lycanthropia

When I don’t write and then I try to write again, it’s like the water’s been turned off at the main, and the rust has settled at the bottom of the hot water heater, and for a long while after you turn on the tap the water comes out muddied and with jolts and judderings of air that rattle the plumbing—

I write tonight quite frightened, of what I cannot tell you, it’s too embarrassing. Only that I have been positioned for the last hour with my back pressed against solid things—the wall, the mattress,—needing something against my back, a position which comforted me as a very young child, a girl, nothing could sneak up on me, nothing could hurt or surprise me. Often I would also shut my eyes tightly and above all shove my fingers into my ears as hard as I could, so I would not hear the sounds, only the roaring of my own blood.

This will be all rust and air bubbles for a long time, I fear.

I am finally stable again on Zyprexa Zydis, but I am also eating again, a great deal, and I suppose I must reconcile myself to this new weight and shape; but I am cranky about it. Beggars cannot be choosers, we are told. So I know I’m lucky not to be crazy and just to be fat, but it does seem like insult added to injury.

Still my friend B. and I persist with our Couch-to-5K running program (#c25K for the Twitter-pated), and we start Week 4 on Monday. I like the running, to my surprise, though I am much slower than when I last ran, in my early 30s. I feel taller after we’ve run for half an hour (well, intervals of walking and running).

The cat got her summer fur-shave and is velvety and adorable, scampering around all proudly. You can see it on her face: “I’m a fancy cat!”

Yesterday she climbed on the neighbor’s roof and couldn’t get down, so I had to break into their backyard and stand on a patio chair and haul her down, and she panicked at the last minute as they do, scrabbling for purchase on my face, so I have a pink claw-mark down my forehead and across the bridge of my nose, like Omar Little from The Wire but much less fetching. But the little cat had been calling for me so long, and I hadn’t heard, that today she has totally lost her voice, and when she mews there’s this raspy croak instead, like she’s been smoking three packs a day.

I am still very scared. But it will pass.

Let me tell you about “love is a food chain,” which is a bitter little slogan I made up for myself in college. The etiology of the concept is shaky in my mind now, but I think I meant by it that more sophisticated organisms devour more rudimentary ones. Or that, to put it in the vernacular, the ones you love never love you back—they love fancier cats. Or anyway less available ones. The slogan tries to express that desire is nothing but an endless chain of being with the Queen of Philosophy at the top—that we all yearn for someone out of our reach—and are yearned for by ones lower on the social ladder rungs than we ourselves.

I didn’t say it was a cheerful theory.

About a week ago, a close friend read me the riot act about continuing to obsess about my ex, but sometimes still I don’t know what to do but to do that. Romantic anguish having been my way of relating to the world for so long? Or at least my way of relating to text, to lyric. I don’t know another place inside my chest from which to sing, only the withdrawal of which Heidegger wrote. So am I obsessing by writing false sonnets, am I wallowing indulgently—or am I writing myself out of the hurt place, writing out my truth so that I can see it? I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know if there’s a way to know.

Poetry as self-indulgent; poetry as salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you it will kill you. My friend I think views me with some measured contempt—my medications that give me a hand tremor, my pretend-sonnets which memorialize endlessly the unworthy beloved—but this is not interesting and I will stop.

Mostly I just want to be able to go off meds so I can really write and really read again.

Mostly I wish I could live with the degree of suicidality I’d invariably encounter without medication.

While I was getting stable on meds, and finishing up grading for my rhetoric section, all of which could be done, thank God, from the sofa, I accidentally found various Internet writings by my ex: first his OKCupid page and then many posts on a polyamory forum, via all of which it was made brutally, blindingly clear how little he thought of our relationship and how eagerly he exited it, overlapping with a new lover (or lovers), and how dishonest he was during that process—but this isn’t quite right, it makes his betrayals sound personal and for the first time I get it, I understand that they were not. That he is just enacting his karma and I happened to get caught in the blast radius. That his behavioral choices really have nothing to do with me and almost nothing, in a way, to do with him. It is quite simply that his entire mode of being in the world is to be as little honest as possible. Is to keep all options open for as long as necessary, committing to nothing, to have a maximally wide realm of experiences available at all times no matter who must be lied to in the process.

I told another friend that the thought of being physically intimate with another person, even an embrace or kiss, nauseates me. I am sickened by the thought of touching anyone, as badly as I sometimes want to be held. And so I am grateful to be so happy alone; if I were unhappy alone, it is likely I would try to find someone, and I am paralyzed with fear that I would choose a similar person, riddled with similar pools of utter, constitutional duplicity.

The good news is that I’ve realized I no longer need to try to sort out whether my ex is lying or telling the truth: he’s always lying. It’s his way, as a black widow’s way is to run away from the flashlight beam I train on her crazy sticky web. There’s an old twelve-step joke:

Q. How can you tell when an alcoholic is lying?
A. His lips are moving.

and I understand this now. There is no point in ever speaking with him again, because he will always be lying. Because he is a liar and that is what they do. Is lie.

I am drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream over ice from a cup that his sister gave me. It’s a bright sunny yellow teacup that says GET HAPPY on the side, and I smile everytime I look at it, thinking: Why yes, thank you, I believe I shall.

I eat well and sleep well and I write as much as I can, paddling upstream against the current of my brain. I laugh with girlfriends and play with the cat and my life is charmed.

I read poems last night with my dear Ms. A. and I think I read badly, but it was hard to know. She read beautifully and I felt lucky to be reading with her. There was a small sea of completely strange faces (except M. and K. were there, thank God) and suddenly there I was reading dour barely-veiled accusatory confessional poems with words like cock and clitoris. At one point I had to restrain myself from giving a lecture on clitoral anatomy. But I hope at least one woman went home and looked up crura and bulbs of vestibule.

My twenties and thirties would have been completely different had I known about those body parts.

I don’t really believe that love is a food chain, anymore. I have had experiences of deep mutuality. I do believe that once the dynamic of pursuer/withdrawer is kicked off, within a relationship, it takes hard work to turn it around, like righting a ship in a gale. Both people need to be as conscious as possible. My ex wrote that he felt devoured and overwhelmed by me. Of course this astonishes me, as I perceived my requests for time and attention as being minimal and restrained (e.g. please come out of your office to share a meal with me rather than playing poker through dinner). I was ashamed of needing anything from him at all. Elizabeth Gilbert writes of a lover who needed more space “than a herd of American bison” and this is familiar. Or Christine Lavin singing, “If you want space, move to Utah.”

Mostly from reading his writing it’s clear that he never wanted to be my partner at all, and was lying from the outset. If that’s the case, it’s astonishing that he stayed for four and a half years.

This is obsessing according to my friend and I should stop it, also I should give up refined sugar and alcohol, there are so many ways in which a person can be better, it is unfortunate that I do not restrict myself more, or at all.

The beautiful thing about finding this writing by my ex, particularly the part in which he has an “erotic exploration” with a “dear friend,” and I’m using scare quotes because the first phrase sickens me and the second one seems highly dubious (since I’d never heard anything at all about this “dear friend” before she suddenly became sexualized, maybe someone gets upgraded to “dear friend” right before you go down on them)—anyway there was this rhapsodic, romantic-language description of the sexy evening they shared, and I only wished, I only wished I had been given this information or had found it a year ago, when it was deliberately concealed from me. Because it released me immediately from longing for him. Instantly and cleanly, like the downward slash of a sword, Manjusri’s vajra truth.

Non sequitur: I don’t want to kill the black widows. They don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. But what if they have babies, what if there are hundreds by the end of summer? My landlady will kill them, or the next tenant, so it may as well be me. But God how I hate ending the life deliberately of anything. Especially an animal with whom I feel such kinship. The one by the catnip plant next to the front door, she is so clever, so shy, so modest. I feel they are my totem animals, at present. They say, Leave me alone, or I will, if I must, if pressed to it, I will bite you.

I’m calmer now and less frightened. The typing of words is so soothing, and the ice clinking in my Irish cream. Many of my most respected male colleagues think little of my blogging, I know. I am staying put. I am a gambler, I am betting that someday I hit paydirt here. I am wagering that I can find and forge an écriture feminine that will serve me in the long run. That there will be a long run. I have chosen monogamy with myself, to stay with me, I am in this marriage for the long haul, I will weather the periods of low libido and unattractiveness, I am committed to me, to staying alive and staying on meds until I can safely come off them, I am committed to writing in ways I don’t yet know what they are. But they will sit just fine here. They aren’t going to come if I slap my own hand away from various subject matters warningly.

I think I feel the same way about gaining weight. I am bothered about it, but not bothered enough to throw out the cookies. The controlling mother voice in my head is going to have to deal, because those Petit Écolier 70% dark chocolate biscuits aren’t going to eat themselves you know. And if I have a full round belly, then I do. Maybe in a thousand years’ time, after the zombie apocalypse, they’ll sacrifice rats and mutant pigeons to my infertile altar.

(I know one of my friends is legitimately concerned about my carbohydrate intake because she believes, with a lot of scientifically backed-up hard evidence, that carbohydrates in general, and grains and sugar in particular, have ruinous, epidemiological-proportion effects upon human health and mental well-being. I don’t think she’s wrong, but I am still in survival mode. I am still in the mode of, let me deal with all this blood splattered around my living room first, and then at some point let’s see about dusting and watering the plants.)

(An unfair metaphor most likely but I can think of no other. I’ve been watching Dexter. Anyway I try to keep the carb/fat/protein proportions even, the least I can do.)

Sheryl Crow has a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and she’s turning 50 this year. I can finish my PhD, find a teaching job, and adopt a daughter. I will name her Christabel. Or Isabel, or maybe even, why not, Jezebel. We’ll get a beagle puppy once she’s old enough, and a Subaru station wagon. I’ll be a fifty-year-old mom too. I don’t mind. What else have I got going on? Why not help out a little girl who doesn’t have a mom?

At four in the morning, yesterday, sleepless, I drove to the Asian donut shop for an old-fashioned. They open at four. The doughnuts are so soft when just baked, 75¢. I ate mine in the car with the windows rolled down, listening to the dawn sounds of birds and roosters and lawn sprinklers. A tow truck parked in front of someone’s house had the driver’s side window smashed in, the street littered with sparkling green glass beads. Two grown cats played in the middle of the street, like kittens. I couldn’t help but think of all the times my ex would go for walks with me when I couldn’t sleep, hand in hand around the neighborhood, watching the feral cats hunting for insects under the streetlights. He either lied then, saying he loved me above all else, forsaking others; or he lies now when he says his ideal sexual partnership includes coming and going freely, sleeping around no questions asked. Or his reality shifted drastically over a six-week period last summer. Which is possible. Though he’d made an identical set of “discoveries” when his last marriage ended in 2001. Maybe he has to keep rediscovering his truth.

Why would I want to be friends with someone whose reality is that unstable?

I am very calm, and I never want to see or hear from him again. If he were to try to speak to me, I would say only: Go away. Not even, Please go away. Just: Go away.

We had a whole life together, woven and intertwined, and he snipped, snipped, snipped until it all fell apart, then said, Look, there’s nothing here but some ugly tangled thread, I’m gone.

I asked a mutual friend to retrieve my audio/recording equipment back from him. She did so. He sent no note or email. I think he knows. I think he knows I found his writings. I think he is ashamed.

I took a bath tonight with cupcake-scented bubble bath and crème brulée whipped soap. As I slid down into the water, only toes and nose sticking up, I thought, as one does: This is so much better than that.

And yes, everything a contrast, still defined by what it is not, negative space shaping out the year since last year when he told me what he’d been doing for months. That’s okay. I don’t mind abjection for now. I can be the subaltern. I’ve been her before.

I wear my garnet wedding ring on my left hand, admire it throughout the day.

I will tell you another story: about a week ago, I went to my weekly Al-Anon meeting where, upon passing his dirty white car as usual on my way to the meeting room, I suddenly pulled my keychain pocket knife out of my purse and, since he doesn’t ever lock his car, opened the passenger-side door, knelt on the seat, and cut down the little pewter goddess figurine which Ms. J. gave me a long time ago, which hangs (well, used to hang) from his rear-view mirror. I had put it there after our first Baja trip, along with a Virgen de Guadalupe calendar card and a little rainbow-colored Guatemalan pouch holding a rose quartz. I didn’t want the other things anymore but I thought, he doesn’t get to have this goddess, with her curvy spiral belly and round breasts and upraised arms holding the full moon.

Heart hammering, I went on into my meeting and only slowly got my breath back. Then I realized, when he sees the cut ribbon lying in the passenger seat, probably this will provoke him to some outraged communication which I don’t want to hear (you violated me by entering my car without my permission, etc.). So I got up and went back out again and, this time more calmly, retied the ribbon and the Guadalupe card to the mirror. My guess is he will never, or not for a long time, notice the goddess is even gone. On my way back I passed his sponsor twelve-stepping a drunk guy, said hello (no reply) and went into the women’s bathroom. I ovulated at that moment, a dot of blood dripping into the toilet.

Then went back in and had a wonderful meeting. Step 11, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. When it was my turn I spoke of my gratitude for a program that lets me define what prayer and meditation are, who God is (and Her gender), and how I improve that connection with what one woman calls not her Higher Power but her Deepest Source. The goddess clutched in my sweaty palm. Now on a leather cord around my neck, after first soaking for three days in salt water to pull away and neutralize anything unwanted.

Afterward a group of us were walking out to the parking lot. His shape turned the corner just as we did, about ten steps ahead of us, dressed in jeans and oversized blue shirt. He looked dumpy and angry and sad all at once, trudging along. So I dragged my feet and stalled a bit to increase the distance between us, while my sponsor and I talked about running; my sponsor is the prettiest one, all lean and angular and Midwest Scandanavian blonde in shorts and running shoes. He started his car and left hastily. And she and I stood there several minutes more and I told her about finding his blog, the relief, the horrified amusement, the disgust, the feeling sexually broken, the med change, the everything.

Then I got in my car and drove to Sunflower Market. It’s hilarious, because for months now I’ve thought I’ll run into him there after the meeting buying coffee and half-and-half, because that’s what we always used to do after the Sunday night meeting. But I never have. Tonight, out of all nights, as I drive up, the Honda’s parked there. I curse and laugh and quote Casablanca, then drive to Whole Foods which has better food anyway, and get fabulous tuna and avocado roll and two delicious flourless pecan butter cookies.

Just one of those moments where I think, everything is so totally fine and thank God, thank God, I am not with him anymore. No more lying, no more flash-point rages, no more being ignored, no more minutely subtle attempts to make me doubt and question my own reality.

And yes it is a negative space, but that is okay. There is at least a space there to be filled soon, when I move to my new city, make new friends, start a new set of academic/artistic projects. At least I’m no longer sleeping every night with my arms stretched out to the east, soggy with longing and remorse, not knowing how to survive the hours feeling that my chest is being slowly crushed.

It’s called progress not perfection. And I’ll take it over the alternatives any fucking day.

I’m going to live until tomorrow. I’m going to fight a better fight then.

PS—I finally bought myself the watercolor painting set I’ve wanted for about twenty years. Opening the little pans of colour was like unwrapping candies. I had a smile on my face for hours. It was $15 and I still feel kind of guilty about it. But I can paint quilt patterns! I want to make a set of 9×12″ art quilts around the theme of, beds. Or maybe, tree trunks. The palo verde are so beautiful and curvaceous. I try to feel like them, instead of just with rolls of fat on my stomach and back and thighs.

Which reminds me: You should read this.

And this.

And also this.

And, OMG, this and this. And ABSOLUTELY this. See, I really am a feminist/literary blogger. Just not a particularly informative one. Hurling links at you ingraciously, without so much as an identifying hashtag.

But I love you—