eros, logos

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