Muchness and Light

The fates are vicious, and they're cruel.

I’ve spent most of the last week recovering from a surgical repair to my left Achilles tendon. It had been bothering me all year, but I’d put off seeing ortho about it, thinking it would get better eventually. I was already battling cervical and lumbar spine pain. I was back and forth to Alabama to see and care for Bumblebee while he was undergoing chemo and then surgery and then radiation. I was starting grad school. I was still raising two teenage sons and working a full-time job.

But after a ten-day study abroad in Berlin, I came home limping. The sixty miles I walked during that trip were invigorating in so many ways. They also gave a nasty bone spur in my heel the opportunity to lacerate the tendon. There was no option but to remove it, which happened this past week.

I’ll spend two weeks in a splint, then several weeks in a boot. I have at least four weeks on crutches or a knee scooter. Physical therapy won’t begin for at least four weeks, and I’m told to expect a year for full recovery.

I can’t do most of what I normally do around the house, like laundry or cleaning. I can’t reach some of the cabinets to put away the dishes. Cooking is awkward. Showering is a convoluted chore. The boys have been somewhat helpful. Friends have brought food. Pandy and Cookie came to help get some things situated for us this weekend. Max is old enough to make a run to the grocery store for me. (Delivery isn’t terribly helpful, as I can’t really put a lot of the groceries away.)

Elevating my foot is key to healing during the first few weeks. I have spent days in bed or on the couch, binge watching television. My eyes have been too blurry from the pain meds to try to read.

In the midst of it all, I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of this fucking breakup.

I am forced to be still in ways I hate. For years, I have walked to clear my head, and the exercise is incredibly helpful at dealing with my anxiety and depression. But physical limitations this year have made me far less active. I’ve lost muscle tone and gained some weight back, and that is going to worsen over the next few months before it gets better.

All of this makes for a perfect storm of self-recrimination and frustration and anger.

I find myself journaling the same things over and over—hurt and anger and confusion at how the hell I ended up in this place again, how anyone could be so consciously and callously hurtful of someone they professed to love. Then I think about the times I have hurt others, and I question at what point I stop paying some karmic price for damage I’ve inflicted.

When will I have worked hard enough and atoned enough that other people stop fucking hurting me as some kind of cosmic penance? Why am I the one left holding the hurt and carrying the blame for anyone else? Why does there seem to be no consequence for their actions, except what I am left to deal with?

I don’t know how to get past what I don’t understand.

Moonshine admonished me not to lie in bed crying over this and not to let it define who I am, to look at the good in my life and not get mired in the bad. “I really believe that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t/don’t or won’t see the reason. I think the reason for this is that you needed to see how string you can be.”

I don’t want to have to be stronger right now. I don’t want another Nietzschean lesson in my own resiliency. I am fully aware of my tenacity and my capacity. The one thing I wanted was a partner to carry some of that for me, sometimes when I needed it most, so I didn’t have to keep breaking my back to do every fucking thing by myself.

He told me he would do that. I trusted him and believed him and gave him the opportunity to be taken at his word, and he shrugged and dropped it all back at my feet when I was least prepared to pick it back up.

And he told me it was for my own good.

I am viscerally offended by the cowardice. I am hurt in ways I have rarely been—after having been as open and honest and brave as I could be to even engage in that relationship with him. I am now literally trapped inside my own head with no physical outlet for it, and I want to crawl out of my own fucking skin.

But I refuse to compartmentalize it away. I refuse to pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter, because to do so it to traumatize myself in the exact ways others have hurt me. It won’t define me, but it will be another marker on my journey, another cautionary tale of another person who made me carry their shame and who dismissed me with little thought in order to justify their cowardice.

Another on top of another on top of another on top of another….

Except this one promised me he wouldn’t do exactly this, just so I would never have to feel this again.

I’m not grieving him. I am mourning the loss of trust and love and faith—and at a time when I need it most. Hope feels dangerous and is not allowed right now. I am lamenting the death of my own passion, again, at the hands of a man who will never face me to apologize for the catastrophe he created.

And I’m doing it all from forced confinement.

The timing is ironic. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of forcing me to slow down and deal with it now. Maybe there’s something coming that will need my attention and focus, so that I need to be free of this bullshit to deal with that.

Maybe it’s just coincidental assholery.

Maybe none of it means a damn thing.

 

 

Yes, you must leave everything that you cannot control. It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul.

I’ll be honest: it’s been a hell of a week.

This breakup with Bumblebee has been foundationally shattering. Over the course of a few days, my plans and my beliefs about my life just shifted. Grad school and work and boys are still ongoing. I’m still getting ready for an upcoming surgery to repair a blasted Achilles’ tendon that has bothered me all year.

But I’ve also mourned. A lot. I haven’t slept consistently, and most days the thought of food makes me nauseated. I’ve seen 4:30 a.m. most mornings this week, eyeing the tear-blurred clock blearily.

I’d forgotten how hard this part is.

In reality, I begged him not to make me remember. From the very beginning, I laid out what I was afraid of and why. More from self-awareness than from self-fulfilling prophecy, I knew the depths of despair I was likely to fathom if another man let me down in those ways.

Alas, here I am.

My therapist praised me for having been truthful and honest and open from the beginning, for giving him the literal playbook to prevent my being hurt. Don’t do this to me. For giving him the opportunity to take the responsibility for his actions within my boundaries.

“But maybe most people can’t handle that,” she said. “Maybe most people not only can’t be themselves, but they also can’t handle you being yourself.”

Fuck. This is hardly the first time I’ve been faced with such musing, from someone else or from myself. I have a tendency to see straight into other people, especially emotionally avoidant men, call them out on their shit, and tap my foot impatiently while hoping they will step up and make the changes they need to make. I know how hard that can be. I’ve done it. I’m still doing it.

It took me a damn long time to realize I wasn’t going to be redeemed by anyone else. No other person can ever make up for the shit that has been done to me—or for the shit I have done to myself. That responsibility lies squarely with me.

But the redemption comes not from meeting someone who can not do the stupid shit that undermines my tenuously-reintegrating psyche. It comes from my not making the same choices, not having the same limited emotional responses to similar stimuli.

                                                                                                                                         December 2, 2017

And this time, I did do it differently. It still wasn’t enough. But it wasn’t that I wasn’t enough.

But I am a girl who believes in Love. Deeply. Completely. Yes, in its redemptive power.

It took me decades to realize that my paternal grandparents had set the example for what love was supposed to be. More than fifty years of commitment and love and songs trilled across the house to one another. No fights, just “discussions” and intense care and open affection, no matter what. (At least as was shown to me.)

The daughter of an abusive alcoholic who fell in love with a magician and lived happily ever after.

I have spent my life looking for literal magic.

To love someone is an act of grace. It is to be willing to accept their flaws, to offer forgiveness before slights are committed, to promise to be there and to accept them, no matter what. Love is a mercy, both to them and to yourself, and that spark is as close to the divine as we may ever experience on this Earth.

“I think you need to rethink what it is you want from love,” Queen Frostine said to me. “I know you want that redemption, but maybe it comes in a different form than you want.”

I get her point. I do have people in my life who love me, whom I also believe will be there for me, no matter what. She is one of the few, and she knows it.

But Queen Frostine or Pandy or any of my Psyrens can’t be there in the middle of the night. They can’t be there to hold me or to share in deep ecstasy. They aren’t the ones with whom I want to craft that magical life.

I am afraid that the likelihood of my ever getting the empirical proof of the mystical, of what I know exists because I am borne of it, grows smaller and smaller with each passing year and broken relationship. The reality is that I am unlikely to end this life with that resolution, both because of other people and because of myself.

It seems as if my Holy Grail will be forever ensconced in gauzy veil.

On top of it all, I am slipping into the emotional avoidance that I loathe.

And it is frightening to me, to think of becoming the thing I hate the most, of turning into the monster that hides under my own bed.

This is what I begged him not to do.

I understand that I still have the power to make me and to make my life what I most want it to be.

Except what I want isn’t happening. Still. Again. And it’s deflating. The only way I know to make the cycle stop is to get off the damn carousel, but I keep reaching for the brass ring one more time. Just one more time!

I’m dizzy from the trying.

Maybe it’s the last bastion of adulthood. It begins with realizing your parents are simply human. Maybe it ends with accepting your own mortality, closing the binding-worn Fairytales and shelving it forever.

What if that’s not what I want?

Maybe what I want is delusional. Maybe my love of myth and tortured epic is the fairytale I get. Maybe I am fated to live out my life as a Grimm protagonist.

Except I know it exists. I know couples who commit to respectful, equitable, mutual reciprocity, who gift one another with care and affection, whose passion ebbs but also flows for decades.

I don’t know how my story will end. I almost gave up on Bumblebee in October, and I made the decision to try again. It still went unexpectedly south, but I tried. I will try to keep trying, though I’m unsure I will ever be successful in that endeavor.

Yes, my girls will still be there, no matter what. There are a few others. More importantly, I will still be there, no matter what. And I will continue to be exactly who I am—open and honest and clever and smart and loving—because I don’t want to be my own monster.

There is no divinity in turning myself to stone.

 

 

You know I thought you could. You know I thought you could, too.

When Bumblebee and I started 14 months ago, I was coming off a long series of bad relationships and encounters that had left me unsure I would ever be willing to date again. The logistics of a long-distance relationship might be insurmountable, but we both found something so special in the other that we were willing to try.

I was still going to therapy every week, grappling with how my past continued to influence my present, determining what was useful from more then 40 years of good and bad and what could be put away. But one of the things I was adamant about, from the very beginning, was that I could not be a secret. For me, secrecy is indicative of shame, of being told by a child molester that he loved me and that what we did was okay—but that everyone would blame me and be mad at me if they knew.

That dynamic played out time and again, specifically with men and sexual and emotional relationships. Sometimes it was their secret shame that hurt me, but usually it was my own. I learned to equate secrecy and dismissive hurt with love. It wasn’t until I ended my relationship with Rango in 2017 that I really decided to work to rewire that thinking.

And I was exceedingly clear with Bumblebee that I was not willing to take carry that weight in our relationship. Although he’d been separated from his wife for more than a year, he wanted to finalize his divorce before introducing me fully into his world. Fair enough. Like most people he knows, including our mutual friends, I knew nothing of his separation. He told me he was trying to finish it all before it became public. But the divorce was imminent. And he was adamant that he did not want anyone to cast me into some shadow of mistress.

So he said.

Look, my own divorce took far longer than I expected to finalize. Sometimes it be that way. But things with his kids and logistics got in our way. I pulled back but decided to give it another go. Then he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, just before Christmas. All of our attention turned to his survival.

I was battling my own health issues, but I was back and forth from Atlanta to Birmingham to see him. We spent an inordinate number of nights holed up in a hotel, away from his supposed-to-be-temporary roommate and most other people. Occasionally we would spend a little time with my friends, as his energy allowed. Chemo gave way to surgery gave way to radiation. And when I was having regular dreams of being denied access to him after cancer surgery, he introduced me to his brother and then, albeit unexpectedly, to his parents, at the time of his surgery. I stayed at the hospital and at his parents’ home to help with his post-surgical recovery.

“I’m looking for the right time to tell the kids,” he said.

Two months later, he finally moved into is own space. He’d been delaying, he said, because he wanted to buy rather than to rent. Okay. But he suddenly relented and secured an apartment, telling me the divorce really was finally almost done. We talked of plans for my visiting him, working on grad school homework from his couch while helping him after more upcoming chemo.

And through it all, we had begun to navigate the idea that, when all four of our children were out of high school, we would have the option to move to the same location. He would talk of what we would do when we retired, how we would grow old together.

Except he still hadn’t told his teenage kids that I even existed. He still wasn’t comfortable with my telling my mom that we were dating, his having known her professionally before he ever knew me. And I was continually agitated by his social media, which was still filled with pictures of family nights and date nights with his long-estranged wife and maybe even a wedding picture (including more mutual friends).

All of these things screamed to me that he was still projecting an image of in-tact nuclear family that had been irretrievably broken for years. And I was still not allowed to share pictures of the two of us together, for fear that it would hurt someone unnecessarily or give someone the impression that there was something untoward about our relationship.

Except, there was nothing untoward about our relationship. His marriage had been over for years before we even began. They hadn’t shared more than co-parenting, as far as had been relayed to me. He was insistent that he loved me, that I understood and loved him more than anyone ever had, and that he was working for long-term future for us. For We. Oui.

“Keeping me in the shadows is hurting me,” I told him.

For the first time in almost two years with her, my own therapist expressed concern at his motivations for not moving forward at a more reasonable pace. Yes, so very much was happening at any given time, and his energy reserves cold be easily depleted. But, from my perspective, being faced with significant adversity tends to make people gravitate toward what they love the most.

I fully admit that I had moments of unparalleled utter fucking freak-out about the whole thing. I would be left waiting or rescheduled, because he couldn’t tell the kids or his brother that he already had plans with me. Illness could sideswipe a romantic rendezvous in a matter of moments. And when I asked when it would change, he would tell me he was thinking about how and when to do it.

“I’m looking for the right time.”

It played against all of my insecurities and my greatest fears: making me an object of shame, emotional abandonment, and dismissive ignorance of me. I had been fighting for years to deal with these issues. He knew about all of it—both from me and from my having openly written about the entire process—from the very beginning.

Through it all, I clearly defined my boundaries and defended them. I used my words and said when things were hurting me. I asked directly for change. I tried to avoid ultimatums. For more than a year.

But two months after introducing me to his parents, his children still had no idea that I even existed. He still wasn’t comfortable with telling my mom. I was still prohibited from posting a selfie of us together in case all the people who didn’t know realized we were a couple. I was given the responsibility of the emotional well-being of people I didn’t know and who didn’t even know I existed.

“I need a plan for how and when this changes, or I need the honesty that it isn’t changing,” I insisted. “To keep me living in this limbo is unkind and unloving, and it’s eating me alive.”

I did not demand to meet his kids immediately. I did not demand that he change his Facebook relationship status to include me. I asked that he offer us a path toward starting to blend our worlds—a necessary part of any future we would have together.

And so Bumblebee decided that losing me and losing We was less painful than acknowledging my existence. He chose to continue to hide and to refuse to do the hard work of change that would improve his own life. As I have seen partners do before, he threw up his hands and shrugged and said, “It’s too hard.”

“What the fuck?!?” my therapist said.

I’m not sure I have ever been so shell-shocked by a relationship in my life. It is all counter to everything I believed about him. The confusion from having been held and told days before that he wants every morning with me and then summarily dismissed and ignored is overwhelming. It feels distinctly as if I missed something somewhere. I have replayed every conversation and reread every message a dozen times or more, to the point of making myself sick from the dizzy.

I just don’t get it.

I can psychologize him—I have and likely will do so again. I understand what I believe to be his motivations. I understand his eccentricities and his weaknesses and clearly as I understand his strengths. I have loved him in spite of and because of them. But it is not the path I, or my girlfriends who came to know him quite well, believed he would choose. At all.

Knowing how previous relationships have played out, knowing my reticence and my fear and my strong desire to work through those issues, I was clear at every turn about what I needed and expected and why. He clearly responded that he understood and worked to meet those needs and expectations. Love and respect and care were mutual and reciprocal.

But now I find myself grieving. Breakup grief is different than the grief of death. You’re grieving the loss of the person, but you’re also grieving for yourself—as both the one who has lost and the one who is lost. Your identity with that person, the intertwined being the two of you created, is inextricably just gone.

And it undermines everything I came to trust and believe about myself. What did I miss? What did I do wrong? Was I really so arrogant to believe that I, myself, was making progress in dealing with my bullshit? Am I really just more broken that I realized? Is it impossible for me not to be better, if never fully repaired? Was I simply an object to him, a supplier of the comfort and affection he’d been missing for more than a decade? Was I just a great, gullible fuck? Was he really a coldhearted, calculating liar, capable of fooling me and all of my girlfriends?

Those are some of the questions I grapple with in the dark, in the middle of the night when I am awakened from some fitful dream. Those are the questions I churn throughout the day, as I’m driving or as I’m trying to work. Those are the questions I repeat in my head every time my heart feels like it’s clawing its way out of my chest.

Those are the questions I raged to Queen Frostine when, the day after he made this decision, the gift he’d sent for my birthday arrived in the mail. Because all of this happened two days before my birthday—just like it had two years before when Rango and I broke up.

(And let me tell you, there is no kick to the teeth quite like an unexpected birthday gift in the mail from your unexpectedly-recent ex.)

I don’t know how long this will go on. I can’t even begin to speculate about when I will start to feel human again. I’m currently waiting on a couple of my girls to get into town so that I can feel some love and support while I cry and wallow for a couple of days. I am plodding through work and home responsibilities and schoolwork, feeling like I’m watching everything happen slowly to me, as I move through some thick underwater. I feel dehumanized by his refusal to acknowledge my existence.

I am careful to comfort my internal parts. I am soothed the tiniest bit by knowing that I did everything I could to care for and defend myself. When I made mistakes and missteps, I apologized and did my very best to change. I was as patient with him and his situation as anyone could every be expected to be.

The fact is, I just have to get through it. Logically, the hurt will abate someday. For now, it’s the shadow I still can’t escape.

 

 

I will wait for it. I'm not too late for it.

Absolem used to lament my penchant for hyperanalysis, especially coupled with my impulsivity.

“You don’t think, and then you think, and then you overthink!”

I mean, he’s not wrong. I can be suddenly and passionately reactionary, then take the time to process and ponder, then spend even more time breaking down every movement and choice of words and determining where I could have changed course.

What I’ve learned through a year of therapy using the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is that this is reflective of my parts—either “managers” or “firefighters” trying to protect some “exile” created from trauma—being blended with my Self. Some firefighter swoops in to act quickly, Self determines there likely could’ve been a better way, and some manager dwells on the minutiae for its own future reference.

In theory, it’s not necessarily a bad process to handle action and reflection. It gives those parts a chance to debrief and report back to Self. The problem comes when the parts effectively hijack Self, becoming blended, and the initial action is so reactionary as to be unhealthy.

And that hyperanalysis only ever stops if I am busy and distracted to the point of self-exhaustion.

Sometimes, though, it serves to let me evaluate a situation over time. In both my relationship with DH and later with Rango, our problems became so toxic to the relationship that things seemed insurmountable. But, in each case, I agreed to step back and take the time to move more slowly, to let us both reflect and reassess, to try to come toward the relationship and each other from a different perspective. In some ways, I should’ve broken up with Rango more than a year before I did. But giving us four months of separation, living apart, allowed for the time to try.

For me—hell, for anyone—ending a significant relationship is never easy. Once I’m attached to someone, it can take me a very long time to disentangle. This is part of having an anxious attachment style. So, when something happens that pushes me to feel vulnerable and emotionally injured (usually reminiscent of some past trauma), I can be quick to pull away, with every intention of ending the relationship. When I’ve had time to think about it, I’ll regret the suddenness of the separation, and then I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time in self-analysis, sometimes to the point of extreme self-recrimination.

I’ve spent the last year trying to learn to rewire my thinking, especially when it comes to how I react to emotionally-charged circumstances.

Taking the time to try to reconcile in those previous relationships made the eventual ending less painful. Choosing to end my 19-year marriage was hard as hell, make no mistake, but it was the right decision, in the end. While DH and I inflicted some serious damage on one another, I was eventually able to disengage. As painful as it was, I knew it was time and had no regrets about making the decision when I did. Similarly, taking the time to see if Rango and I could rebuild our relationship was absolutely the right choice, even if the result wasn’t what I’d hoped for. When that ended, I was sad for a time, but I also had zero question about whether it was really time to let go. Rango and Sass were dead, and I had no interest in holding onto that zombie.

Although my reasons for ending my relationship with Bumblebee were valid and healthy, I felt like the air had been sucked out of me. I have never missed someone as much as I missed him. While the reality of long-distance relationships is difficult to manage, there is no question that we love each other deeply. There’s no question that we have potential for a lasting, healthy, loving relationship like I’ve never experienced before. There’s also no question that the distance and the circumstance may be insurmountable.

But I have to try. I have to give this a chance to overcome the odds. Yes, it’s easier for me to move forward if I know there is absolutely no going back. But he also loves me in ways I have never before experienced.

So, the parts and I had a long talk. Could we walk away now, cleanly and comfortably, or did we want more time to see?

Above all else in my life, I do not want regrets. I would rather fail miserably at an opportunity I took than to let an opportunity slip away. And if I have reason to second-guess my decisions, I will.

So, Bumblebee and I have come to the decision to try. More specifically, to wait. He needs time to deal with logistics in his life. I need time to make sure I’m as healthy and well-equipped to handle a relationship as possible. We have agreed to wait for the other to be ready, to keep talking and maintaining connection, but also to remove other expectations and the pressures that come with them.

There is a love that we don’t want to lose. Maybe that still happens, no matter what we do. But there is also the possibility that we are able to weather this storm, together, and beat our own odds.

And I’ve never known anyone so worth the risk.

 

 

What if this storms ends? And I don't see you, as you are now, ever again?

Four-and-a-half months ago, I found myself in a confusing place. I’d just realized the new guy I was head over heels for was dating someone else. I realized the ways in which I used sex to intimate love and exactly what my role was in re-traumatizing myself, constantly exacerbating my fear of emotional abandonment.

I made the decision not to date. Period. Maybe ever. And it was a very difficult thing for a girl who believes so deeply in love to eliminate the possibility of it at all, and to come to some kind of internal detente with that decision.

But then, I met someone. He was someone I’d known tangentially for more than a decade, though we’d never met in person. An unexpected conversation turned into another, and there is a moment (the event horizon, he said) where each of us realized the situation had turned in another direction.

Unexpectedly, and utterly terrified, I fell in love.

I’d spent years, off and on, begging the universe for some relief from my loneliness. Even when I was in relationship, it was always with badly-damaged men who refused to try to be better. Either I’d tire of their inconsistency, or they’d tire of my trying to get them to see how much better their life (and my life with them) would be, if they would just show up. Show up physically sometimes, but mostly I needed them to show up emotionally. Consistently. Reliably.

There were many, many nights on my own, when I would be in tears, prostrate before a god I barely believe in, praying for peace. Yes, I would prefer to be with a partner, because I believe so completely in the beauty and truth of love. But I eventually resigned myself to wanting at least peace in my solo heart, to accept the rest of my life in singledom. I paraded every hurt, in lurid detail, through my mind and steeled myself to not being vulnerable to them again.

But then, he appeared. Bumblebee. Kind, generous, smart, funny. Damaged but speaking to me through song. We meshed so well. He knew all of my shit, all of my fears, understood my ongoing process of trying to rewire myself from the inside out. No one, with the exception of the girls, had every accepted me so fully and completely. So incredibly lovingly.

Of course there was a catch: he was 180 miles away.

I’d just sworn up and down two weeks prior that I could never do a long-distance relationship. My need for physical proximity and regular contact was too great. But he was worth the chance. Initially, we were making it work pretty well. We would visit each other in our respective cities, and we were happy just to be together.

Eventually the logistics—four kids, visitation schedules, family obligations—started to erode our time together. Unavoidable demands on him were preventing us from having consistent connection, and it seemed to only be worsening. I was more anxious about this relationship than I’d been in years. The anxiety could be abated by reliable contact, but his logistics wouldn’t allow for it.

Faced with living indefinitely in a perpetually-anxious state, knowing the damage my response to the insecurity and anxiety could cause, I made the decision to end the relationship.

Nothing about it feels good. Choosing the rock over the hard place simply gives me a perch from which to see a vast, lonely ocean, a place from which to sing my lamentations. It feels like yet another trick of Fate, dangling the gilded promise of happiness, only to snatch it away again, laughing in her delight.

I don’t expect to do this again. There is no more surface of me to scar or fracture without breaking me open irreparably. My fear of emotional abandonment is consistently reinforced, and I have a direct role in choosing the relationships that undergird my insecurities. I do not trust myself to choose wisely.

It was so nice to be loved for a while again. It was nice to be missed when we were apart. It was wonderful to see my worth reflected in someone else’s eyes, far beyond the value of sex. It was wonderful to able to love someone, actively and deliberately, and to have my efforts appreciated.

But I am back in the confusion. I no longer believe it was an inherent flaw in me that made me unworthy of loving care and attention. I do believe I was a young victim of other people’s failings, and that set the course for how I would see every relationship and exchange and emotion in the years to come. Other people’s actions set in motion consequences that played out in me. I, in turn, made my own decisions with their own consequences, and somehow I seem to be so bogged down that progress forward is tiring and difficult and sometimes illusory.

Today, I don’t believe that I will ever really find what I know exists. It is there to be found, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to touch what is perpetually under a veil of tears.

I will stop crying, eventually. I will move through my well-honed List of Shit to Do after a Breakup. I will eventually feel like I can breathe again, and I will be happy again, though I’m not sure that my definition of that will ever be what it once was.

But I hope Bumblebee is able to find the balance he needs. I hope he’s able to establish who he is, within and without other people’s constraints. He is a wonderful man, and I love him very much. I want good things for him.

And I want good things for me.

 

 

A million lights are dancing, and you are a shooting star.

As I wrote about a few weeks, I have been seeing someone new. I won’t wax poetic here; it’s simply too early to exalt him to the status of Blog Fodder, in and of himself. I hadn’t necessarily intended to get into a relationship—though maybe it’s still too early to even call it that—while also trying to work on my own stuff, much of which was highlighted and exacerbated by the ending of my relationship with Rango. But the fact is he presented as an opportunity worth exploring while I was beginning the process of self-reintegration.

Whether coincidental or due to some meaning I have assigned (or even thanks to that fickle bitch Fate), there are things about him that remind me strongly of Bounder. He is not another alcoholic, though he may well be overcoming a history as a dismissive-avoidant. He is not Bounder, however, and it is unfair of me to make direct comparisons. They are two different men, with different histories and stories, but there are moments that are striking, to say the least.

Because of this thing with Finn (so named because he is my huckleberry) and because of the end with Rango and because I sometimes pass him driving on the road between our houses, Bounder has been on my mind a lot. A lot a lot. It makes sense that he would be, but it set me off on a path of re-analysis and overthinking (again). I think I’ve dissected that relationship for the millionth time over the last few weeks, still looking for where exactly I went wrong. Because his shit is his shit—I can’t control how he acts or reacts or fails to act—all I can do is try to figure out what I screwed up. He told me numerous times that it wasn’t me, and I generally believe that, but I always dissect to the point of vivisection, flaying myself to a bloody, psychoanalyzed mess.

I do remember getting a text from him, a couple of days after we’d met. He said he was glad we could take things nice and slow. Except we didn’t. We started intensely, quickly, and that’s exactly how it continued. Within two hours of that text, I was making out with him in the parking lot of his office, a quick drive-by on my way home.

And that is where I failed him. Hurricane Sassafras was coming, no matter what he did. I didn’t really hear him and slow down. It wasn’t terribly caring on my part, no matter how unintentional the push was.

Finn also said he wanted to go slowly, I have tried to honor that. I have tried to dial back my impulses to forge full-steam into his world. There is something there worth exploring, and I don’t want to do it all in hindsight.

Which brings me back to Bounder.

Working within the IFS model, I have become very mindful of my feelings. I don’t just mean my emotions. When I feel something—anger, grief, sadness, longing, affection, attraction, love—I take note of where in my body I am processing the emotion. There is usually a physical locus of that energy. Because my strongest emotions are often tied up with what a subpersonality is processing in a given moment, I feel them in different places, which is effectively where each of those subparts resides. Harley and Quinn and Stephie and each of the others sits in a specific spot and pulls on my center from her point of reference. When I feel a subpart whose name I don’t know (who maybe I didn’t even realize existed) pull at my center, the emotional and physical feelings are often coupled with anxiety.

Because there has been so much thought of Bounder over the last few days and weeks, my anxiety has been really high at times. It has often felt like a pull from the right of my stomach. Sometimes it has been so bad that I would get nauseated and irritable, desperate to make the pain stop.

“What is that she’s feeling?” my therapist asked. “She may just want you to acknowledge her feelings. Can you tell what she wants?”

“She wants relief,” I replied. “She is hurt and angry and confused. She doesn’t understand how anyone could have something so precious as that kind of love in their damn hand and just walk away. It makes no sense, and it’s infuriating.”

This, of course, is wholly indicative of my fear of emotional abandonment. While that’s rooted deeply in my childhood, the feelings of hurt and betrayal and confusion are never more profound than when I think of Bounder. While I’m still angry at Rango for how he handled the boys during our break-up, I have dealt with my feelings toward him, kept what I needed to keep and shed the rest. Same for DH and Rex and others whose names and memories don’t really matter or impact me all that much anymore.

I explained to my therapist that the feelings are seated in this very specific location, that they can be overwhelming at times. And when I am most overwhelmed by something, I tend to dive into it head first, hoping to reach the bottom quickly and resurface cleansed.

But that never seems to happen with him, and I am forever in a loop of self-flagellation.

“Well,” she said, “first of all, she needs to know that you are simply witnessing the trauma again, a memory of it; it’s not actually happening again. You’re not being traumatized again.”

Okay. Just a ghost. Not real. Not happening now.

“And,” she continued, “she doesn’t have to feel that anymore. You don’t have to feel that anymore. That’s a lot of burden to have been carrying around for so long. She can let it go. You can let it go. Let the elements have it—they can take it—they can take a lot more than that. But she doesn’t have to feel that anymore.”

Wait—WHAT?!?

Even I could tell that my facial expression shifted in that moment. I was stunned, utterly baffled by the idea that it was okay not to keep feeling those emotions over and over, effectively retraumatizing myself every time. I have dealt with it repeatedly, and there is no healthy in dragging the futility of it all around, night after night.

And it makes sense. I had stopped feeling similar things for others long ago, in a healthy timeframe and in healthy ways. Why is he so special that I should continue to carry that burden?

In part, I think, it’s because he wouldn’t. Part of what happens during the emotional abandonment is that I’m left to feel whatever with no support, and I’m the only one feeling it. Maybe the other person is feeling something, but it never seems to be anywhere close to what I’m feeling, especially when the other person is a dismissive-avoidant who is so well-versed in compartmentalizing emotions away to protect themselves.

I have often railed against feeling like I was carrying it for both of us, because that was sometimes the only way to prove that the thing had ever happened, with no acknowledgement of grief coming from the other person. I am sure Bounder felt it in the darkest of times, but I know that he never faced me to tell me he was sorry for hurting me. His not acknowledging me and the hurt he created, his ignoring of me when he damn well knew it was the worst possible way to hurt me, made me feel worthless, especially to him. But that flew in the face of his telling me he loved me, of his moments of showing me deep, incredible love, and I could never reconcile the conflict of extremes no matter how much I psychologized him and myself.

But to think, to realize, that I don’t have to do that was foundationally shifting. I could feel the anxiety and the tension to the right of my stomach abate immediately. There was a deep sense of relief. She’s there, and she’s a little antsy about what she’s supposed to do now. If her job was to hold all that baggage, what is she going to do now that still allows her to be of use to the Self?

I had a dream once while Bounder and I were dating, one of those lucid nap dreams. I was standing outside a tall, wide, stone tower, trying to figure out how to get inside. I could hear a knocking from the inside, and I needed to let whomever was in there out. As I looked more, I realized the tower was his face, the details of his mouth and eyes and brows built from each brick. I climbed some scaffolding and began to chip away at this one high, white stone. It was the speck of light in his left eye.

Months later, he told me that I’d been like this force knocking on his walls, over and over and over, until he eventually poked his head out enough to see what was in the light.

I let light back into his darkness, and somehow that wasn’t worth staying for. And it’s not that I wasn’t worth it; it’s that he didn’t see himself as worth me. So convinced that he would hurt me in the end, he made it happen, pushing me unaware into the dark pool so that I felt like I would drown before I could resurface.

But in the same way I did it for him, I must do it for myself. I get to be the disco ball for myself, to reflect light and shine it brilliantly into my own dark corners. Disorienting and distracting at first, yes, but eventually it becomes a beautiful swirl worthy of dancing.

It is odd, a little unsettling, to think of life without the possibility of him. I gave up the possibility of him as a romantic partner long ago. Our life goals are different, and he would never be able to consistently meet my needs. But he was always this driving force of emotion and thought, even when we weren’t together, sometimes in contact and sometimes not. Music, in particular, became a daunting prospect for me, because everything could remind me of him.

And that’s her job now, that’s what she is supposed to do, to dance. She is lightened of her load. And she gets to pick the music she wants to dance to. She’s not trapped by the years-long playlists of Bounder songs. She doesn’t have to be afraid of hearing one of them in the grocery store and bursting into tears. She doesn’t have to listen for him in every new song. She can move freely again, not weighed down by his burden or mine. She can find the path that she lost, can move toward light and laughter and love, because she deserves that.

This wasn’t her fault.

And if we pass him on the road again? I don’t know. I could feel something; I could not. I may well never see him again. I’m not going to dwell on what might happen. Now I have different roads to explore and a different Stephanie to discover.

And there is dancing to be done.

 

 

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High as a pretty star, don't you break my faded heart.

If I believe in nothing else, I believe in serendipity. I believe in those unexpected moments in life that can lead you suddenly in a different direction, that can force you to see what you were too busy looking elsewhere to notice, that can turn you slightly until you notice a new path you hadn’t been privy to consider before.

Fate or fate.

Knowing I would eventually want to date again, to feel connected to something deeper and more poignant than myself, I reactivated my online dating profile. I immediately had to find three-year-old messages from Rango and delete them, to find his own reactivated profile and block it. I wasn’t willing to dwell on what was before. There were a few passing new interests, but mostly it seemed like more of the same again. Sometimes Harley found it a useful vehicle to remind me that I could get hurt again, ever.

But then…. But then.

Days of talk. Constant, funny, respectful talk. Flirt but no innuendo, no offers or requests for late night sexting. Just getting to know one another.

And then… a great first date. Really wonderful date.

And, thus, a serendipitous moment of possibility. Of opportunity.

Yes, possibility and opportunity with this man, but also possibility that I am, just maybe, worth time and effort. Opportunity to not be the same and do the same that I’ve done before, to slow my own roll and allow connection to unfold organically. To discover someone else but also to discover things about myself, to examine my own new ways of looking at the world, whether external or internal.

Consciously, mindfully, I have chosen not to throw myself headlong into someone else. I didn’t drop my baggage suddenly at his feet and dare him to step over it. I didn’t dig deeply into him, demanding to find his damage and steel myself for what might come.

Though I did caution him that a deep Google search for me would reveal this life, of Stephanie Quinn Jackson, the writer who bears witness to the cacophony. It’s a thing, for sure, to have so much of the last seven years laid out for the world to see. Love and joy and heartbreak and fear, the incessant and sometimes brutal self-analysis that is Muchness and Light. He replied that he would rather not search for me. He’d rather learn it all from me directly.

Even if this goes nowhere, even if it ends after a couple of great dates, I have been privy to the serendipity of possibility of future, of opportunity to not be bogged down by the past, sorting and resorting my own baggage over and over in simultaneous delight and dismay.

But I am also fucking terrified. At this moment, there is an unexpected someone with the ability to hurt and disappoint me. Sure, there are other people I care about who could theoretically do the same, but those are people I already love and trust. I made the choice to accept the opportunity to be vulnerable to hurt, believing so deeply that serendipitous moments should not be ignored or taken for granted. I chose to accept the possibility of hurt because it also comes with the possibility of not hurt.

Dating me offers him the same. There is possibility that I will bolt, revolting against fear in reaction to my past. But where I have been plagued by ghosts so many times before, I have come to realize that my ghosts are my own fears, deep inside me, trying to protect me from future hurt. When I let the past fall away and listen carefully, it is variations of my own voice that I hear whispering, cautioning me that hurt is possible and to avoid whatever might feel like an imminent threat.

My insecurities are real, anchored in a very difficult past, and I am still learning how to calm those voices. He, or anyone who may come after him, certainly has his own insecurities. It doesn’t seem possible to be human and not have uncertainties about yourself that can derail you at times.

What I have come to understand is that my partners in previous relationships have blamed me when their insecurities flared. Sometimes in reaction to my shit, and sometimes in reaction to something I was never privy to, they relegated me to the role of villain, of fallen superhero, and made me the patsy for their own emotional shill. They would tell me I was wonderful and that they loved me, while they formulated an exit strategy. They compartmentalized me and rationalized losing what they said they wanted and loved most, rather than face themselves and deal with their own shit.

But what happened before is not what’s happening now. I get to choose what happens next. My future is not necessarily determined by my history. I am not doomed to repeat my past, because I am still, constantly, learning those lessons.

I didn’t stop trying. I didn’t shut down my heart completely and stubbornly refuse to embrace serendipity. I didn’t kowtow to my fears, and I won’t be blamed again for anyone else’s.

I am worth knowing. I am worth talking to and discovering and sharing. I am worth loving.

I’m worth the risk.

 

 

Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire. You'll give in to your desire, when the stranger comes along.

Break-ups can be foundationally shattering. The end of a long-term relationship can be shocking to the core. There is the grief that comes from severing a deep, meaningful connection, of lamenting what has been lost, but there is also a sudden shift in daily routines that now feel hollow and future plans that will never come to fruition.

The day after Rango came to get his stuff from the house, I struggled just to maintain. I woke early, fed the cats, and cried for a while before falling back asleep. At noon, I realized I needed to get up and do my normal Sunday chores. The boys would be home from their dad’s that evening, and they would be expecting clean laundry and food for the week.

Walking through the grocery store, I felt raw. I felt like everyone who passed me in the aisles could see the sadness dripping from my every pore. I was certain that my hard-fought composure would come undone if anyone spoke kindly or smiled at me.

It’s not just that the sadness is a part of the grieving process. The sadness fulfills a purpose.

When I realized the futility of the relationship, I started looking for a new therapist. Therapy had been incredibly helpful through the demise of my marriage to DH. I was fortunate to have found an incredible therapeutic partner to help guide me through a couple of years of divorce and dating and loss. But my insecurities undoubtedly played a role in the tensions and break-up with Rango, and I knew I never want to feel those things again. I never again want to feel so easily broken by another person, especially when my head knows it shouldn’t be possible.

As I did some research online, I came across the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It seemed to be especially effective in treating anxious attachers and rejection sensitivity. The idea is that we are each a Self, which is the true, whole, spiritual center of us. But we also have these discrete subpersonalities with their own intentions and needs and quirks and purpose. Each part has a specific viewpoint, developed from its interpretations of life experiences. Each has its own memories and interprets them according to its unique perspective:

• Managers handle the way we interact with the external world. They try to protect us from hurt, whether from others or from our own memories.
• Exiles are the parts that feel the worst emotions—pain, hurt, shame, fear—usually resulting from childhood trauma. Managers and Firefighters try to exile these parts to prevent their emotions from coming to the surface.
• Firefighters show up when Exiles break free and demand attention. They try to distract us from the pain, often encouraging unhealthy behaviors as coping mechanisms.

The goal of IFS is to allow the Self to access and connect to each subpart, healing them one by one. Thus, the Self leads the other parts in harmony and health. We become a whole, heathy person, rather than an amalgam of these smaller bits that exhaust themselves fighting to maintain a losing battle.

I have long believed that we each are made up of various persona, and we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone….

In an online interview reposted through the band’s Facebook page, Alex Wheeler said the title, Persona Non Grata, referred to all of the unacceptable and unwelcomed parts of everyone—the lurid, the shadowy, the hidden, the broken.

“Each of us has a persona, all the time,” he said. “I’m one persona with the band, someone a little different with my fans, someone else entirely with my wife and daughter. Sometimes that persona is ‘good’ and sometimes it’s ‘bad’. I spent a lot of time exploring the bad sides of normal, everyday people, you know? Not serial killers or rapists or anything. I wanted to look at the things regular people like to hide from the people they know and, most especially, from themselves.”

                                                                                                                                Persona Non Grata (2012)

I have, at times, named some of my subpersonalities, though I wasn’t thinking of them within the context of IFS.

• Cissie is the sweet, blond girl who never seemed to be pleasing to her parents, no matter how hard she tried. She never felt like she was enough. She was also molested for years, and she spent a lot of her time agitated and afraid. She is an Exile.
• Quinn is the rebellious teen who learned to trade sex and secrets for affection, often in an attempt to protect Cissie. She has her own anger and hurt, but she will bear it all to protect that little girl. She is a Firefighter.
• Stephie is a loud ball of angry. She will erupt and tantrum and demand her way when she feels she is being ignored. She is potentially a special subpersonality called a Tormentor. (She secretly wears that like a badge of honor.)
• Sassafras Bombalurina O’Malley is the one who reminds me to be shiny and sparkly and to tell the world to go fuck itself if it doesn’t like it. She is an eccentric, outrageous Manager who knows how to call on the Firefighters to back her up.
• Wonder Woman is the Amazonian princess who does it all, because she has to. She handles the day-to-day business of life, and she is remarkable. She is strong and capable, smart and intuitive, and she can predict everyone else’s needs and desires before they can. She is a Manager.
• Stephanie Quinn Jackson is the writer who sees it all, who arranges it and espouses the shared perspective of the others, who bears witness to it all and gives them a voice when it seems that no one else will listen. She is a Manager.

There are others, nameless but all with some variation of my face. Each has its own role and purpose in getting Stephanie through her life. Not to be confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I am not claiming to have multiple, distinct personalities. These are simply facets of my personality, and each strives in its own way to help me be secure and healthy and safe—even when its influence result in dysfunction.

The sadness is tied up with the hurt, and it’s not just from this break-up. This is hurt that hasn’t healed in 40 years. This is sadness that helps me to keep others at bay, or to curl up in bed and sleep when I should be doing productive things, so that I don’t have to feel the hurt. So I don’t have to delve back into every haunting memory and question again why I was both too little and too much. Why I wasn’t worth careful, healthy love.

None of these parts can or should ever be exorcised. Each is valuable and necessary, both as its own part and as a part of the larger whole. But the hurt can be healed enough so that it doesn’t make more hurt, create more sadness, because somewhere in there is joy and beauty. Somewhere in there is a sad and lost little girl who desperately wants to be loved.

I have to find her and help her.

We have to find her together.

 

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Muchness and Light - But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

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I don't want to be tied to anyone's strings. I'm carefully trying to steer clear of those things.

I am a passionate person. I tend to throw myself fully into whatever I do, doing it loudly and brashly and intensely—though I am perfectly capable of tempering that passion when needed.

I’m also verbose. If you’ve read Muchness and Light over the last seven years, you know I rarely spin up any idea in less than 1,000 words. Text messages and emails are almost as wordy, even if they’re just to myself.

Even while I’ve been inactive in this forum, I have tended to continue to journal, whether in a Word doc or an email that sits forever in my Draft box or in a note on my phone. Bounder commented once that he was amazed at how much I could get out through a tiny phone keypad. Although initially interested in my writing, and in being the recipient of effusive love letters, Rango eventually told me to stop sending him walls of texts that he’d lost interest in reading.

Over the last few days, I looked back at many of those messages. What I saw was almost two years of trying to convince him to love me. That’s not to say he didn’t feel the affection. I’m certain that he did. But I wanted his actions to match his words, to behave in loving ways toward me (and the boys) as often as he told me he loved me. It wasn’t just that I wanted reciprocity of affection—I needed to feel loved to feel secure in our relationship.

What I also saw in those messages was a slow spiral into severe insecurity. I didn’t regularly and consistently feel love from him, and I questioned the distance he was putting between us. Like so many others I have known and loved, he compartmentalized his feelings into these tiny boxes that he used to build a wall between us. As it got harder and harder to get reassurance from him, sometimes to get response at all, I inferred a great deal to fill in the empty space. Eventually I adopted what I interpreted as his skewed perception of me as my own, and I became unbearably self-critical, lobbing ugly accusations of flaws and unlovability at myself.

Last night, as I was journaling again, I got myself type the words, “He wouldn’t have hurt me, if I hadn’t made him so angry.”

There was no physical abuse, ever. But for me, the systematic elimination of my passion was just as devastating. I reread months and months of my begging him to engage me, of telling him that I couldn’t take much more of his ignorance. I saw him blame me for being too much and causing him to withdraw.

His withdrawing would stop, the distance would shrink, if only I’d give him space and time to allow it to happen. Every time I changed my own behaviors and approaches to match what he led me to believe he wanted, he would move the finish line and leave me just as far away from him as I had been just weeks or days or hours before. Eventually I learned to stop having expectations of him, because expectations are just regrets waiting to happen. Eventually I learned to suppress my own desires and needs—until my passionate nature would erupt in anger at having felt ignored for far too long. My anger would, of course, drive him further away.

“Baby, why you make me wanna hit you?” Queen Frostine commented dryly.

While I have been effectively starved for intimacy, I am also incredibly fearful of it now. Certainly, it hasn’t even been a month since we broke up, and I’m not ready to meet anyone new. I’m still not quite ready to entertain the thought that it might one day happen. The idea of getting over someone by getting under someone else is repulsive to me right now. As I explained to a friend today, the thought of anyone touching me make me physically ill.

But I long for affection. I long to be touched carefully, to feel my own warmth reflected back from the skin of someone who chooses to share in intimate moments with me. I miss being seen, being regarded as an interesting woman. I miss being valued as a woman in any way.

At the same time, I don’t believe I am an interesting woman. If I were, surely Rango would’ve stayed interested. He told me time and again that he wouldn’t have been here if he didn’t want to be. But wouldn’t he have chosen to engage me, if he’d really wanted to? He did other things he wanted to do. So, if he didn’t choose me, there must be something wrong with me. And if there’s one thing wrong, then everything is wrong. If I have no value to him, then I must have no value to anyone else.

I understand the logical fallacy. I get that this thinking is maladaptive and self-defeating, if not self-destructive. If I ever expressed these thoughts to him, he would tell me I was wrong, that none of it was true, but he would never offer reassurance. He might say it’s not true, but he would continue to behave in the same ways that contributed to my having arrived at the conclusion that I am fat, ugly, stupid, worthless, etc. And so my insecurities systematically buried my own passion, compartmentalizing it away so that it was less likely to hurt me.

He told me a few times that he didn’t understand why I needed him, or anyone else, to contribute to my own satisfaction. In his mind, I should be able to be fully independent, especially emotionally. In the end, I believe he saw me as weak because I needed him.

But I believe that love is shared. I believe partners in healthy relationships care for one another. They do the things logistically and emotionally that support the other. They work to create and maintain intimacy that is meaningful to each and to the whole.

I believe love should be greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to believe that there are others who believe the same, who want to live and love passionately for their whole lives, not just for the initial stages of a relationship. I want to believe there are people who care about others more than they care about themselves. And I want to believe there is someone who could both allow me to care about them in such a way and do the same for me in return.

But I don’t. Not really. I want to. I want to still be the woman who had faith in love above all else. I want to still be a believer. I’m just not. Not because I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that woman, but because I have become so accustomed to being shown those beliefs were delusional that I don’t trust them anymore. I can’t. The possibility of hurt is far too great.

Even if I never again allow anyone close enough to hurt me, there is still the damage I have done to myself. There is still my own culpability in having allowed him to hurt me, to have given him the proximity and knowledge-as-weapon to be able to do it.

Maybe in the end it’s not just that I don’t trust others. I don’t trust myself. I adopted those skewed perceptions, and I’m no good to anyone until I can unravel that mess of barbed wire. But I am truly afraid I will weave into some kind of armor to keep others at a distance—including myself.

 

 

But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Talking to Queen Frostine one morning late last week (as I do almost every week day, on my way to work), I relayed a conversation I’d had with Fluffernutter the day before. I told her how I hadn’t cried about the break-up with Rango since the first days. I was feeling more centered and more at peace with everything, if sad and resigned at times.

“You’re handling this break-up so much better,” she agreed. “I’m really proud of you.”

I told Pandy that, again, I felt like I was reliving events of five years prior, ending my relationship. The similarities were eerie at times. Certainly, I am prone to attract avoidant attachers, usually dismissives, and Rango was no exception. But there hadn’t been the self-recrimination and second-guessing that I’d experienced before. I had avoided the prolonged bouts of melancholy that followed in the wake of Bounder. I chalked it up to having done much of my work in those five years, coming to terms with myself. I’d also had a year or more to live preemptively through the grief of losing Rango.

But he came on Saturday to get his belongings. I’d packed everything neatly, wrapping his glasses in paper and putting a figurine we’d gotten him for Christmas back in its Styrofoam sarcophagus. Some of the boxes were labeled, and I’d stacked them neatly in the carport, away from the edge where the rains of Hurricane Irma might blow onto them.

I heard his car drive up, and I was okay initially. But when I glanced out the kitchen window, peeking from a distance through a space in the curtains, I saw him. There was the man I loved, from whom I’d been separated physically for nearly a month.

I lost my shit.

I immediately hurried back to the bedroom, far enough away that I wouldn’t have to hear him load his boxes and talk to the friend who’d come with him to help. I messaged the Castration Committee that I was sobbing uncontrollably, that it must be Snoturday.

My girls were sweet and messaged with me constantly throughout the afternoon. They reminded me of all the ways in which they see me as wonderful, as well as all the ways in which they see him as an ass. 

But for a moment, none of that mattered. I wanted nothing more than to fling open the front door and run to him, to feel his arms around me and his breath in my hair. I had the fleeting argument with myself over whether I could do it, trying to convince my anger that its sister, aching, would be relieved if only I could hold him for a moment.

It was the bargaining stage of grief, in the Kubler Ross and Kessler model.

I’d avoided it until that moment, at least since I’d officially called it quits. In practice, I’d been bargaining with him for months, trying to abate my grief at what I saw coming. I’d vacillated between denial and anger and that negotiating, trying desperately to convince him to meet me on some middle ground, to love me and to let me love him back.

The last of a 24-hour-long fight over email ensued, plus a final phone call from him asking about where something was (packed neatly just as I’d said in email). Hearing his voice after hours of crying was a sucker punch to the gut. I shouldn’t have taken the call. Not being able to tell him that I love him made me want to vomit.

Pandy suggested this morning that I find my anger again. I don’t want to be angry. That takes too much energy to maintain. I understand her point, though. If I can feel not so sentimental about him, then it will hurt less.

But it’s going to hurt as long as it hurts. For me to feel nothing after a month, in the aftermath of a three-year relationship, would be unhealthy in its own way. I never wanted this break-up. I wanted to fulfill those promises of the rest our lives. It will take time to find peace in the acceptance of what we lost.

For years, I had a sign in my bedroom that says Forever And Always And No Matter What. I hung it on the wall across from the bed when DH and I were married. He took it down in those last months, but I put it back when he left. It was, and is, an important vow exchanged regularly between me and my sons.

We took it down again last summer to paint the bedroom. Rango never got around the hanging it again. I did it this week, while I was home with the boys during Irma. It’s the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.

But Rango had also  bought a sister sign, in the same style, that said HAPPILY EVER AFTER. He’d intended to hang it with the other one, just for us. It never made it to the wall.

I put it in the pile with his boxes. He left it to the side, and for two more days I will see it sticking out of the trash can until the garbage man comes to take it away.

I kept lots of reminders of him. I kept the blue canary nightlight and the book end he bought me for my first birthday with him. I kept the charms for my bracelet that he bought with the boys. I kept the sound machine he bought me for Mother’s Day, to soothe me with rain sounds when I can’t sleep.

But I could not keep the things that would hurt in the coming weeks and months. I couldn’t keep the metal Rango he also bought me for Mother’s Day. I couldn’t keep the house key he returned yesterday.

Those things are all packed away in a box I bought especially for him. In the back corner of my closet, where I don’t have to see it every day, my life with Rango sits in the dark. If I were to get it out and go through it, I’m sure I’d cry.

But I can do that on my own right now. I don’t need his box.