lycanthropia

[Warning: yet another breakup post, even though I wanted to write about something else. But apparently I have bits still lodged in me that I need to cough up out of my system, shrapnel or phlegm still working loose—]

So I resist the temptation for days but finally break down, awash in premenstrual hormones and—voluptuous, glowing with concupiscence, welling over with affection and desire—text him the single word, “Love.” I sigh at myself but conclude this is harmless enough. It could be worse, anyway—if I were in my twenties I’d be showing up unannounced at his house in skimpy outfits, or calling him nineteen times daily, or god knows what else. When I obsess, I don’t do it by halves. When I love someone, I love them in that kind of frightening totality that often understandably alarms them.

The next day he sends me a brittle email in which he rather condescendingly decides that (paraphrase) “perhaps we can now be in communication without causing any harm.”

But he has misunderstood me. I don’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to send him love, which I did. And then I fell into a tempest of menstruating and weeping and impotent rage.

And frankly lists are the only way I can explain it anymore, tell anything how it is, because it’s this AND this AND this AND that AND that AND this, all those ands jostling against one another and colors blurring where objects touch each other and the swirl of it deplaning and debriding and degloving and decomposing in mid-sentence and moving on to the next, the next, the next, the next. I think for no good reason of my pink lava lamp, lumpy inside with coruscating molten emotion. I despise him AND I miss him hourly; I am disgusted with myself for still loving him AND I can’t touch myself without bursting into tears; I am enraged by his uncaring formal brittle prissy email, which reads as if composed by his robot butler, AND I wake up at three in the morning reaching for him. It’s been nearly a year. I haven’t even seen him since last August. Just how many more seasons of 30 Rock am I going to have to watch before I get over this guy? Who’s just a guy, just a forty-something guy with dumb sneakers and bad posture? Just when am I going to be done with this stupid fucking breakup already? I’m sick of it, sick of him, sick of myself. I am sickened and fuming and shaking and defeated that I am still so painfully in love with someone who clearly cares so little for me.

He thinks it would be “grounding” to talk. That it would be “helpful somehow.” My translation: “You will accept that we are better as friends and you will quit being sad and in love, and then I won’t have to feel guilty for first betraying you and then completely abandoning you.” No. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t need another friend, I have friends, and the friends I have are amazing. Be friends! the very idea is insulting. The way he addresses me, using my full name, is insulting. All along he’s kept saying this stuff, like we should spend time together because it will normalize the situation and help us accept it and and and and and. And there is nothing normal about this situation and anyway I don’t want to accept it, so fuck that noise.

I go to bed menstrual and tearful, wake at 5 a.m. in pain and the usual dramatic quantities of blood, and, half-asleep, email Exurbia Community College to say I will not appear on the 9 a.m. panel about feminism, which has a title like Why I’m Not Afraid of the F-Word. I drink cold tap water out of the bathroom sink, swallow three ibuprofen and go back to bed, wake at nearly noon and read his email, eat a handful of almonds and one of blueberries, seething but not even knowing it. Drive to teach, crack jokes with my students and push them as hard as I can for an hour and a half, drive home, eat leftovers, still don’t know I’m angry until finally I talk to my best friend and suddenly am yelling into the phone, to my surprise.

Me: Why am I the one left holding the bag? Why does he get a free pass out of this?
S: You can’t know that—you don’t know what’s going on with him.
Me: But why am I the one who can’t stand the idea of being friends? Why am I the one writing all the poems? Why am I the one reaching for him in my sleep at 3 a.m.?
S: Because he’s probably playing poker at 3 a.m. He’s an addict. He’s doing what he does.
Me: Then why do I still love him?
S: Because you do.
Me [yelling now]: I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF IT.
S: Yes, you are.
Me [yelling and crying]: BUT I STILL LOVE HIM.
S: Yes, you do.

Then I went to therapy where I repeated this messy stichomythia, Lauren making me FEEL MY FEELINGS and all kinds of crazy outrageous UNSEEMLY shit like that. I demonstrated the waking-at-three-a.m.-wrapping-my-arms-around-air maneuver, laughing, and she told me that made her feel really sad. Then I started to cry. We’re like that.

The thing I am grateful for, through all this, is that it can be both/and instead of either/or. I miss him and think of him constantly, AND I am able to go to Giuseppe’s with Beth and have amazing gluten-free fettuccini al salmone with asparagus tips and that gorgeous soft house Chardonnay of theirs, which is like a pale golden Vermeer-colored light reaching down into my soul and illuminating the dark corners. I reach for him in my sleep and wake myself up grabbing air, AND I turn over and pet the cat, keeping her eternal vigilant post at the window, guarding us from hobgoblins all night long, the breeze from the window ruffling her hair, and she mrrrtles a little at my touch but doesn’t turn her eyes away from her watch.

The catalogue, in short, it is saving me. Fiery longing can coexist, and quite companionably it turns out, next to curiosity, interest in frozen cherry and almond milk smoothies, and the ability to mail poems to literary magazines, to read submissions for our literary magazine, to comment on papers, to read Chaucer and Whitman, to play Scrabble, to sit in the grass with the cat, or curl up with her under the yellow quilt, to watch Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr and to worry about my hair (the break-up induced blonde highlights are growing out, and I can’t decide if I should color them back to brunette).

As long as I accept my fundamental shallowness and my insistence on having chocolate with breakfast, I should be fine.

Finally, for your entertainment or maybe mine, an email to my beloved BFF, who’s a Zen priest and therefore knows the story to which I’m referring:

I finally figured out, 24 hours later, why I’m so irritated by his wooden email. It reminds me of that story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones where an old lady has been supporting a monk for all these years and she wants to test his Zen, so she sends him the young lady “rich in desire”? And he says something pompous and frigid and condescending and turns down the young lady? And the old lady BURNS HIS STUPID MONK-HUT DOWN HAHAHAHA because he was such a self-righteous ice cube.

That’s why this email chaps me so. Because after ALL THESE YEARS does he not know me but at all, that he’s all using the passive voice and being formal and standoffish and prudish and I TEXTED HIM THE WORD LOVE and his is not an appropriate response to love. And yes, as the Zen people say, the practice of a lifetime is the appropriate response.

But, okay, I will level with you, and then I swear this will be the end of this ridiculous post—it’s spring break, this next week is spring break, and last year we went to Tucson and Madera Canyon and we fought the first day (a bad fight, I had to ask him to let me out of the car and walked for a few minutes alone, looking up at the moon and asking her for strength as tears rolled down my face and he followed me in the car), but after that we actually had a wonderful time, intimate and close, and it’s all too easy for me to romanticize it, the hummingbirds at our window every morning, the dinners we made in the cabin’s tiny kitchen, the hikes walking hand in hand.

And, that was a year ago and this year he’s going to Texas and New Mexico alone, and that’s just how it is. So I’ve got to plan as many nice things for myself this week as possible, as many ANDs as I can fit in. Yoga four days this week, that’s without doubt. Maybe a Scrabble evening with friends, definitely working on new poems with my silly but fun new marker/ posterboard system, hanging out with Alison who’s here with her family from New Mexico, watching season five of The Wire, keeping myself busy and happy and distracted even as the ringing AND of loss and longing still sounds down in the marrow of my bones.

[Best Marlo Stanfield quotation from season four: "You want it to be one way...but it's the other way." Yeah. You're not kidding.]

in which the abandoned row houses are also characters