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.
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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 |
Closed/on Hiatus
![Your writing in the other hand [sic] is pure filth and disgusting.](http://www.gotbears.com/gund/sesamestreet/75985.jpg){kind=link}