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“So,” I said. “How are you?” I almost didn’t stop driving. The urge was so strong. To take a right and hit the highway. I had a full tank of gas and my MP3 player. I didn’t even want to veer by my parents’ house and grab my suitcase or anything. Just go. Drive down into Montana, cross the mountains on the I90 to Seattle and check out the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Maybe stay on the I15 all the way to Las Vegas. Should be able to make it in 30 hours of non-stop driving. I could see it in my mind. I could feel the road already, the vibration in my fingers. If it hadn’t been winter. If the roads hadn’t be too slippery for my car. I turned left. “You’re still the one I want to call. You still feel like my best friend.” It would be easier if we had really hurt each other. If there had been an affair, or abuse, or even a fight that got so out of hand that the bad words kept coming, even after the damage had been done. But it wasn’t like that. It was eleven years of problems that we were too immature to understand when they started and then too wrapped up in our habits to change later. Years of miscommunication, of living our lives based on what we thought the other wanted, without ever considering our own needs or even looking for the truth of things. Years of living so deep inside each other that we were losing contact with the outside world, that each connection was slowly being severed, until we were all alone with each other. And thinking that was what we wanted. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted this to happen.” I’ve had three months to get used to the idea. Three months of counselor appointments, conversations with friends, long nights in my parent’s spare bedroom trying to understand what she wanted, what I wanted, where things went wrong and how to fix them. If they could even be fixed. Three months of checking my phone every few minutes in case I somehow missed a call. Of checking my email a dozen times a day. Of reading her LiveJournal, hoping there would be a message to me hidden in the meanings. Of turning our few conversations over and over in my mind, mining them for a nugget of hope. Something that would let me continue denying to myself that it was over. But I knew it was. I don’t know if I completely agree, if I truly feel that our problems – and they are some real doozies – are just too much to fix. I don’t know how much of what I’m feeling is acceptance, how much of it is anger and hurt, how much of it is the desire simply to let things go and be over. She’s sure, and I accept that. Fixing our problems would require us demolishing everything and starting again from the very foundations of our relationship. I don’t know if what we feel for each other could survive that. I don’t even know if it would work, the old habits being so very easy to fall into. Even the cadence of our conversation slips into the comfortable ruts. “I don’t want to go. Leaving makes it all real.” I am awake now. I see my part in this. I’ve been describing myself to people as a reservoir. If a hole gets knocked in the dam, the water pours out and settles at the new level. But instead of fixing the hole, I left it alone, thinking to myself there was still plenty of water left. I’m reconnecting. Spending time with people I haven’t seen in years. Swimming. Trying out old habits to see if I feel the excitement they once brought me. I'm kind of excited about the idea of living by myself for a while. I’ve never done that. I moved from my parents’ house in with Ronja and Joel, and then in with Lisa. I’ve never made my own decisions in my own space. I think I need that. I’ve never been good by myself, always too prone to falling into a funk and feeling sorry for myself. I need to work through that, learn how to live with myself and completely understand my wants and needs before I can even think of living with anyone else. “I don’t want you to go. That will make it real for me.” So now we’re talking about the equity in the house, how to divide things up fairly, who will get the cats, all the crap that comes along with this huge and deeply sad change in our lives. It’s both funny and awful that dealing with separating our lives makes it easier to not deal with the separation of our lives. As long as we keep talking about who gets which DVD, we don't have to think about why. I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want to get divorced from Lisa; I didn’t want to ever get divorced period. I didn’t want to have to look at my life at 35 and start all over again. Building a home, building a family, building a life. I know she doesn’t either. At some point in the future, probably when I’m lying in bed in whatever condo or apartment I end up in, lying in the bed that we bought together that ended up being a place of rest for neither of us…. At some point in the future, I’m going to be able to look at all this with real clarity, and see what we once had and understand how it changed into something neither one of us wanted. I’ll be able to understand how the good and the bad all combined into something entirely grey, where we were living together but not truly living. There was a lot of good. A whole lot of laughs and hugs and smiles. I don’t regret any of that. I think I’ll be able to eventually look back at it all without taint. Because despite everything that went wrong, where I slipped into my funk of ‘waiting until things got better’, where Lisa started to despair of anything ever getting better at all, despite all that, it was still the best years of my life. I’ve had my kick in the ass. From now on it’s all up to me. |
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from 8-Track Mind Tracked on February 28, 2007 09:11 PM |
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