"You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale." ― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
A decade ago, I would drive to work past the Peace Bridge every day, and I would think about EX getting stuck on the other side of it somehow, in another country, away from me. Every day, I thought that. Then he got a job offer in Canada and left me and my country. Like a miracle. But there are no such things as miracles. There is intention. In a million little ways that I myself do not know and couldn't recount, I created the conditions to get that wish to come true. I believe that.
This is wiser than the counseling Trainwreck and I got. I remember just once our counselor asking me why I found life with him valuable. What was the GOOD in it? Aside from my schpeel about commitment, why would I WANT to be in the life? And at the time, I had a long list of what had been valuable to me, in our first life together. Stuff about how we nurtured each other, trusted each other in the everyday to get our backs, were friends, laughter, home. And that list outweighed the hurt.
Hurtling myself back in for our second life ('the next'), I amped up the sexual affection by a factor of 100. I thought that would fill it in, the air pockets between us, where his discontent holed up and festered. But it didn't work. It wasn't a sex problem in the first place, so sex couldn't fix it. And we didn't break up over sex, either, not really. Sex I can handle, can understand, (a better word than 'forgive', for what right does anyone have to forgive someone else's sexual orientations?). The essential problem under that was that I had lost the list. The reasons, the valuables, didn't move back in with him. And I was toughing that out for a very long time before the hotel receipt.
Since he has been gone, I put myself back together as if after a long slow beating. I remember he had a split lip that wouldn't heal and I worried about it, my stomach knotting, because as a lifelong smoker his oral cancer risk was high. And I thought, I will love you and care for you if you lose half your face, so not to worry. The dramatic irony of that detail isn't that the lip problem resulted from his using his mouth on the lips and bodies of other women, the irony is that I was already caring for a man with half a face, and it was draining the life out of me. I barely noticed anymore, I had grown so used to it. He required constant care and attention, would otherwise go crazy, eat nothing or worse than nothing, get into trouble like a kid who likes the taste of paint, break things, hide messes to be found later rotting food or shit it would be impossible to tell, need his miseries witnessed to nonstop minute by minute at work, or worse disappear into habits of 'happiness' that would spin him into manic episodes of sleepless shiftiness for exhausting days on end. Even with his mother surely up his ass, and a couple women whose attention he has (2, I'm pretty sure, a red head is in the background noise somewhere I sense), at least one of those a vegan farter and thus health conscious, even with all that surrounding and supporting him, I know his meals come from vending machines and he is smoking at least two packs of cigarettes a day and he mainlines as many emergencies as he can find to trick his body into vigor. I don't need my third eye to tell me that, I just know him. Trying to keep him alive against his tendencies otherwise was like holding a door all the time against the pressure of a clambering hoard. The lying to me to convince me I was crazy and treating me like a disposable/replaceable maid were insults on top of all of that injury-drain already.
So it is little wonder that now the scaley patches on my skin are disappearing again. The bad dreams come less frequently (Stella licked my face last night), and I don't wake up yiping so much or go days with no sleep at all. The skin around my nails has stopped bleeding. The house stays clean, so much less work, my back not always sore from stooping. Since I started eating again, it is simple and the food of my own people - I take the boys to the good Italian place in town, now their favorite snack is bread with a dipping bowl of olive oil. So yeah, I look a little better day by day. But. I came out of the (clean) bathroom and there is an antique mirror there and I was stunned by a thought when I saw my own face in it looking back at me like someone else. Now granted that mirror is speckled and very grainy, so it doesn't reflect very truly - it is put there to be a flattering play of light not an accurate portrait. Plus my camera is crappy so it is like being looked at my someone who is nearsighted. But still. I look like I am 'not dying', like I stopped getting chemo and my entire palette shifted from gray to pink. And it occurred to me: he was wishing me dead. Not like in anger, just ... GONE'd. He didn't mind much of the life, it was me and my grounding him in it that he was sick of. If I had died, he could keep on rolling, live here as The Girl was instructed by the will, hire an actual maid. How many times did that cross his mind as he looked at me? How did I die, I wonder? I think maybe to him he wasn't really lying to me so much as he had killed me off inside himself so thoroughly that I wasn't even there anymore, to him. Not flesh and blood anymore.
My guts still hurt. That is the only real symptom left of of being worse for the wear of it all. I put my hand protectively there all the time. And now praying it wasn't cancer he killed me off with in his thoughts. Praying that the affair(s) were his way of leaving what was left of me alive. A last ditch scrap of kindness towards me, in its way.
