Blog it Out

In a post from October 2009, right before Becky and I started dating, I said that I’d never again make the mistake of censoring my blog based on who reads it.  This is tough when what you want to write about is doubting your relationship, and the person you live with is who you’re marrying in five months.

My Gaba moved to Seattle (damn his evil heart for leaving) after ending a seven-year relationship.  He got together with TheOneTheyCallB after seven months.  He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him, and they’re getting married next month.  In fact, seeing pictures of the beautiful engagement ring is one of the things which kept me from proposing (damn his decent-wage-paying job for delaying my happiness).  

Getting together fairly quickly has led to its share of problems for Gaba and TOTCB.  What those problems are, I have no idea.  Early in my relationship with Becky, TOTCB and I shared some correspondence.  I wondered how things would work for me.  I worried I was suppressing pain under the glow of new love, I worried because of warnings against rebound relationships.  

TOTCB made a comment like, “Gaba and I went through a lot of that at first, believe me.  It wasn’t easy but we got through it.”  I wondered, what’s that about?

Well, now I know.  

The saying goes, Sing like no one’s listening, dance like no one’s watching, and love like you’ve never been hurt.  Now that I can think straight (and by that I mean it feels like I’ve stopped drifting through a storm and picked up my oars once again), that last part is proving more difficult than I ever thought it would be.

Every misunderstanding feels like the end of the world.  Complicating matters, I also can’t talk about them for some reason.  Something as simple as, “When you joked about_____ it made me feel _____” is like trying to lift a building.  I don’t even know how to begin a task so impossible, let alone have the tools or strength to accomplish it.  So the tiny (usually imagined) slight festers like a splinter.  It festers and it poisons my thoughts.  

My head belongs to someone else, someone I dislike intensely, someone who only sees faults everywhere he looks, be it the mirror, his life, or the woman he loves.  I develop a lump in my throat, pounding around the base of my skull, and pressure in my chest.  I doubt everything.  I doubt her love.  I doubt mine.  The world feels like a bluish-black swirl of pain, sucking me down into it’s pit.  I want nothing more than to curl into a ball under my desk, or inside a closet, anywhere dark, enclosed, and hidden.  

I can’t get over my divorce, for some reason.  On my divorce post, I said there must be a finite number of tears you can shed over someone.  Either I was wrong, or I had more tears to shed.

Well, I can’t afford a shrink.  All I have is Sweet.

Bear with me. 

I Dreamed of Big House

In the dream we always live together, every family member I’ve ever had, Becky and her friends and family.  Tota is there, but she can hear, and she can still dance, drive, and throw a punch to anyone who disrespects the family.  The uncle I lost at nine to alcoholism is there.  I don’t remember him but there’s an uncle-shaped man of smiles and living room rug-wrestling who I call Fran.  Friends live here too, friends who’ve wandered from me over the years, or who I’ve let slip away.  There are endless rooms for all in this house, solitude when it’s needed, and adventure in undiscovered rooms.  Everyone is happy.  

I’ve yet to decide if this is my vision of heaven.  If hell is other people it can’t be heaven, right?  But that’s a question for another post.

In last night’s dream, Becky and I buy a home and everyone we’ve ever known moves in (I use “buy” loosely; these dream homes just kind of happen).  Everyone loves it immediately.  The vibe is perfect and the foundation is solid, even if there are spots which need work.  

Everyone runs out front onto the rolling hills of lawn for a huge night barbecue lit by paper lawn lanterns (thanks, Blood, Bones, and Butter).  I look back at the house, the windows blazing light, the balconies on each floor which run the entire length of the front of the house.

While I’m looking, feeling great because we’ve found such amazing accommodations, the front balcony falls off and lands on me.  Laying there stunned, pinned beneath the rubble (thanks, re-watching the first season of Lost), I open my mouth to call out to the friends and family who are already down the hill at the feast.  Losing the first balcony has caused others to loosen.  I close my eyes as two more fall toward me, thinking, this is going to be bad. 

When I wake up (I use “wake” loosely, since I’m still dreaming), we’re all inside the house again.  The mood is subdued.  My head is wrapped in so many bandages I can barely see.  Becky is nowhere.  My hand hurts.  Lifting it from my lap, I see the fingers are splayed in all directions.  The skin of my forearm is misshapen with broken bone trying to poke through.  My biceps and triceps are severed slabs of meat, the gleaming white humerus the only thing keeping my arm from falling off.  Didn’t anyone look past my head for injuries?  What kind of hospital did they take me to?   

  Turns out no one wants to take me back.  They’ve been through the interminable waiting room once for my head, they’re not going back for my arm.  They’d rather busy themselves prepping food, or lay around playing video games, they’d rather not make eye contact so I won’t see their guilt.

Not much interpretation needed.  

My first marriage crumbled and my friends and family put me back together again.  Now that I’m starting a new family, part of me worries it won’t work out.  If it doesn’t, another part of me worries no one will be interested in helping me back on my feet a second time.  

Well, I’ve dreamed that house a dozen times and it always holds.  

Also, it’s clear that I’ve not fully healed from the destruction of my marriage.  The most obvious hurt is gone, but there are still glaring wounds when you know where to look.  

Bones, poking at the skin.

Dear Passport Application: Don't Judge Me

Becky and I are getting married on Friday, September 16th, 2011.

The divorce from my first marriage was final on September 3rd, 2010.

I didn’t really think about that until I was filling you out.  I tried talking to you last year, but your marriage questions thwarted my efforts.  You didn’t just want to know if I was married, single, separated or divorced, you asked if I’ve ever been married.  Sure, whether one has been married informs a large part of one’s identity, but what do you care, passport?  You even wanted dates, and got picky about it.  You wouldn’t take my court appointment as the end date of my marriage because it was in the future.  Fine.

So here we are again.  I tell you the dates of my marriage.  I use Becky as my emergency contact.  Under relationship, I put fiance.  You ask why I need you.  I tell you for my honeymoon on 9/17/11, and you’re dated 4/21/11. 

It’s not like I got divorced, met a stranger, and got engaged in seven months, passport application.  It just looks that way.  

Listen, application - that marriage ended two years ago, more than two years ago, now.  Becky and I were colleagues, so even if I never looked at her in a certain light, I knew the cut of her jib.  She got divorced after I did and they hadn’t lived together for years, are you going to judge her, too?

You know what, application?  There are whole worlds out there you have no idea about, lives lived in the margins outside your paragraphs, emotions bubbling in the spaces between your lines.  You don’t even have ideas, you’re just paper.  Paper, and one really bad photo.

Guess what else?  I found my favorite white wine at Walgreens for $3.99 when I was getting that lousy picture taken.  You didn’t know that, did you? 

I do not have shitty taste in wine.

Look, I don’t need your attitude right now, okay?  It’s not my fault they made you more expensive and required you for a night in Niagara Falls.  Just do your job, get me over the border, and no one will get hurt.

In the meantime, let’s keep this between us.

Would You Like a Side of Divorce with that Moons Over My Hammy?

Andi agreed to drive me to the courthouse.  We shared the awkward small talk and physicality of a first date.  We caught up on our lives and managed to laugh, despite the circumstances.  We also discovered that the courtroom language of divorce is not irreconcilable differences.  There were two single petitioners.  There was one man with his best friend and one woman with her best friend, both groups surely destined for an early lunch soaked in alcohol.  Then there was us.

The judge pronounced all our marriages irretrievably broken.

On the drive from downtown, Andi told me she would still love it if we could be friends.  She asked if I thought she was a serial cheater.  She told me if I ever wanted to “give this thing another shot” she was game.  She also forced me to say why it’s painful to see her: I didn’t want my marriage to end, and it ended anyway.

She asked whether I meant last year, or in the car at that moment.  Last year, I said.  Wanting the divorce didn’t make it any easier to see her.

I get it now.  She’s proof that love doesn’t conquer all, that even dreams you work for don’t always come true.  I set that aside long enough to be civil, and eventually we laughed like old friends, but that doesn’t mean I’m inviting her over for barbeque.

When we pulled into the driveway at the Treehouse, I suggested breakfast.  She said she’d been working up the courage to ask the whole drive.  Shades of our marriage, afraid to say what we want because it might not make the other person happy.

We decided to hit a Denny’s.  As Kevin Brockmeier writes on choosing a restaurant in "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device," sometimes “you want nothing more than the simple curt reactiveness of a stranger.”

It felt great, for the most part.  We avoided sentimentality.  I enjoyed our rapport.  If she saw and wondered about the new scar on my forehead, she didn’t mention it.  The way she spoke about her new guy and music, I realized that my friend Z is right; the divorce was a correction.  I love music, but it doesn’t light me up the way it does Andi.  Becky and I share a passion for books, the thing I love most.  It was a hole in my marriage.  Clearly you don’t need to have everything in common, but still.  Becky’s read more of my work in a year than Andi read in sixteen.

Packing up to leave my bachelor pad the next day, I came across my wedding band.  I felt like crying, but I didn’t.  I guess there are a finite number of tears you can shed over certain events.  Irretrievably broken, I thought.  Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want, I thought.

When I saved the ring, I had pictured something from a movie.  I’d bike to Kennedy Park and stand on the pier looking thoughtful for a time before throwing the band into the water.  I suppose I could have saved it for that trip, but I didn’t want the ring in my new home.  It also seemed like too much effort.  Instead, I cut the band in half and laid it into a flat line, cut that line into pieces, and threw those pieces in the trash.  I still didn’t cry.  I felt empty.

Irretrievably broken.

The marriage is broken, but life is still as wonderful and beautiful as it ever was.

Cracks and all.