Story, pt. 1: The Prophecy

The Prince put on a disguise, walked out of the castle, and went to the wise woman in his kingdom and asked her to tell his fortune. She could see that under his disguise that he was really the Prince, so she said, "No one can tell the fortune of someone as wise as you are. You will have to see for yourself. " So she poured water into a silver bowl and below the surface of the water this is what he saw:

Pure white flowers on long fragile stems growing high on a mountain.

A tower struck by lightening in a storm.

A falcon returning to its master's glove.

He rose from the table, gave two gold coins to the wise woman, and suggested she get a new bowl--because this one didn't know anything very useful.

Next: The Arrival of Princess

Blank Space

I haven't wanted to write for what feels like a month. The main reason for the radio silence is that I've actually been feeling better. Anyway, the highlights:

The Riverhead: I've been taking classes in neurolinguistic programming (re-writing the code in my brain's operating system), both a foundations course and an advanced class--eight weeks altogether. The most significant realization is that, despite my previous perception of myself as being born of fear and peril, I may not have been doomed from the moment my cells started to multiply. An exercise in a practice session with another person in class shifted this rock-solid idea to the understanding that I was actually held in my mother's love from the moment I arrived. This not-s0-subtle reframe of my story has made a huge difference in how I've negotiated the past weeks: brighter, hopeful, a participant in my life.

Clear: Trey went to Germany to present at a conference, and then spent a week in Cadiz on the beach. I didn't hear from her the entire time she was away. Friends told me she just needed to take some time for herself and that she'd be in touch when she got back. Pictures of her travels and new friends basking in the small hour, northern latitude twilight on the rooftop of a German socialist castle populated her flickr page. During the 10 days she was away, I moved all of my stuff out of our flat--she had been panicky about my things in cabinets and on shelves that prevented her from actually living where we lived. As she had never, ever lived on her own (always with a man from the time she left boarding school), she was trying to live in her house now but was stunted by my things (photos, clothes, books, CDs, papers). So I boxed it all up and moved it all out--except for the stereo and my six-linear feet of vinyl, and the kitchen necessaries. I drove it across bridges on multiple trips all the while hoping I would be allowed to move it back when I had become an acceptable partner again. Or maybe, as a roommate in the spare room.

Substitution: I'm in Wyoming all this week, staying with my friend Sam who I know from my days as a bodyworker. It's been days of bike riding, archery, hiking, photography, and driving through farm country. I was reading my Twitter page this morning and read that Trey (who told me on Sunday when we went out that she didn't see herself as my fiancee any more) had just found a roommate for the spare room, a deal sealed over Burmese food and single malt scotch. A message that was sent to her thousands-strong readership before it was told to me. In a brief video call with her this morning, she clarified that this was a financial arrangement of sharing the rent and utilities with someone who would be in a room and cook meals for themselves and that was it. Not a romantic roommate. Of course, she heard my disappointment at not being chosen as her roommate and my embarrassment at having the news broadcast to her audience of followers and our mutual friends as an opportunity to burst into tears at how she had fucked up and should have done things differently and was helpless under the burden of having to pay the rent on her own. I tried to persuade her that I wasn't saying she fucked up, or should have done things differently, or needed her to be burdened by the rent in order to make me feel better. I just felt disappointed and embarrassed, and she could go off to the races on her own if she wanted.

It's a beautiful outside this morning. There's a white clapboard Baptist church boasting a 20-foot long banana split at its annual picnic this Saturday. Orioles and red wing blackbirds dive over crystal mountain streams. With no clouds in the sky to hold on to, I could just let go of the earth and float up and up.

Fraidy Cat

Apparently, if I tell the woman I love that I am afraid of her volatility and that I never know if I'm going to be the recipient of emotional, verbal, or physical abuse, it is the same as telling her that she is an abuser.

This seems to be true, because it is what I am told by Trey.

Because I used the word "abuse" to describe my fears, I have also defined the woman I love as an "abuser."

Is it too subtle to make a distinction between the activity and a label that defines a person? Is it too bizarre to share, which was my intent in the first place, my fear that volatile interactions will result in violence being directed at me?

I am afraid of the things I am afraid of--and they are not necessarily based in the actual behavior of the person I'm talking to. That's what fears are all about in the first place, right?

"I gave up so much to move here to be with you" is a phrase I've heard over the course of the past three years. When Trey drove here from Nova Scotia, she lost her country, her home, her family to live in a strange land with foreigners, including one foreigner she liked enough to leave it all behind for. So much depends on a red Saturn sedan, glazed in Richmond District fog, beside white bagged Christmas trees. Such a burden to shoulder her loss of nation and kin. I find I filter every word and glance through a script that trowels dark matter into ordinary ambiguity--and my result is always the same. I did her wrong by setting her in motion westward. And so when our conversations go sideways, the emotions are heightened by my responsibility for her frustrations and the escalation of her pain.

To think that the heat and spit and raw lust with which we began sparking in the dark corners of our graduate school lodges in the woods--secreted from community and from her common-law husband in Halifax, has unraveled so nearly is heartbreaking to me. I began this with so much hope, expectation, belief that I could do this right. That I would succeed in being lovable, worthy of being a husband, a father. A man. A powerful partner to a powerful partner.

With all the talking Trey down from taking up the mantle of "abuser" the conversation was steered completely away from what I was trying to express. Which was,

"I love you! I want to love and to be loved. I want a relationship with you based on ease, joy, and beauty. I want to use our time and energy being creative together--building family, making music, painting, laughing, sharing our lives with friends, gardening, and feeling good feelings."

Sick Transit

I'm writing application letters and revising my resume to submit for marketing jobs. The current one I'm working on is for a position I've already submitted for but has been reposted. The company I've got a contract with hasn't given me feedback on the work I've submitted to them, and since approving the work is the gating function to me doing anything more I've been idle for the past two weeks--rattling around the house, disappointing the cat, and wishing Trey would call.

Last Tuesday, I dropped by with a friend of mine, a 70-something theater director who was auditioning me for an upcoming show, with 20 minutes notice. I knew how much she loved the old man, and so I wanted to bring her something wonderful in hopes that the wonderfulness would rub off on me and I'd be seen in a better light. In hopes that the better light would stick when she thinks of me.

She burbled and cooed and so did the director. As a gift, it was a huge success.

Then, on Friday, she came to dinner with my friends downstairs. I wasn't invited. But apparently, Trey was expecting me to drop by and say hi if I was home. I sat upstairs from them watching Miyazaki movies while they ate and laughed below. When I heard the gate to the street scrape shut, I folded over and sobbed.

I love her, and this is my tar baby of a situation. She trusts her fear of me and believes separation will keep her safe. When she looks at me on Skype, she can't control her love for me from coming out and in the conflict between her desire for connection and her belief that such connection is dangerous is too much for her delicate Northern system to handle and she bursts into tears. At the sight of me. So she does better IMing me when she infrequently does.

I texted her, "Did you leave?" She typed at me from the going away train the mind reading double bind above (in 160 characters or less).

Jack, the gypsy husband of my friend downstairs, tells me when I call him that I'll be very surprised when things work out for the better for everyone if I just give things time to sort themselves out. And still I ask the universe, "What could possible be the benefit to running the particular line of code I've been programmed with that (1) wants to be with the woman of his dreams, (2) has shown himself in his most broken state and caused her to fear for her life and sanity, and (3) works to be a better man while his efforts don't figure in the equation of what would bring him back to the woman he loves."

What benefit to the development of the greater human operating system is the skunk works project that runs in me and when will the guy charged with debugging me get back from lunch?

Crack Babies I Have Known

Let's try this on for size.

How do you make a baby? 180M:1 ratio male-to-female biological material in a bath of hormones. Heat, feed, and keep in a dark watery portable container for plus/minus 9 months.

Terence McKenna talked about psychotropic plants sharing their wisdom by being metabolized by humans. The plant uses the broadcast medium of the human bloodstream, nervous system, and cell structure to tell the ancient story of itself.

Apparently the actual health impacts of flooding a developing fetus' fluids with cocaine, ammonia, heroin, ether, methamphetamine, alcohol and the like aren't any worse than cigarette smoking. With the elegance of any garbage-in/garbage-out system, crummy ingredients tend to produce crummy results for the new little ones. But here's what I think: it's a percentage game. If you get more food than crack into a baby, you'll get a person, more or less, at the end of the gestation period. Although, if you crank up a mother's fear about safety, abuse, or danger, generally, the hormonal wash gets shifted from alkaline to acid and fries the circuitry in a particularly fantastic way.

My earliest memory is as a 14-month old deciding that men were unsafe for women and children to be in relationships with. It is my first principle. The result of 9 months of my mother's hot and cold running fear and equal time of personal observation of family dynamics. I love my mother, he makes my mother cry, so he's got to go. In order to feel safe in my relationships now, in order for all the pieces to line up so that I know I'm in a relationship, I've got to have the necessary components to make the chemicals synthesize: Abusive man, abused woman, avenging boy. Even if I have to make them out of thin air or other people.

Lethal force for minor infractions

What lets me know that the situation I am in is going to kill me and I need to defend myself from mortal harm?

Not that the content of my life to date matters, but growing up I was pretty convinced that my dad was going to kill me and my mother--and that my mom was not only powerless to stop him but also unwilling to move us both to safety.

I don't know of any young boys who aren't emotionally sensitive, so I can't say if I was more aware to subtle shifts in domestic barometric pressure than other kids would be. What was clear for me at the time was that I was in danger from my father's rage (in the form of flying plates, large hands, withering sarcasm) and in order to survive, I needed to get read changes in cloud movement, shadows, the rustling of leaves in the wind.

Had I been part of a traditional society, I could have put these survival skills to work in gathering food for the community. My father had his version of these skills to keep him alive as a forward scout in Vietnam--his sense of smell was particularly acute. Perhaps from his feral, solitary pre-adolesence living on the river, he had learned to smell the presence of people and animals before they could be seen. He would come home from work complaining of the way the people in his office smelled, "They all stink from red meat."

I've got a system that's finely tuned to detect homeopathic amounts of negativity in communication, which, as a survival tool, if totally awesome. I get into trouble with Trey (though, who are we kidding, it's with everyone) because of what happens next. The baseline setting: All danger is mortal danger.

It's a little like this:
The Situation: End of day coming, Trey at home, I'm coming in the door. I put the key in the deadbolt and door lock gently, opening the door quietly, but because of an open window in the kitchen the door closes with at loud "Whump!"
The Response: "Hello!" sings Trey from the other end of the house. I say nothing and take off my shoes.
The Poison: On my map of what behavior and language means, yelling throughout the house is rude and dangerous, so I wait until I'm in the same room as she is to give her a warm hug. It's like when I say something and she says, "What?!" as if I mumble and speak incoherent gibberish. On her map, silence and non-response are signs of imminent breakdown from me.
The Results: Trey comes up with a look on her face I read as worry and I feel responsible for making her feel bad. She sees the despair on my face and begins to cry.

Is this love that I'm feeling?
Is this the love that I've been searching for?
Is this love or am I dreaming?
This must be love 'cause it's really got a hold on me.

No Help Is On The Way

I've written about the potential connection between seeking a remedy to emotional pain by claiming or self-inflicting physical or psychological pain. In the past, I've resisted the pat analysis of just doing "it" to get attention. But now, it makes more sense than I'd like it to.

I've been aware of a nurture gap between what I would like in my relationship with Trey and what she's demonstrated over the past four years. I've felt badly that I don't receive the kind of affection or support or expressions of attraction from her that I would like to receive--even though she is very clear in her mind and words that she loves me whole-heartedly. I dove off my bike in the middle of Market Street in rush hour traffic and sprained my wrists as an experiment to see if she could take care of me in a crisis: and she got mad at me for being in pain and selfishly going to bed. I've understood this experience as a failing on my part for looking for support from my lover and potential (attempted, deferred indefinitely) life partner.

Which it is true. She's not ever going to make me feel better when I'm down or nurse me back to health or improve the quality of my life. There is nobody coming to save me from myself or from the world. No call to the suicide hotline, no session with my therapists, no doctor, no prayers, no spells, nothing is going to heal me. Nothing from without can touch the perfect pain of life within me.

And there's a certain sad comfort in this awareness. All of my past attempts to seek external remedies to abuse at home, relationship pain, and self-doubt have been futile because they could only be so. There's nothing outside myself that can improve conditions inside myself. All my base are belong to me.

First thought, best thought

I'm pretty good at cutting apples into quarters, slicing the cores out, and halving the pieces. I'm good at eating the apples too. I can make coffee pretty well, grinding the beans while the water boils, pouring the water through the filter and warming the mug, then coaxing the beans to release their crema, and warming milk that just tops the cup. Sweeping, mopping and laundry are also strong suits.

It's funny though, no matter how many things I do well, my mind resets to a single conclusion. "I should be dead."

And I'm told this isn't how most of the world sees the range of available options. But fuck it. When I was in fourth grade, we had multiplication tests every other day. I couldn't do them fast enough. I was a total failure. I only got through about half before time was called, and I kept having to do the 3-times test over and over. I would sit at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoons and attempted to complete the test within 5 minutes. And not being able to do it. Waves of hot failure shame washed over me. I would break down into tears and try again. Back in class, I stood at Mrs. Paulette's desk, waiting for my test to be graded. When the check-minus was written on it, I would crumple. The TA looked at me and said, "You don't need to be so hard on yourself." I replied straight-faced, "Well, if I'm not hard on myself, who will be?"

The best thing for me to do in times of stress is to obliterate all evidence of my failure. Chopping down the tree at the root seems have sent out shoots seeking moisture, wrapping around pipes and choking the underground network of manmade structures in its blind push to the sun.

Spin around with a spinney spinney spin spin

"Tone."
"Tone of voice."
"Bad tone of voice."
"Not getting right tone of voice."
"Maybe someday I'll get the right tone of voice."

Here's how I got to be living across the water from my home. I say things, the things I say are perceived as being bad, Trey loads up all kinds of feelings about her perceptions and has a total skitz out.

She means it: she wants to have a better experience of me than she does. So here's what I do--I avoid her calls when I'm feeling less than 100% happy. This includes feeling a little tired, a little sad, a lot sad, a little hungry, a little distracted, just recently arrived at home, on my way out of the house, when I'm out of the house, when I'm working, when I'm sleeping, when I'm eating, when I'm reading, when I'm petting the cat, when I'm in the garden, when I'm watching the clouds slide across the sky. I feel safe talking with her when I know only a controlled voice will come out of my mouth. Which means Skype goes bong bong and the phone goes buzz buzz and I walk out of the room without thinking twice--it's so not worth risking the untended nasalized inflection, string of single syllable words, downward intonation, over articulated phonemes, or mumbled response. I do the same with email, where tone is much harder to quantify and so easy to embroider.

But even so, this path of careful tending of the interaction garden--so that every conversation is curated for optimal accord, Trey feels neglected and abandoned. Unloved. Het up. So when I do contact her this morning (after she tried the night before to raise me after I had "gone to bed"), she's already wound up about feeling unloved that when I say I'll take care of the thing she was calling to ask me to take care of she has a full-on freak.

"What do I have to do to get you to talk to me like you love me?" she asks as if its a non-provocative, neutral thing to say to your fiance-in-name-only, who she's too afraid to commit to because he might have another suicidal break when he may be unable to keep his shit together after feeling criticized by the woman he loves when she expresses her frustration at all of the things he does that make her feel bad--particularly the things that involve having an ineffably foul tone of voice that is defined by the ear of the behearer through a series of filters that trigger an briared nest of synapses that create the feeling of terror, mistrust, and loss of love and hope and home.

It's so easy for me to break what she keeps at the edge of the table and pushes when she believes the worst. And then we dance barefoot on the shards of family china on the hardwood floor blaming each other for our heavy steps and the blood we spill.

Is anybody reading this and wondering if the people in these stories ever want to kiss?

Remutilate Me, part 1

I've been listening to a bunch of audio podcasts about depression treatment, which have been mostly low-level, academic, or arms-length such that the fact that feeling fit to die is something experienced by individuals trying to live lives was glossed over. But one little nugget jumped out that I had never applied to my understanding of what's going on with me.

Self-mutilation.

I've heard that this is mostly something that girls and women do to themselves. I've certainly seen some interesting evidence of cutting on the forearms of colleagues and thought "Wow, there's evidence of a specific coping mechanism" or "What modern primitive body manipulation boutique does work like that?" I got my left ear pierced along with my nose during my first two years of college, which I recognized as an attempt to create a rite of passage for myself without a larger cultural awareness of what it is for a young man with a nose ring and suicide chain through the eyes of a woman from India ("Where are you from?" she asked with wide eyes. I was staring at her bindhi dot thinking the same thing--but apparently, her cultural signifier didn't mean "this young woman is married, and has an ayurvedic enhancement to the female reproductive organs for assistance during childbirth" like mine did).

But it hadn't occurred to me that I had been overcoming my reluctance to slice myself open and let the happiness in by outsourcing the task. And that I'd been doing it for a while.

I don't have an adequate data mash-up time line of traumatic emotional events and physical wounds attributed to accidents from 1970 to the present, but here's what I do have:

1973 (est.)
Chicken Pox (trio of pock marks next to left eye)

1974 (est.)
Banged Forehead (between eyebrows)
Banged Chin

1975, Summer
Broken Arm (Swing set)

1976, Summer
Skinned Knees (Bicycle)

1978, Winter
Concussion (landed on forehead rollerskating)

1979, just after Christmas
Thrown from horse

1980, January/February
Mononucleosis (Question: How does a celibate 9 year old become the only person at school to come down with a communicable immune deficiency disease? What does his internal chemistry need to be for him to allow this to set up shop for a month?)

1982, Spring and Fall
Ingrown Toenails (two out-patient cutting off's of toenails)

1983, October
(Death of Grandfather on birthday, therapy soon thereafter)

1985, January/February
Broken Arm

1986-1987 (Christmas-late February)
(Admission to adolescent psych ward on Christmas Eve, 2 months, suicidal depression)

1988, Springtime
Broken Wrist

1988-1992, Winter-Spring-Summer
Sore Throats Galore

1992-95, Winter-Spring-Summer
Acute Spinal Pain--neck and low back (from flattening curves in spine for voice classes at college)

1998, March
(Divorced from Sheila, sent packing, prayed to be taken in my sleep every night while sleeping on floor at mom's apartment)

1999, March
(Dumped by Ashley, after she returns home and becomes instantly engaged to an old friend after spending 3 ecstatic months in my arms: mom comes over and takes knife out of my hand in my garden apartment)

2006, October
Acute Spinal Pain--sacrum (unable to walk two days before beginning of grad school, week before birthday, right after receiving news that Evie was dumping me for the third time and had found a new romance in a guy from Austin she met at a Vancouver gay wedding)

2008, late January
(Breakdown with Trey, desire for death, scratching of face with nails, banging of head into plaster walls, Paxil-induced seizures)

2008, July
Sprained Wrists (landed on hands while flying off bike caught in streetcar tracks, trying not to be late to meet Trey who was waiting for me a few blocks away)

2009, June
Broken Arms (weeks after completing grad school, two smashed ulnas requiring immediate reconstructive surgery with plates and pins, months of hydrocodone followed by withdrawal, physical therapy, scar healing, movement recovered)

2010, March
Arm Surgery (Removal of plates and pins, total bone recovery, slow-to-heal weepy wounds)

I'm laying this out as a series of Burma-Shave signs along the highway. I'll revisit the highway soon to give more detail on topography, conditions, and roadside hospitality.

The Revenger's Strategem; or, The tragical historie of Shelby the glazier

(This is the basic outline of a Jacobean Tragedy to be developed later.)

Prologue
If there is disorder in the kingdom, it is the manifestation of the disorder of the king. To heal the canker in the body politic, the head of the serpent must be severed. In doing so, the disease of the king can spread to the avenger and be perpetuated in the new generation.

Act 1
Mad king does mad things and issues a crazy proclamation. The queen puts on brave face for court, but is spied on by servants who see her galloping her horse toward the hovel of a witch.

Act 2
Courtiers plot to depose the king by political means and thwarted by the king's minons. Subplot of exiled son of prior king and his country bride being discovered by fleeing courtiers.

Act 3
Courtiers flee the kingdom after king initiaties a purge of all residents with arbitrary characteristics (tone of voice, word choice, body posture). King manifests meterological events (tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes) which level the castle. By magical means (from the queen and the witch) the castle is restored, though vulnerable to the king's future assaults.

Act 4
The skies darken on the sabbath, dark spirits are conjured from the past, and generations of dishonored dead take control of the kingdom. The king is consumed by his creation as a shockwave is sent beyond the castle into the woods beyond.

Act 5
The forces of the son of the exiled king (including courtiers who have turned away from the current king, the queen, and the witch) storm the castle and do vanquish with the forces of darkness. The son of the exiled king is crowned and adorned in the mantle of state which transform the new king into the vanquished king. The new king's first words are the vanquished king's proclamation.

Epilogue
The plum tree that drops its fruit into the stagnant pool feeds a festering brew of decay and rot. The brine that feeds the tree infects every fiber, every branch, blossom, and root. It is they cycle of life, the exchanged breath, forever unbroken.

Exeunt omnes.

The reflex is a lonely child

My dad was a sensitive little kid growing up outside of Tulsa, OK in the fifties. His parents were divorced. His mother was 1/4 Cherokee and my dad saw her through the special prism little boys use to see their mothers. His mother lived in Sparks, NV and worked as a blackjack dealer. Family lore describes her with long straight black hair and bright, flashing eyes: a "wild" girl. She was 19 when she had my father and had been married before she met my dad's father. He was a charismatic bully who would drink and yell and get violent. They weren't married long. Shortly after my dad was born and his father left Tulsa, dad's mother met another man and had my dad's half sister. Then his mother left for Sparks, leaving the kids in the care of her mother.

My dad and his half sister were best friends and they both loved their grandmother. When my dad would cry for his mother, both his half sister and grandmother would comfort him. A few times a year, his mother would send for him, and my five year-old father would ride the train across the plains and into the mountains to see her. And back again to his grandmother and half sister.

His father resettled in California, and sent a demand back to his mother-in-law. My dad was to live in California with the new family, a step-mother, two older step-brothers, and a baby half brother. To live permanently in California. So my dad boarded the train in Tulsa for the last time and never saw his grandmother again. It would be 20 years before he saw his half sister again.

His mother died from blood poisoning caused by an illegal abortion when my dad was six. It's unclear if there was a funeral. Family lore describes this as the moment when my dad turned off his heart. On his bedroll in the garage, with the smell of lawnmower gasoline, oil dripped from a sedan, and windowsill cobwebs he would cry into the pillow he stuffed into his mouth. There was only room in the house for the family, so my dad should take what he was offered. What was left.

During the school year, he lived off the coast of his father's arrangements. Freed from the watchful eye of the truant officer, my dad would take off for the Russian River and live for three months of the year. In my imagination, I see my dad like Huckleberry Finn: catching frogs for dinner, meeting up with unsavory characters, scavenging out of the garbage cans of vacationers. He described laying still in empty fields for hours, waiting for the buzzards to begin circling. The black birds would spiral closer and land near my dad, hopping closer, and when he felt one nibble at his clothes he'd jump up and try to throw his arms around it. I also place him in the hollows of trees, surrounded by cold night, huddling in the damp without a blanket, afraid and in mourning for his life. By the dates on newspapers, and the ebb of daytrippers, he would know to begin the 30-mile journey back to his father's house.

Skip to dad at 18--in love with the long-haired exotic girl from high school who'd been living in Santiago, Chile with her parents, writing letters to the girl from infantry base camps in Vietnam. Dad had found a way to keep safe, from his volatile sergeant and fellow grunts whose aim and judgment he mistrusted, by working as a forward scout. This is apparently the riskiest job a soldier can accept, and that he decided it was the best way to keep safe speaks to my dad's ability to perceive the ultraviolet spectrum of potential dangers. He had undertaken an advanced course in solitude and foraging as a child, an excellent preparation for tracking the Khmer Rouge through the mountains of Cambodia. He was able to perform this task for two tours and keep from getting shot--though the magazine clip of his rifle caught a slug two inches from his heart in the first moments of a firefight.

Between his tours, he married the exotic dark haired girl with the sparking eyes. He had his pay back to his father for safekeeping in a bank account. Returning home, he discovered that the money had been spent on his father's family--the old man having no regrets or shame in stealing his son's salary. And so my dad went to work for his father drilling wells, work he swore he would never do when he enlisted in the army.

And so he would come home, pass me in my high chair with alphabet soup letters cooling in broth puddles on the silvery tray, and within moments angry words would come down the hall chilling me further. In my little mind a tiny logic sequence ran:

The big man makes mom cry.
I love mom.
I choose mom over the big man.
I choose mom over the big man in me.
The big man always puts mom in danger.
Therefore, when things get scary, and mom starts to cry, I will kill the big man--even if the big man in me is the only big man I can kill.

Anhedonia, My Reflection

Letters from exile. Tracing the ridges of my fault lines. The opportunity to stitch my mind back together and become someone worth being.

I spoke with Trey this morning as she was getting ready for work. If I keep the content of the conversation in the range of "how are you," "just called to check in," and "I hope you have a really great day," things are pretty okay. When we have an activity to focus on: like talking through ideas for her next presentation while walking on the shore, or getting lunch and sitting down to eat it, or going to a parties at her friends' houses. It's harder to keep the mood constant during interstitial "so what do you want to do next" times, or "now that we've talked about what we planned to talk about, how are you doing?" times, or transitions. Arrivals particularly.

As best as I can tell, it's like this. Sometimes it's different, but it's mostly awful.

I come in the door and feel glad to see Trey. Trey comes to the door. I say hello. Trey looks at me sideways. I say, "What's wrong?" Trey hugs me and says hi. I'm confused about the sideways look and don't hug back because I think I must have done something wrong. Trey still hugs me and says hi again. I say it's still me from the first time she said hi. She says, "I know, silly. Hug me." I say I don't want to because I think she's mad at me because she looked at me sideways when I came in the door and said hello. Trey begins to cry, which is loud. I try to talk and then stop. Trey cries more and walks into the house--all of the above having happened in the doorway in the span of 8 seconds.

At this point, a few things could happen. I could collapse to the floor (not sure why this became my go-to response to relationship stress, but a year ago February it seemed like the most natural thing to do to crumple into a heap of skin and bone on the hardwood), which brings more crying with pleas to "come on, be strong." I could follow her into the next room and talk in a way (with wrong tone or words or some other ineffable wrongness) that brings more crying and pleas to "stop being so cruel." I could sit silently on her couch looking at the floor in a posture of control blended with catatonic detachment. Or I could walk outside and hear her cries reach me on the sidewalk.

This doesn't happen every time. But if I don't hit the right note in my door knocking, or lock unlocking, or first hello-ing I'm hosed. Because it's my responsibility to keep the relationship in the middle of the tracks. The story in the house is that she responds to what I give her--so if I bring the crazy, she responds in kind. The inverse, if she cries then I must have done the thing to provoke her tears, is also true. How we regain attraction, love, or lust for each other is a mystery to me. How we get to a shared trust where we can start making wedding plans again seems like something another person could do easily. I feel so far from being acceptable to her.

The memories of our first heart brimming full year are paved under with a parking lot of grievances, broken trust, and neglect. The results of my poor stewardship of paradise.