hard when the other person knows the definition of so few.

Take 2: To hell with the mother, the wife wants the father-in-law. Yes, she does. Always did, what with her daddy issues and all.  Now she really wants him.  Sit and look me in the eyes Ron, she think-hisses softly.  Remember how the last time you sat in the yard, and told the story of how your bosses, for whom you’ve worked for 40 years, had just told you that “you were like family” and thus “never had anything to worry about”?  It’d be a real bitch if you suddenly found out the hard way that you weren’t jackshit to them, wouldn’t it? (Word of advice, next time you stab a witch in the back, you better make sure you killed her.)

Take 3: The wife cannot think about anyone else but her husband when she thinks about her husband.  If the lens widens any further, he appears to her surrounded by malevolent forces on all sides, and then she suspects that if she could see herself from a vantage that would include her in that entourage, that she herself would not be a force for good in his life.  He claims she is the only such force, and everything else is hostile to his wellbeing, to his very survival even.  Not being able to tell which perspective is the truth, she feels what little clarity she does when she is alone with him actually or in her mind in an otherwise empty room.  Inches from his face.  Though being that close makes her shake, also.  She has loved this person very much.  That is true.  It is also true that she has been hurt by this person in a way that she cannot fully comprehend and perhaps is ongoing, a cancer of mistrust metastasizing inside her, though the affair itself has stopped.  They talk of mostly mundane things, his need to buy a car, his landlord, the roof is leaking at home.  She doesn’t know how to talk about what has happened to them; he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know how to talk about what has happened to them. She feels keenly the primitive state of psychological science in her era, limited access to care that is so crude it might as well be leeches and bleedings.  This is a literary situation.  She ought to be better prepared.  But when she watches Jeopardy, she always clears the columns labeled such things as “home remedies” and blows “contemporary authors” completely.  Perhaps centuries from now, in a situation like this, it would be possible to put a bell jar to the side of his head and pull her husband’s mind out through his ear, see it like a rabid deformed little fucker bang wildly and harmlessly at the glass as she sets the jar on a shelf and says, “Jesus look at that thing, glad that’s out of there eh?!” And he’d have to agree. Then she’d safely fuck the living daylights out of him, having effectively treated what ails him by beheading him just above his sensual mouth. 

Take 4: I know from umpteen bouts of therapies and especially from what is called “shadow work”, wherein you explore the things you hate the most about yourself and learn how they are in fact exactly the things you also have relied on most (you are your own closest worst friend!), that strengths are weaknesses.  Aarons’ strengths are that he knows what to say to people (I don’t), that he is cool headed in an emergency (I am not very much not), that he is even tempered almost always (I have quite the temper), that he is flexible and ameliorating (I am rigid, fixed in my habits and values). Let’s take those one at a time: the weakness of the first is he might at any point be lying, or at least messaging the message into what the other person wants to hear (I will say only what I mean, which means I have usually very little to say to most people); he can dissociate completely from other people’s feelings (I cannot stop feeling other people’s shit, their moods, their every little thing, until their very proximity feels like a chore, but if you’re not sure that you have a feeling I might be able to clue you in); he internalizes his anger to the point of near oblivion then when you do finally see it, he’s a GIANT ASSHOLE (I’m going to avoid conflict like the plague, not wanting to feel my temper, which I cannot internalize in the slightest, and am prone to hissy fits); his idea of right and wrong is relative to the situation (mine is not at all, and forgiveness does not come easily to me). 

All these very fundamental differences set the stage for what happened to us, and though I see all that, I cannot still wrap my head around what to do with it now that it’s occurred.  When I talked to the mistressexgirlfriendwhatever, the story of the affair left me psychologically speechless.  This is not a woman with whom I have much, if anything, in common.  That part would make sense – if you’re unhappy with what you have, you choose otherwise, right?  Okay, so far so good, it makes sense.  She offers him a friends with benefits arrangement, has no compunction about telling me as much, though she knows he was married, but it had died a long time ago like marriages do whatever, and he has the hots for her and so fine, let’s have some fun she tells him.  Right there, at that juncture, it would make sense for an unhappily  married man to either leave his wife and ease his way into being single with a ready piece of ass already waiting, or for him to take the piece of ass for a while and not tell his wife, as men as are apparently wont to do.  But he did neither of these things.  What he did do is replay our entire relationship out with her, almost to the word.  The things he told her, the words he used, the plans he wanted to make, in the same sequence. The emails that my brother-in-law decrypted suggested something of this, and the sense of betrayal I felt in that was more than any merely sexual connection between them could ever cause.  But when I got the WHOLE story, it was not that he had just taken her to a restaurant he had taken me to.  He had recycled EVERYTHING, and attempted to recreate the exact storyline of us, to relive his early relationship and marriage to me EXACTLY.  The first hotel, it was the first hotel we ever stayed at together.  The whiskey sours, we’d learned together how to ‘muddle’. The poor woman didn’t have one single original joke to report, not one term of endearment that actually belonged to her, not one memory that wasn’t a relived one.  “Lay down, I want to talk to you”, a phrase that just struck her as just odd though she knew it was a sex cue, all a language that Aaron and I had invented and pieced together between us – that was what my grandpa would say to my grandma when she’d get good and mad at him.  And Mistresswhatever, playing the part of me, did a shitty job of it, being herself and not me after all.  

And the weirdest part, the one I just cannot fathom or forgive, is the going along with this playacting that his parents did.  As when he met me, they told him “if you love her go get her”, the same phrase to a word.  The birthday party, the family functions upon functions, they just rolled her right into them the next day like they do on those daily afternoon soap opera when they switch out one actress for another but the character role stays the same.  Even the accessories were switched out, two sons she had in their pool playing with the noodles they had for mine.  And the mother-in-law so excited that he was going to be settling down. Plus, she was egging him on long before the fact, wanting for herself a more extroverted and breeding stock daughter-in-law.  All those nervous phone calls he’d have with his mother, out in the backyard, about which he would only say “she’s just up my ass”.  Then in less than a heartbeat, the in-laws are showing the mistress the family wedding albums, to which her own life story would be added, just like they did with me.  Even down to the witch shit, the mother-in-law planning that trip with her son’s woman to Lilydale, like adding the few things that the woman might need to be a complete replacement for me, able to read tarot after some classes - ?  She was always into that about me.  Otherwise, I could be switched out for someone more likely to show up at Polish weddings every weekend, and my name not even spoken, as if I had not existed just a fucking minute ago.

And all the while, Aaron is trying harder and harder to say all the same things, do all the same things, and have it turn out the same way, with a loving wife who gets his jokes and makes breakfast, step-kids tumbling around (except fertile as the Nile would be one nice adjustment – otherwise, he’d like her to be exactly me).  But she isn’t me.  Her kids aren’t my (our) kids.  She doesn’t make breakfast.  She does jello-shots.  And he comes apart.  And gets a tattoo on his ass.  And tries to come back to the home he inexplicably tried to recreate when he already had it, except for the making a baby business, about which the mistress says “I hope it didn’t take” as she orders her fifth shot, loud bar noise in the background.  “I had no idea I was his mistress!,” she laughs bitterly.  And I find myself on the phone with a woman who fucked my husband, apologizing to her for the playing the role of me that my husband put her through. Mistresswhatever is sorry she met any of them, except for me, who seems really great.

Take 5: He runs his finger across her top lip at the edge, slowly.  “I love this collagen line”, he says. She is happy with an almost cloistered life.  Without any access to reasons to do otherwise, it might be that he could utter nothing at all but things so peculiar to her that they could never be repeated and make any sense. He could never use that endearment again unless he could find a woman with loose morals who had an enviable lip liner contour and an inherent stillness enough to be caressed along the length of it.  Could he be cured of a tendency to cheat by being left mute except for phrasing that makes sense only in a small specific context and would otherwise be complete gibberish?

Take 6:

or not

http://blackandmarriedwithkids.com/2014/01/10-ways-to-survive-in-your-marriage-when-your-in-laws-hate-you/

I'm writing it all down but then I think, Who would even believe this? In order to get these experiences into some kind of art, I have to write them all out and out and out then stand back and try to see/choose the illuminating bits. The ones that truly HURT. It's the little things. Left as a whole, it seems insurmountable, unreal in the first place and the impact of all the small wounds lost. 

Once, we tried to buy some borsht from a Polish house-front store in south Buffalo and they wouldn't sell to us because I was Black.  I thought it was very funny.  (It reminded me of the time that my friend's Czeck wife told me I was her first black friend - they mean Roma, which my face clearly betrays, and to Poles and Czecks etc, that's Black)  I'm not nearly political enough.  Not about people, anyway.  Garden ordinances, backyard chicken freedoms, greenspace policies, yes...but the peopled world I try to tune out as much as possible, feeling naggingly guilty about it always. It felt good to be "oppressed" for a minute, I remember feeling, like the slight had given me some miniscule load off my a-political karmic guilt. And then I didn't give it any more thought. I should have.

Meanwhile, I might be okay with everything on that list except #7.  That is, if we get as far in counseling as we need to, which is to them, his childhood, his narrative that starts at "I was born, and then the fucking with me began" as the story starts for us all.  That's mostly it right there in #1 "don't take it personal", the first two sentences; I put him beyond their debt.  He was no longer beholden and not particularly interested without being forced.  The only thing he still could be manipulated by was the fictions he'd buy into, the spell they cast about how the ur-form a happy marriage took was their own only. It had two forever-little boys in it (mine had aged out, and Mistress had two new ones to switch them out for). The happily-ever-after had a nearly inert (seemingly) parked man in the center (otherwise always slaving away so the story went). "I want a marriage like my parents'," he'd (re)told her under the approving and urging eyes of his parents, the same wedding album ritual, down to the word, as if he weren't already married. 

In the story this is, there are many lessons to be learned.  One: never underestimate the power of an untrained unethical witch (which) (one is it?). Now they're all learning a thing or three about the three-fold law.  And I am breaking this spell.

truth: their expressions

In the disputed baby book I still have, that is still mine because it is his and my name is on his ass, this is the "happiest" photo.  That book, it's 4 inches thick of photos.  And in that mountain, never do they smile at each other, never are in physical proximity to each other except to pose like this.  Take a good look at their expressions.  That look like an expression you'd like to have on your face for the rest of your life?  Even Brian is already fucked.  The only one still innocent of the pose he's suppose to strike and hold is that baby in the middle, little Aaron.

Every night he would say as the last thing "wake me if you need me". And occasionally she would. To test it. And sure enough, he would surface and look to her searchingly, "what? what do you need?" And people tell her now, you're not safe with him. And she thinks, Well no shit but when was she ever safe? Never anyways as it turns out. That's what she wanted most, safe and sound.  Is that even a real thing?

This is our anniversary. I am sleeping alone. I guess that's safe?

Spent the evening yesterday actually eating. Why? Probably because I was with Aaron. We met to get dinner. So it seemed like life as I knew it, I guess, so I ate an actual meal. That was yesterday (on night worker time, it's still Saturday now to me).

I woke up today sick as hell. Probably my body just couldn't handle something as normal as cheese. But it felt spiritual. I laid here sick at dawn trying to figure it. One thing he'd said didn't ring true. And that's how I am now, a touchy bell.

So I sent the exgirlfriendmistresswhatever my phone number. I dunno, I am a writer, I figured : what's your story? And I went back to bed, curled around my exploding guts until late afternoon. Later, "a few jello shots in", she called me.

(Insert Faulkner's          here.)

I was right about the mother-in-law, and the father-in-law too in his dimmer way. Both a couple of turbo psychopath betrayal perfectionists. In the story this will be, the parents of the woman's husband are quaintly *depraved*.

In real life, will Aaron be able to leave a lifetime of lie-trained? Will he able to learn when he is lying to himself before he winds up getting others to buy into a Brooklyn Bridge he's selling to himself? It will be an extremely daunting task to learn that, certainly the hardest of his life... (The tattoo was a dead on good guess on my part - what is REAL? Chances are you'll know it if it hurts some, fyi.)

And in real life, what am I doing? Am I teaching him to own the truth or am I learning to lie to myself? I think I am trying to salvage what real love there is out of this rubble pile of damage. But what if I'm not doing that? Then what I may find I've been doing is to drink in the dregs, soak in all I'm able, put my arms around him while I can, as if going back to before all this time-machine style to savor the lasts in a way you only would if you knew it were the lasts. Last hugs, last smiles, your last day on earth.

WORD

"Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over." D.H. Lawerence, Sons and Lovers










I met with my new shrink today.  She says, "I have the sense that you have extremely little ability to protect yourself from feeling other people's feelings, and that's why you don't like to have them around."

My grandmother used to say, "I know you love me, but try to fight it."  It's good to be loved and all, but sometimes it's just too hard to breathe around, especially when it gets all torqued and comes out as fury or grief, and then what are you supposed to do, to say?  You can't articulate when you can't fucking breathe, can you?  Then I chase everyone off and lie down, just breathing, silently weeping with the breath that allows for that much.  Wondering if there is ever going to be balance again. Wondering if only in loneliness will I ever have so much I wish I could say, while in love all I can do is put my hands over my head and cower until it's over.