emptying my pockets
[Warning: Maudlin. Menstrual. Self-indulgent. Boring. Incoherent. 100 percent lycanthropic. Yep, that should about cover it. Caveat lector.]
My beautiful, handy dad has been building a greenhouse for the last three years. Yesterday morning was warm and dully sunny, so he invited me out to watch him work on it. He upturned a five-gallon metal drum and thoughtfully placed a beat-up old cushion on it, so I would have a seat. I was groggy from muscle relaxants and still in pain. I watched him saw boards and screw them into place, and offered playful suggestions so he could grumble responses (“You missed a screw there!” “Everyone’s a critic”).
When he was finished with the row of boards, he stood up (with difficulty) (though he’s damn limber for a man of seventy) and turned to me suddenly, smiling. “Do you want to see my rocks?” And he pulled a couple out of his pocket. “When I started carrying them, they were just ordinary rocks, they weren’t pretty at all. But now look at them—they’re so shiny! My pocket is a rock polisher.” One diamond-shaped brown rock, glittering in the light.
My mom overheard this last part as we were walking back toward the house and pulled out her own rock. “This is mine. It’s not shiny yet but it will be. It reminds me of the cat.” (She has an adored black cat with a mind of her own who seldom consents to come into the house and be fed or petted.)
And I had my mouth half open, to say, “P. always has rocks in his pockets, and they’re shiny too,”—the instinctive brag, the way I’ve fought it for a year and a half now, the urge always to drag him into conversation, carting him around like the Log Lady with her tree branch, wanting to quote him, relate one of his stories, to friends, to strangers, even to students. Always wanting to repeat, glowingly, some goddamn conversational gem of his. And trying to train myself out of it, because it’s creepy and Miss Havishamy, and who wants to know what the hell he used to say/do/think?
But there they were, practically in my hands. The contents of his pockets, spread out on our bed when he’d shower. A half dozen stones. One lepidolite I’d given him. I’m sure he’s flung it into some body of water by now, probably Tempe Town Lake. A little silver baseball-glove charm from a student. Some seed pod or another. Little magic things, like the pointy collection on the dashboard of his Honda. Vertabrae. Cactus spine clusters. Dozens of rocks. Rusty metal horseshoes, or lost cowboys’ spurs. I’d clean it off every few months because if he rounded a corner sharply or we hit a bump, the whole collection had a tendency to slide off into my lap; also it made it hard for me to put my feet up on the dash, the way I loved to do as his passenger, to sun my legs and be more comfortable as we talked. As we talked and talked and talked, there was never enough time for talking.
Why didn’t I leave his magic collection there? Why did I clean it off? Partly also because whenever we came through Mexican customs the border guards would be really suspicious, and rightly so—were we carrying out any botanical matter, were we importing things that were supposed to stay put. We got in big trouble one year for my coral collection, as I recall.
But I shouldn’t have touched his magic. Maybe if I had left it alone, he’d still be with me.
So there I am exclaiming politely over my parents’ pocket-rocks, of which they are for some reason so innocently proud, and I carry nothing in my pockets, I don’t like to be weighed down, and my ex-lover carried everything in his pockets. When I met him, he couldn’t open a bank account, due to the usual financial disasters of late alcoholism, so he carried all his cash on his person, often thousands of dollars, rolled up in his jeans pockets. I used to tease him, say he was a mobster, would he be my sugar daddy.
Those black jeans. A white square worn into the back pocket where the cigarette pack was, even after he stopped smoking.
So, let’s see now. Let’s just try to figure out why I’m sitting here in Houston, Texas, on 26 November 2011 crying, when the last time we were together was 26 May 2010 in Tempe, Arizona. Let’s just try to get real clear about this. About why I’m crying on a Saturday afternoon in another state just because some man I once knew used to walk around the world with some goddamned rocks in his pockets.
•
October 2009
He was in the back yard, doing cactus stuff. I called to him through the bedroom window.
“I’m doing laundry, do you want me to wash your jeans?”
“No. Well—yes! If it’s not too much trouble.”
I held them up. “Already got ‘em.”
Took everything out of the pockets, arranged it carefully on the quilt, the way he would.
Wallet fat with receipts. Sighing internally, pulling them all out to go put in the office.
Always looking at things I shouldn’t look at. Always messing with stuff. Ever since I was a kid, getting in trouble for being nosy.
Him, later that day, shouting angrily: “I have no privacy! I have no privacy in this relationship!”
Him, a few minutes later, crestfallen: “If that’s the kind of privacy I need, I shouldn’t be in a relationship at all.”
Me: saying nothing. What is there to say? He’s saying it all by himself, over there. He’s doing everything all by himself. It’s not participatory. It’s actually completely private, his personal whirling dervish of decision-making, action, reaction, rage, unmet need, lying, silence, silence. When someone tells you nothing, there’s nothing you can do about that.
•
26 May 2010, around 3 am
“I’m not going anywhere, I’m right here, I’m right here, love, I’m not going anywhere.”
•
27 May 2010, around 9 am
[a note:] “Thank you, I love you, thank you, I love you, thank you, thank you. Love, P.”
•
June 2010
[a voicemail:] You know what, I have no interest in doing any of the things you suggested. None of them. No more therapy. No more discussions. I think you are controlling, and manipulative, and you want to dictate every aspect of my life. You are SEXUALLY CONTROLLING. You will not let me be myself. And—and actually, you know what? Just NO. Just NO to fucking everything. All of it. I’m sick of there always having to be something WRONG with me. There just has to be NOTHING WRONG WITH ME, for once in my life, there is nothing wrong with me! So, NO! Just forget it! Forget the whole thing. GAME OVER. I just want my FUCKING CAR BACK! [hangs up]
•
August 2011
We are in a coffee shop where I have spent probably a hundred hours during the school year, grading papers and splitting orders of quiche with my best girlfriends. I’ve read my poetry here to a bewildered audience and have drunk gallons of matcha latte. I haven’t seen him in a year and he looks edibly, radiantly beautiful and I am cursing myself for that but I don’t know what to do about it, it just is. I struggle to accept it, sit uneasily, listen.
[I screw up everything and I screwed up receiving amends. I didn't know that I was supposed to let him have it. I didn't know that I was supposed to go to town on him as he admitted all the things he wouldn't admit before. Instead I was sheepishly grateful and I felt sorry for him, FELT SORRY FOR HIM, instead of telling him what an unvarnished motherfucker he'd been.]
As part of his self-justifying amends, he makes one long impassioned lyrical speech in particular, that moves him, actually, to tears. It is along the lines of:
I never really knew before what a real relationship was, so even though I committed to be in one, I wasn’t. I wasn’t really in it. Now I can see what that kind of relationship would really take—that kind of courage, honesty, commitment, just showing up day after day, being present, staying real, telling the truth no matter how scary it is, that kind of integrity—and I just don’t have it yet. Maybe I never will. But you deserve no less than that.
The speech goes on for a long time, I just can’t reproduce it—maybe as long as a full five minutes, and I listen numbly, listening is all I ever do, sometimes it seems he talks enough for the both of us and I am stolidly numbly listening, schooling myself not to react, I don’t know why, because I am so afraid of being a messy railing woman, was trained so early, by my family and my very first boyfriend, not to act like a crazy woman, “now let’s have none of your theatrics,” “you are sick,” etc., so that now I am generally numb and hollow during these encounters and I just listen to the speeches being made. And in the back of my head very smally, I am thinking, and will remember later:
But you seem able to describe it pretty well. Seems like you know EXACTLY what it would take, actually. Seems like you actually DID it, for the first four years we were together. Seems like now you’re just too lazy to try to do it anymore. Seems like you just want to fuck new women and so you’ve turned me into some big bad wifey who won’t let you. Seems like you just actually don’t really care about me as a person at all. And now, conveniently, you have this water-tight coherent story: you just don’t have it in you! Are unable to commit! Phew, explains everything, off the hook. Don’t have to behave with integrity after all. I’m too immature, I’m incapable of commitment! Thus, thank God, I get to leave this partnership, because it’s not fun anymore, and no way do I want to do ANY of the work to see if I can try something different for once in my life and hang in there, stay with this woman I love. So I get to scamper off again and be free, free! and not have to change my pattern at all, BUT I get to tell myself I’m doing something different! because now I have all this fancy shiny new spiritual insight into why I cut and run as soon as it gets challenging. I’ll miss her, of course, but it’s not that bad. It’s worth it, not to have to try to love her on a daily basis. Not to have to show up as my real self and have her see me.
•
25 November 2011
Standing on the steps of my parents’ farmhouse, all of it piling into me, pouring itself into this concentrated dark-matter lump in my throat making it impossible for me to speak.
He had magic in his pockets, he was Hermes and the Fool, the coyote and the Hermit, and I was always going through his pockets, I was always rearranging him, it was my fault, I wanted too much, I got too close, I should have known, I should have seen, he was never the marrying kind, drummers never are, no matter what he said, no matter how many plans he made with me and how lifelong they seemed, I should have heard the sadness in his voice when he pulled me close and said no one but you, then, for the rest of my life—I shouldn’t have meddled with his bones and sticks and rocks and talismans, I shouldn’t have looked in his wallet, I should have let him be, I should have given the bull a wild wide pasture to roam in, I should have, I should have, he should have, he should have, he should have stayed with me, he should have realized he would never find anyone like me, he should realize that every time he drives around the Arizona or Mexico desert and misses me with physical pain that’s because we’re actually supposed to be together, he should realize that the reason the grief isn’t lessening is because it’s for something real, not for something he played at or invented or did just to make me happy, he should be able to see that we were actually partnered and in my whole life that hasn’t ever happened, not even in my marriage, and probably never for him, but he’s not going to, he’s going to rationalize it and rewrite it and control it and manage it the way he manages everything that’s not him, that’s outside of him and scares him, he’s going to tell himself that it’s just “the past,” just “heart-soreness” just “memories from the past” that are already dissipating, they are dispersing, all you have to do is label feelings for them to start to diminish, so they are “sentiment” or “nostalgia” and then there they go, there they go, and what I wish is they would just recede far enough for him to quit moping and just start fucking someone new on a regular basis, which is what he always wanted anyway, so he will stop writing about driving around the desert fucking missing us. Because as long as that goes on, some stupid, stupid piece of my tiny little lizard brain is going to keep thinking: maybe at some point he’ll be sitting in his filthy white Honda on a dirt road somewhere, black jeans ripped by barbed wire, pockets full of rocks and cactus seeds, and maybe it’ll finally fucking dawn on him: Oh my God, I don’t have to miss her like this. I can spend my life with her, which is what I was doing before I kicked her to the curb.
But he’s not going to realize that, and he’s going to keep writing mournfully about “memories from the past” and this is just one more way in which he talks and talks and talks and I just have to listen and can’t do anything, can’t say anything, can’t show him anything, because he already has all the information and he just chooses to do something different with it.
My brain works like this: Miss someone? Be with them! His brain works like this: Miss someone? Drive around the desert feeling sorry for yourself and reifying all the fancy complicated justification for why you just can’t be with them even though you actually could.
•
26 November 2011, around 1 pm
It’s pouring down rain. Pyewacket comes in yelling with her hair plastered down, I towel her off and she runs back to the door and scratches at it to go out again. I’m groggy, having just slept 13 hours, but the muscle relaxants seem to have done their job; I can move and breathe without pain. Long dreams about trying to buy items in a completely dark store, with little buttons you could press to turn on a tiny light, momentarily, so you could see just the one small item you were wanting to look at.
It’s how it is. It’s just how it is. He’s gone and he’s not coming back and I’m 42 and I won’t meet anyone else, and if I did I wouldn’t be able to move in with them or plan a life with them, that part of me is just toasted now, torched, burnt out like a socket. I walk around the world with my face on tight and my body leaden with this acceptance, filled with it like a burlap sack full of wet sand. I didn’t know this was what being grown-up meant. It means living with the unbearable. It means picking it up every morning, where it’s been all night long waiting for you on the nightstand, like a wristwatch or wedding band, picking it up and putting it on again. Binding it tightly to you, the weight of it that doesn’t go anywhere and nothing shifts. Maybe he gets peace in the desert, peace from his self-chosen misery. I haven’t found any anywhere. Not with another man, not with friends, not with running, not with writing. These are good distractions and when I turn from them, there it is again, not going anywhere, wet and soggy and heavy, like the dead baby.
My former Zen teacher told a story about a female monkey she met in Thailand, and this monkey was still carrying around her dead, rotting monkey baby. She would not let go of it. And my teacher wrote that she met her eyes, and the sadness there was unbearable.
I tell my friends who are mad at themselves for hanging on, I tell them something another Zen teacher once told me: You’ll do it till you’re done. So at some point I will stop putting on this fucking grief every morning with my clothing, right?
At some point, surely. Faulkner spinsters are just literary, just fictional? I don’t want to die with this still all over me, though it mostly seems I very well may. I have tasks ahead—nursing my parents through their illnesses and deaths, teaching students, helping friends. I don’t want to have to do those while dragging a dead baby around behind me. I don’t want to have to keep reading anymore about “memories from the past” which means me, I have now been etiolated into a mere abstraction which will soon dry up and blow away and leave only wistful poignant sweetness, making room for the new woman because how this time he will be honest and real and show up, because now he is grown up and a newer better more honest person, I couldn’t do it with the old one but I can do it with the new one, yeah coach just put me in, this time I am willing, this time I won’t lie, anyway not until about three or four years in at which point I will repeat the entire cycle from the beginning, including the moment where I gain fabulous new spiritual wisdom which makes the folly of the past crystal-clear, and something to move away from as rapidly as possible.
I don’t want to live with this. I never wanted to, not any of it.
But if I have to, I will.
now you ask me just to leave you
to go out on my own
and get what I need to
you want me to find what I’ve already had
somebody said they saw me
swinging the world by the tail
bouncing over the white clouds
killing the blues
