Last night I slept with your music in my ears. I didn’t doubt that you were speaking to me or what it meant. My heart heard your pain, and your hope, and I felt you. For the first time in this, I felt reassured and I felt relief. Our connection, strained immeasurably, has not broken beyond repair.

Today doubts overcome me. Am I imagining a conversation? Is there even a message to be found in these notes, or am I humming along with the wind?

I’m so afraid. Afraid of reading into what’s not really there, of being lost to wishful thinking. Afraid of the mistakes I have made, and of the journey before me. The life I imagined, the future I was building, is in peril. I close my eyes to the damage and sometimes cannot help but comfort myself with the hope that something has survived, something I will find when I allow myself to look.

But today I mourn. I won’t let myself search the wreckage of what was. I won’t be overwhelmed by the need to start over, if I find that nothing remains. The planning and the analysis and the implications can all wait.

I am in hell. As best I can, I will not hope for otherwise. But I will not disown my hope either. I will take it in. I will go on. I will try to quiet my brain, and wait for my heart to speak.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
—Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find

I ache with regret that I was not threatened earlier. I am overcome with grief for for the damage I have caused. How hollow it feels for my doubts to have fallen away now. How despicable seems my impulse to shout, “Never again. I have learned. I have changed. I am not who I thought I was.” I have no reason to think I would be believed. How awful it is to have required a deathbed for an epiphany.

I’m so ashamed. So angry. All those protective walls I put up, and not a single one of them mattered in the end. All the caution, the hesitation, the anxiety and the fear: about FEELING LIKE THIS. Just as I feel at this moment. The defenses meant nothing.

I was a rose who thought her thorns would protect her from the tigers. I grew them sharp and strong, and felt invincible. But the thorns brought harm, not protection. They pricked those who would have otherwise taken care of me.

Now I am alone with my wounds, shaped by the gun. If only I had been more malleable before it came to this. I sit in annihilation and it is my fault. It is so hard to go on.

I have been trying to be strong and loving and not think about things too much, but all I want to do is feel better. I walk the streets making the soft moans of a wounded animal. I sit in windowless conference rooms in my office and cry until everything goes black and my mind leaves for a little while.

On one of my walks today I thought, I wish you were stronger. I wish you had figured out how to make us both happier with each other again without putting me through this. Then I thought, that’s not fair. You said you felt like this too. And you learning to deflect my anger and selfishness would not have forced me to deal with it.

Still, I want to pretend none of this ever happened. I want it to all go away. Part of me wants to start drinking but I fear I will never stop if I do. I understand why people make drastic life changes when things like this happen: moving away, sleeping around, becoming generally reckless. How tempting it is to find distractions from the pain, so you don’t have to think about it anymore.

I worry I will do something crazy. I fight the impulse every day. To be in your apartment when you come home from work. To accost you on the street and ask for a hug. To email you incessantly, every thought that comes into my head, about us and about how I feel and about anything of the other things that I no longer have someone appropriate to share with.

You are the love of my life and I feel our relationship falling apart was my fault. I am a strong person and I’m not trying to excuse my behavior, but I don’t know how to cope with this. I depend on you. If you make demands I will meet them. I am still the person you fell in love with, I just got careless and I made you feel like shit. I will take concrete steps to keep from repeating this mistake. I will be better for you. If I can be patient and strong, some day you might believe me.

I had a dream last night. Someone had given me a bowl of stew and I was chewing it while I walked around in a group setting. My stomach started to hurt.

I felt something at the back of my throat, so I reached into my mouth to see if I could scoop it out. I could feel a little flap that seemed like loose food, so I started pulling at it to get it out. It did not come out easily.

I grabbed hold of something thick and dark that looked like a rope at first. When I looked closer, I saw that the rope was actually little pieces of rats tied together. Arms, tails, and noses, melded together in a macabre chain and still wrenching out of my throat.

The horrible stream reached its end and broke out of me, but then I felt another tickle behind my tongue. I started to gag, but instead of vomiting it up I had to keep pulling to bring it up. And when that one found its end, I felt the tickle again.

I have poison inside me. It is disgusting, and horrible, and sick. It cuts me coming out, so wrapped around my intestines and intertwined with my veins. And I suppose that although I keep trying to rid myself of it, there will always be more. Others can see the marks of my contagion. They would do well to stay away, and in the end, they all do. They all will.

I have been an atheist for over a decade. That context is important. I’ve been thinking lately that falling in love is like believing in God. Faith is a requirement for both. And risk is unavoidable in either case.

My impulse is always to build a coherent narrative out of a collection of moments. I have always been a good storyteller. It’s a comfort to believe that patterns and lessons can always be found, and meaning created. It’s reassuring to look at a situation, list out future possibilities and consider their ramifications, and choose between them. It’s empowering to make a plan, to move forward with it, to think things through.

That process has failed me though. I don’t trust myself to see clearly anymore. The interpretation that makes the most sense has implications I can’t accept. I can’t do things over and make different choices. I don’t trust my instincts to go forward. I’m paralyzed and I can’t move on. I’ve lost my faith in my view of the world. I no longer believe in myself.

If this is my life now, I don’t want it.

I am closer to where I want to be now.

Make no mistake, I am still miserable. I’m broken at my core. I wake up some days thinking about what’s happened and I can’t force myself out of bed. In lucid dreams, I say I don’t want to wake up, because when I do he’ll be gone again. If I think about it, I can’t help but cry. I cry a lot.

And yet.

I’m awake.

I wasn’t before this. The pieces of my life were drifting into place but I was ripping them apart. I scoffed at how they were fitting together. I fantasized about a different puzzle entirely. I was either fighting things or resigned to them, feeling angry and trapped, either way, that I was being forced down a path I didn’t want to be on.

My life was closer to what I want, but I didn’t know I wanted any of it. I was terrified to reach for anything more than what I had. I told myself I needed less, preferred less even. I told myself I was different, and I don’t need what so many others seem to want, what they yearn for, what they find if they’re lucky. I mocked them. I thought and I analyzed and I rationalized, but I didn’t have an inkling of an idea of how I actually felt.

At least now I’m not working against my own interests, fragmented into a false brain vs. heart dichotomy that put me at war with myself. I am crushed, but my mind and my soul are at peace and I hear them both. Finally, I am whole. I’m empty, full of longing and regret, but at least I’m no longer stuffed with shit.

So. I will mourn how close I was, how blind I was. I will practice giving the love I want to put into the world. I will try to make it right, eyes open this time, waiting and praying for a second opportunity. But it is a gift to know that I am closer.

I remember this weight; this fear. I remember the desperate attempt to hold back, the apprehension that I am made only to ruin things. Hope gathers in my chest as a knot, a heavy but fragile ball that makes it uncomfortable to move, sit, or lie down. I feel so defenseless, cradling this newborn part of me that could be so easily broken.

All my artifice, my selfishness, my cruelty, spawns from this.

I want to imagine I don’t need protection, but that if I do I have weapons to defend myself. I’ll preemptively strike at anyone who would get close. I’ll say I’m not vulnerable and drape the lie with camouflage so even I believe it. I’ll sabotage my own efforts and lash out at myself, attempting to mercy kill this tiny offshoot inside me that I’m afraid I don’t have the resources to sustain, much less nurture.

How do people live like this, without hurting others or themselves? After all, in the end wasn’t it my nightmare that came true, not my dream? I suppose it is this pain that I have to learn to live with. It is the one that seems to endure through everything else, eating away at me — when otherwise I might be happy.