eros, logos

Sunday, March 08, 2009

ancient history: sunday mass

It's sunday morning and that is where my lover is, at mass, with his wife and children.
He often texts me during the service, and sometimes demands that I masturbate and come for him during it, though he won't be able to check his voicemail until it is over.

Although I comply, I feel contempt for him over this. Although I am, now, the atheist, I was once a good Catholic, and his notions of sin and trangression and forgiveness are so very far removed from mine. I am the atheist yet I judge him harshly because he does not hold his faith dear enough--his principles. My former Catholicism is why I find boundaries and transgression so compelling, but I don't think one can truly understand transgression or sin, or guilt, without having such boundaries.
---------------------
He tells me he doesn't worry about discovery, that he believes his marriage would survive it. What is between them would be strong enough to endure that revelation.

I have my doubts about this. One can love and wish to forgive, and yet ultimately find it impossible to forgive such a betrayal. I do not think any of us can predict in advance how such a betrayal will take us, much less another. The theory has a way of coming apart from the practice.

What would not survive that discovery would be us, him and me. I have no doubt that it would be a condition for her that he sever all contact with me.

I also have no doubt that he would comply.

My wife, he calls her to me, sometimes. My wife. I know her name and we use it, and these words from him, my wife, they fall on me like a blow to my chest. In those words and tone I hear finality. I hear both possession and being owned. I hear the weight of the things that hold him together, these things he has freely assumed that give him identity, that help constitute his self, the public one and the one he holds most dear.

I am no part of that identity; I am inimical to it. There is no place for me in his public world. Men shouldn't leave their families, he has said to me, and I do not think he sees why this causes me pain. It's not for any trivial and obvious reason--I don't want him to leave them.

It's because what this means to me is that I am shameful to him; it is not love for others, but shame and the fear of shame that will ultimately keep him where he is. Like Peter, he would deny me three times and turn his face from me.

She is his other half, but I am his other self, the secret one. Yet I know and have always known–I am only transient to him, an obsession he secretly hopes will lift and fade with time.

What is between us merely adds to the sum of his happiness, although it is the whole of mine.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Philip Larkin, Church Going

Reminder: all posts starting with 'ancient history' are posts I wrote but didn't publish then about my old situation, not now.

Labels: ancient history, old news, X

posted by O @ 11:37 Social bookmark this 16 comments

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Damage, 2

Coincidentally, or maybe not, I heard from X the other day. The strange coincidence is that he mentioned the topic in damage 1—the way he told me about his wife’s biopsy.

I suspect that he’s reading here. It doesn’t matter. He never did respect my wishes about that. If I am honest I have to admit I hope he's read me writing about someone else. I still have the desire to hurt him, you see.

What’s strange about this coincidence is that we never discussed that when we broke up, and I doubt he knew or understood how deeply it affected me and why. I am not sure I understand it all either, and I should try to sort that out.

I accused X here of lacking selfknowledge or insight, but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge my own. One day I will have to understand why I was so willing to spend so much time in a situation where the message I was always getting was that I didn’t matter, I wrote him after we ended. I can’t say I understand all of that now, but I have some ideas.

After he'd told me he imagined something happening to her, and then told me about his wife’s biopsy, he told me that he’d be very busy at work for a few days, that he wouldn’t have much time free, ….and I already expected this. Quite frankly, I was relieved. I expected it because everytime he made some sort of confession, every time we seemed to be close, he would pull away afterwards. I was relieved because I needed to sort out what I felt and what I wanted to do.

And yet, and yet, I still loved him, or believed I did. I understood him better than he understood himself. Better than I understood myself, and my reasons for staying.

So I decided to end us, but really, the decision was already made. It was encoded in everything we did, everything we said. What’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh, and affairs always have ending encoded in their bones.

In our case he couldn’t seem to stop hurting me, or hurting himself. I understand now, he wrote me recently, every fight we had was about my refusal to see you as a person. You told me flat out this was happening, but I refused to see it.

I don’t believe I invented him, but he invented me. It’s so easy to invent the lover in an affair, to invest them with everything you want to see, to overlook the parts of their puzzle that don't neatly fill the hole in your life. What I hadn’t realized at first was this meant he couldn’t really see me. I don’t wonder you resent me now, I said to him. How dare the statue speak?
You were always too stupid to know I'd written that about you.

But before that happened, I want to tell the story….

I’d decided to leave, but I was still so in love, so blinded, that I wanted to hurt him as little as possible. I wanted to still be his friend—I thought we would salvage that. And so I waited…I waited til things would be better at work for him, til he’d hear about her biopsy, til the time of uncertainty would be over.

This was very hard for me. I’d grown accustomed to hiding my true feelings, hiding my realities from him. But it was a very hard time for me. I was sick and I hadn’t gone to the doctor. I had a sinus infection and a fever, and I felt very ill and very sorry for myself. And in the midst of this I got an email from him, an extremely rude and cruel email berating me for ‘bothering’ him, (I had asked him how he was).

As I was still reading that email I got another, this one a frantic apology, filled with excuses, justification, self-pity. I couldn’t take it in, you know. I was blindsided by this casual and small cruelty he’d visited on me.

A few hours earlier I’d gotten an email from this dear man. I didn’t know him at all at that point, he was just a reader and fellow blogger, but he’d signed me up for a word-a-day subscription.

And you know—that’s how I knew X and I were over. Finally.
Because a total stranger was more kind to me than he had been, more thoughtful than he had been—and yet I couldn’t stop that lift of my heart, that brief hope that it was from him, that he’d thought to do something for me to show me he’d been thinking of me….and I realised he'd never given me a fucking thing. A card once, I think.

And that’s how I realized we were over, and it was pointless to hope to be friends, because he was not my friend.

I still waited two weeks to tell him though.

I am not sure if that was self-denial on my part or my desire to make an exit when I could be sure he'd notice.

Labels: honesty, self-denial, self-loathing, sss, X

posted by O @ 10:22 Social bookmark this 12 comments

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

damage, part 1

I wrote of how X and I broke up and then reconciled, but then we stopped saying the word love. I wrote in the end of the emotional starvation diet I was on, the willingness with which I accepted the idea that it was now too dangerous for him to use that word, or to engage fully in my life. I made excuses for his selfishness because I wanted to, and convinced myself that it was perfectly normal, in the circumstances, for me to remain aware of every detail of his emotional and daily life, respond to his physical needs, while he remained wholly uninvolved with the details of my own life. I wouldn't tell him, and he did not appear to notice.

And then one day he told me that 'last year' he'd imagined ways we could be together. He told me he'd wondered if the children would like me. He imagined that she'd find a lover and leave him. We would be together, it would all work out.

To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. The first things I thought (and said) are "Why are you telling me this?" and then "Why on earth are you telling me this now?"-- because this conversation, had we had it a year before, would have changed things. I would have broken up with him, because I don't believe he would have ever left his wife, and I believe--I hope--that I would have told him not to.
But why torture me with this information now? What was the point? What was the point of essentially telling me "I once loved you that much, but now I no longer do"--because isn't that what he was saying?

But before I could say any of this, or even process it correctly, finally, he said, he'd had "dark, sleeping fantasies of ....something happening to her."

I didn't know how to take this in. I told him he shouldn't have told me, I told him I didn't understand why he had told me, what the point was, and most of all, why he was telling me this now. But I knew I'd get no sensible answer; he never could understand himself. In this case I couldn't understand him either.

His imagining of me as taking her place, his wishing her out of existence, made me sick. For me that was the ultimate betrayal, and one for which I couldn't forgive him. Or myself, because wasn't I the cause?

There's a great line in Josephine Hart's novel Damage about how damaged people are dangerous, because they know they will survive. I think that's (mostly) a load of crap. As a damaged person, I can state with assurance that there are many times I doubt my capacity for survival, most especially this past year. I have been clinically, desperately depressed at times, and many times I felt I could not go on.

Damaged people can be dangerous, to themselves and to others, but most of all we're like the vase that has fractured. Those fractures are still there, no matter how well or imperfectly we are mended, and certain invisible lines of force can bring that out. Sometimes we can be stronger in the places we're mended, sometimes not.

It's not damaged people that are the most dangerous, but people with no capacity for self-analysis, self-reflection. They live in a dream state, not knowing or understanding their own actions. Although I'd loved X, I had from the beginning known that he was largely unaware of his own motives. His relationship with me was a perfect example. I don't mean to suggest that I am always aware of my own,--I know I am not-- but there are degrees of self-knowledge and understanding, and for all his intelligence, X was low down on that scale when it came to understanding his involvement with me.

The next day he called me and mentioned casually, as though it were something I already knew, and that he genuinely believed he'd told me, that his wife was today having a biopsy done on a suspicious lump in her breast.

Then I understood the timing of his confession. I understood it all, and I understood too that this was the end for me; I would not be able to go on with him after what he'd done.

As for me, I am a watercolor
I wash off.
Anne Sexton, For My Lover Returning to His Wife

Labels: damage, ending, X

posted by O @ 03:35 Social bookmark this 8 comments

Saturday, December 27, 2008

cheating

Can you cheat on a married man?
Oh yes, I said. And that's exactly when you should know it's time to get the hell out.

I remember what that was like:

Last night I fucked someone who was not you.

I didn't want to. What I wanted was you. You were far away. All day
talking with me and it's not til the end that sex arises. You ask me
what I will be doing tonight--coming, i tell you. I'll be thinking
about you, and coming.

You ask me to tell you more, you ask me to tell you I want your cock.

You know I want it. You know I need it. I know you love this, the
intensity of my need for you.

But it's not fair. It's not fair that I should be wet and aching and
wanting you, that I should be living my life on the fringes of you.
I'm starving and I'm given crumbs. You ask me now to tell you I want
you, how, where, and I know your wife will be home in ten minutes. You
know it too. You know you'll leave me here, undone, possessed.

I think again of your wife, and how you'll fuck her tonight. I know
you fuck her, I know how, I know you don't think of me when you do.
I've known that even without you telling me that.

There is nothing I have of you that is only mine. Nothing. Even this,
even desire, even your desire for me--all of it goes back to her.
Wanting to fuck me makes you fuck her harder and better. The
inventiveness I bring to you, you give to her. The things I teach you,
you show her. You love her more now, not less, and it is because of
me.

I think of you fucking her and I envy her. I will give you all my
desire, all my passion, knowing you have it with her. Knowing it
amplifies all that vibrates between you two. I will still give you
it--but I cannot live, with nothing for me.

Even this secret you keep from her, the secret of us--you keep it for
her and not for me, for her happiness and not mine.

Last night I got dressed, I painted my eyes, my mouth. I fucked
someone else, and all I thought of was you.

Baby, he called me during it and touched my face. I turned away from
that and I said coldly don't.

Don't call me that.

No one has ever called me that but you.

Call me whore, I told him, because that's what I am now.

Labels: cheating, eros, X

posted by O @ 00:30 Social bookmark this 8 comments