The sad, final acts

Packing up her things, putting them in bags. Wrapping up the few breakable items (gifts I'd bought in happier times). Finding a few things that were heartbreaking reminders, noticing a few things that were missing, suggesting that she knew she was leaving for the last time before she told me. That really hurt. For some reason, taking her shampoo and conditioner out of the bathroom and packing those away was a really hard moment; such simple things, but so intimate, such potent symbols of a life together.

I've written here of the problem of my sexual attraction to her; she discovered those writings and was very hurt by them. Because I never thought she'd find this blog, I didn't go into as much detail about all the myriad other ways I was attracted to her, ways that counted for at least as much. I mean, I stayed in the relationship for a reason. Packing her things away managed to remind me of almost all of those: her laughter, her idiosyncracies, her ineffable sweetness (most of the time), her focused intelligence. Her sheer loveableness. I hope I showered her with enough love - I know I tried to.

I had to write a note to go along with the bags of her stuff, which were to be delivered to her by a friend of mine. That was brutally hard, my hand shaking so badly I wonder whether she'll even be able to read it. The finality of that short letter, written on old-fashioned stationery; it shook me literally and figuratively. Even in those final moments I was careering wildly between wanting to express my pain at the separation, my hurt at some of the things she'd said and done, and my love for her. It must read like the ravings of a demented meth addict.

I managed to keep from crying while I wrote it, up until the very end, when I told her that I loved her and wanted her to be happy. Those two messages were I think the most consistent things I told her during our relationship, and saying them for the last time just tore the heart out of me. Then I realized that she might be in a place where she can't even read the letter from a perspective of openness, trust, or generosity - she might still be trying to pathologize me. But what I wrote is true, and if she doesn't realize it now, eventually she will. I know that. As confused as I was, I know that my truths were simple and clear.

There was one other sad, final act. Deciding for some reason to hold on to one symbolic set of things: a set of absinthe glasses and a bottle of absinthe. I don't drink the stuff, but it was just too sad to pack those away and literally have no trace of her here, other than the gifts she gave me (which were and are several and significant). But this was about her, not about me, because I don't like absinthe, and suddenly it just seemed so awful to have literally nothing that was about her in my space. The bottle and the glasses were talismans, in other words, markers for some hoped-for future when she and I will be able to be friends and she'll feel fine about coming over and having a drink from her bottle of absinthe. I don't know why that seemed so important, but it did.

Losing even the hope of friendship is just too awful, but that's where this has been headed recently, which is why I was so glad finally to have gotten rid of her stuff. It had become this symbolic issue upon which she'd begun to project all kinds of horrible shit: I was holding it hostage, or I was going to physically harm her if she came to get it, or her friends told her she should just forget about it for fear of having to actually see me. I can't begin to express how much all of that hurt. It was all untrue, the wild fabrications of girlfriends supporting a friend who wasn't thinking clearly about who the man she'd been in love with for 3 years really was, but that didn't stop her from writing these awful things, and they really, really hurt. Getting her stuff out of my space was critical to my moving on and getting the poisonous rage and projection out of my life.

But.

But I can't seem to let go of hope for some sort of "later", some sort of "after", when the wounds have closed and the healing has finished, when the good memories start to creep back in and gradually supersede the bad feelings, when some sort of equipoise of emotion has been achieved. That this is foolish and probably pointlessly self-destructive I realize.

But anyway, that's why I have two absinthe glasses and a bottle of absinthe. They're not the worst traces of her to have; absinthe was something we argued about early, something that she turned out to be right about, something vaguely mystical and mysterious, something in keeping with her enthusiasm for Dada and Surrealism and the artistic temperament of the early 20th century. I tried to find her the best absinthe I possibly could; I had this conviction that nobody had ever given her much and I tried to make up for that. She had some trouble accepting that for what it was, later on.

There's probably a much worse, probably Freudian, analysis, about a gift that I retained. I bought them for her and then kept them. I think my motives are good, but who really knows, right? Who knows why I held on to these reminders of her? Who knows what I hope they'll bring about? And who knows how long I'll actually hold them.

But I do have this simple, compelling vision: some unknown months in the future, me standing behind my bar, her sitting at it, catching up on what's gone on, waiting for the glassy, barely green liquid to turn milky white-green as the water mixes into it, like time transforming the hurt and pain of our separation into something less potent, bittersweet, something that can be approached and appreciated for what it is. I might even share a glass with her.

Reminiscence 3: My First Threesome

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I can't remember

What it was like to come with her. I can't remember what it was like. I remember holding her close while we fell asleep. I remember kissing her neck. I remember her orgasms, but it had been so long since I had one with her that I literally can't remember what it was like. This is not something I'm blaming on her - it was a problem but not anybody's fault.

How funny that we'd end up inverting the usual scenario; the wife/girlfriend who complains of not having come in over a year. We never were a typical couple; she was a lesbian when we met, for beginners.

Men like me

I was just reading, on the recommendation of Mu Ling at The Pavilion, the blog of Hiromi X. Both blogs are written by women unafraid to tackle personal issues that cut to the heart of who they are. It had been my intent initially to attempt something similar here, and yet...

And yet, I've found a couple of things inhibit me.

First is the old gendered, stereotyped characterization of this sort of soul-baring; that it's unmanly, somehow marked as unmistakeably and disagreeably feminine, and that any man who would engage in such an activity is similarly, well, you know... That this should carry any weight with me at all surprises me, having grown up in the era of feminism and having fought battles and carried scars about just such expectations since I was around 10 or 11.

In fact, my depression, social anxiety and a whole host of other problems probably have root in the social dynamics (or, he thinks, ever the careful social scientist, may themselves have caused the dynamics - one musn't get the causation backwards when all we really know is correlation) surrounding the expectations of maleness. I entered junior high school in 1974, about the high point for the ERA-era (sorry) of feminism, when all sorts of gender stereotypes were coming into question. I heard phrases like "male chauvinist pigs" and the like a lot back then, and I didn't want to be one. Anyway, my point is that this sort of self-examination, despite Socratic admonitions regarding the unexamined life, seems culturally typed as feminine.

Second, I note that men rarely comment on each other's blogs of these sorts. Instead, those of us who do it at all seem to have our own cadre of what might uncharitably be called 'blog hags', a group of women who are supportive and read the blogs, comment on them, etc. Maybe plenty of men read them, but to actually interact with the writer, well, that seems to cross into a sphere of intimacy and connection that is, again, gender-typed and inappropriate. How this came up is that I was reading Hiromi's blog and in addition to all the other reactions I had to it, I was just kind of jealous of the support she gets from other women to her experiences. I wish men would do that for each other, too.

Third, now that the anonymity of this blog has been destroyed by my ex, I wonder still about the utility of it. I really valued that aspect of it. Of course, I could just post whatever the hell I want to now that the relationship is over and damn the consequences, but I've already self-censored two posts concerning her for various reasons, on the assumption that she'll occasionally check back in on this blog. I'm pissed at myself for doing that, and of course still angry with her for having so fundamenatally violated my boundaries in this way (she talked a lot about her boundaries and my failures in respecting them, yet seemed unable to recognize mine and her own depredations against them).

Fourth, I notice that my posts veer wildly in tone and focus, making me wonder what exactly it is that I'm doing - the changes in writerly voice seem indicative to me of....something. The blogs of women like Mu Ling and Hiromi seem much more consistent. This could just be doubts about my own authenticity, borne of an early immersion into the preoccupations of existentialism (hey, it was the only philosophy available in libraries and bookstores in small, conservative Southern Californian towns in the mid-late '70s).

So that's it. After a start filled with promise (uncensored exploration of the area where my sexual history intersected with my self-image and depression, and in particular with my issues surrounding attachment), I come to this point, wondering whether I've realized that the goal was either beyond me, poorly conceived, too socially proscribed, or...

The vast mimetic distances between us - Pt. 1

Because I think she's now blocking cookies, I can't be quite as sure that she's reading this at specific times from specific locations, but more basic traffic patterns seem to indicate that I'm still getting visits from my ex here. No matter. If you are reading, K., this is done without malice. This post is about us anyway, and about one of the reasons why I think something was finally revealed to have been missing. And about why it may never have been available, may in fact never be available to be found in any case.

And it's about why I still miss her, or at least the possibility that I thought she represented.

And I'm telling you
I know what you've been going through
In my heart of hearts
When I was here
And you were there
Nothing was between us

- Magazine, "Back To Nature"

One of the first scenes we ever did together would turn out to be the best one we'd ever do. It may yet be the best scene I'll ever have in my life, or one of the two or three. And it may have set us both up with expectations and hopes that could never be fulfilled in the quotidian realm of an ordinary day-to-day relationship, particulary one between equals. If we'd entered into the strange nether world of explicit D/S relationships, there might have been some small, slim chance, but I kind of doubt it, and besides, a huge part of the attraction between us was that we were frequently intellectual sparring partners, a dynamic quite difficult to maintain within the parameters of D/S.

It was very early in our acquaintance; I'm pretty sure it was months before we'd call ourselves boyfriend/girlfriend. She was at my place and we were playing in my back room. I had her tied to an inversion table (bondage table thing that can be used to hold a person at any point on a 360 degree axis), but was mostly using it as a stable flat surface upon which to restrain her.

Already there was some kinetic bond between us, some sense that there was something special if indefinable there, something latent with possibilities far beyond the usual play partner stuff. I'd played with literally a dozen women in the year prior to this, and I hadn't had this feeling before. She seemed emotionally available in a way that I was, in a way that I needed and needed to reciprocate.

She was lying on her back, restrained, and I had lots of little plastic clips all over her most sensitive anatomy. Once they were all on, I was doing some very painful things to those clips, things designed to bring her to higher and higher levels of pain. And they did, quite succesfully, until at one point she actually started to scream.

Now, screaming is a mixed blessing for S/M tops. We love it, but if you live in an apartment, it can have all kinds of nasty ramifications. So I lent forward, told her to scream into my mouth, and covered her mouth with mine. And kept hurting her. It was one of the most intense, intimate things I've ever done or shared with somebody.

At some point after I'd stopped the active pain part of all this, I was looking down at her and there was this look in her eyes...she wanted to feel again, she wanted to love, she wanted to belong to somebody, and she thought at that moment that I was the one. But she was scared, too. And she was crying, because it had been an intense scene, both physically and emotionally.

And as I looked into her sensitive, beautiful eyes, I suddenly started to cry too, because I felt the same needs - to feel, to love, to trust, to have someone belong to me, to belong to them, and after what we'd just shared, I thought it seemed she was probably the one. And the crying together was even more intense than the screaming into my mouth and all the other painful stuff. It was an amazing, transcendent moment, when I felt myself melting into her, and her melting into me, the boundaries between us giving way to the heat we'd just created.

Nothing was between us.

I would give anything to have that moment with her back again.

A great whooshing sound

The sound that hope makes as it leaves a body isn't like that at all. It's more like the labored sigh of a bed-ridden cancer patient.

The great whooshing sound is what comes flying in to occupy the newly vacated space. Most of the time there are a number of prospective tenants for even dilapidated old walk-ups. Despair, rage, panic, they all take turns squatting. But eventually the credit checks are complete, the deposit checks return marked 'NSF', and the unit is left vacant. And the landlord is absent.

That's how it is for me, anyway. I've never yet been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness other than depression, so maybe my point of view will change upon the discovery of some cluster of misbehaving cells or a shaped charge of genetic plastique. But so far in my life, this is how it is for me, every time.

So when does this harrowing occur for me, when does this horrific expiry of hope reach the stage of sigh and whoosh and Notice To Quit?

Too stupid: the death of love. When it seems like the estrangement of my Other from me has gone beyond a certain point, then hope reaches for the call button and sighs its last.

And just to be clear, this isn't hope for a revival of the relationship. This is hope for survival in some form of the love; I have never yet been able to understand (and surely this is a basic failure, a psychological malformation so obvious that not one of half a dozen therapists has bothered to name it or point it out to me) why love has to end when the relationship does. Why be in a relationship at all? It's like agreeing to hold guns to each other's heads for some period of time, then guessing who'll pull the trigger first. I don't enter relationships that way. I fully expect that something will survive the end of the romantic/sexual/partnership phase of a relationship; otherwise I wouldn't enter into them.

So: am I hoping for too much, or somehow, too little? Do I need to have a gun to my partner's head for it to count as a real relationship with a chance? Is that my problem, that I expect love to survive in some form and am not desperate until it's too late?

Perhaps it is time to lock and load, so as to prevent looters and squatters; property values seem to drop in this neighborhood all the time...

You're still reading

I know you're still looking here, K. You read this Friday morning at work, then again Friday afternoon, then again yesterday at work even after the late night play party. You checked it from home on Saturday and Sunday. Maybe yesterday you were hoping/fearing to find some emotional reaction from me to seeing you at the party? But I was surrounded by friends, people I hadn't seen in a long time, so it didn't bother me that much, if that's what you were hoping for. I hope you aren't that petty or vindictive. Anyway, by the time you showed up, I'd already finished my scene, so I had little energy left for atmospheric disturbances.

I wish I knew why - I wish I knew what it was you were hoping or fearing to find here so that you could have whatever peace it is you need to move on. Because that truly is all I want between us and for each of us.

But I also know that you're telling others about this site, which I specifically asked you not to do. I repeat, please stop it, immediately. You have violated my privacy enough.

Probably moving on

Unfortunately, the anonymity of this blog has been compromised. My ex, for reasons known only to herself, evidently felt engaged enough with me to indulge a search for a private blog of mine that became known to her.

That this represents a total violation of my privacy is obvious, insofar as I stated that it was crucial to me that this private blog (unnamed, content unspecified) remain private and anonymous and was acting as a place for me to work things out in almost complete anonymity (hitherto, only one person knew who I was on here). She knew that and decided to hunt for it anyway, for whatever reason. That this feels like a massive betrayal goes without saying. That it is also vaguely and creepily stalkerish is also pretty obvious, but people in love and pain do weird things to each other.

As a result, I'll probably have to move along to other, even more anonymous pastures. If anybody out there can come up with a good reason for me to keep this open, please let me know.

Not dying, sorting things out, and other necessary tasks

Well, it just gets weirder. And as Dr. Hunter Thompson used to say, "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

So far no dying. This is good.

Additional conversations with Utterly Inappropriate Woman #1 have ensued since she's been in the in-patient unit, but I remain fully aware of the idiocy of anything beyond support here. And it hasn't been limited to her.

But there is also necessary sorting out to be done. Last weekend, there were some unfortunate events that had to do with:

• my forgetting that I'm not really a normal person; and
• my forgetting that my ex isn't really a normal person either
• my forgetting that the particular combination of mental illnesses, while fine and even supportive when love was the predominating mode between us, is not so good when she's at pains to expiate or suppress guilt at her behavior at the end of the relationship, and the love has been replaced by this guilt, the resultant resentment, projection, and the rest of the ugly panoply of defenses.
• my cascading emotions around all of this: loss of idealized image of ex, which was crushing if a little late in coming, all things considered; renewed sense of betrayal; sense of shame at being emotionally labile in the first place and at all susceptible to this sort of horseshit; sense of hopelessness at ever being able to find my way out of the morass. Hence the need for the Happy Face Optimism Mantra to be found one post previous.

Now before all this, which all took place Sunday, I had been doing well. I'd thought that she and I had reached a pretty happy and tender equilibrium with each other - I felt reassured that she was not doing what I most feared, she seemed reassured that I wasn't interested in continuing bitter recriminations, and we had a meeting that seemed to remind both of us how very much we care/cared about each other. It felt sad, but OK-sad, not awful-sad.

Anyway, it had made my 2nd week in my outpatient program much, much better. Knowing that she was out there and didn't suddenly just hate me or not care whether I lived or died was comforting - it reaffirmed the emotional reality of the preceding 2 1/2 years. Sometimes two people can love each other a lot and just not have conditions be quite right, and it's OK. I always loved and trusted her, and it was very important to me to feel that I'd not been wrong to trust her that way. The death of that trust...it would have been awful, like the death of something inside me. Or worse, the death of part of me.

So I'd made quite a bit of progress during that 2nd week (last week), and was even reaching out to other patients, both in group and out of group. One young guy, previously alluded to, needed to hear that nobody hates him, so I made sure to let him know in a couple of different ways on a couple of different days how much I enjoy him (nothing cheesily obvious - I'm capable of greater subtlety than the flat description given here would indicate). Another guy was all alone in the city, having come out of inpatient after all his friends had moved out of the city. So I gave him a call on the weekend, just so his phone would ring and someone would ask him how he was. I expressed to the group as a whole how valuable I'd found our discussions and common work and initiated a phone & email list so we could contact each other in crisis. Little stuff like this. And of course, sure, another call to the Utterly Inappropriate Woman.

So yesterday what happens? Utterly Inappropriate Woman's inpatient roommate joins our group, and at lunch, gets a bit flirtatious with me. Worse, she's insanely, ridiculously, achingly, just stupid attractive. Dark, dark eyes, indeterminately exotic background, multiple visible piercings that suggest others...hugely alluring, in a word. Physically, pretty much everything my little heart could desire. Considering that she'd been on the inside for a few weeks, who knows what her particular emotional/mental state was/is, though. Probably suicidal depressive from the look of things.

So say hello to Utterly Inappropriate Woman #2. This is going to drive me mad. Oh, and I came home yesterday from all this to a phone message from UIW#1, who had phone privileges.

I am catnip to the mentally/emotionally fragile. Sadly, they're always at least slightly more fragile/complicated/screwed up than I am. Obviously, there's an inherent self-bias here, but testimony from several friends, including during the present breakup, confirms this general impression. To be sure, the ex was by _far_ the most sane of my recent girlfriends, but she has plenty of problems and perhaps the biggest is her inability/refusal to admit that these problems might be playing a part in her problems with relationships. Everything wrong in our relationship was, you see, basically my fault, at least according to her.

Now, how often is that really true? It's not like she had a brilliant track record either prior to me. For example: two successive and totally different partners basically lost interest in having sex with her after a great beginning - coincidence? I'd say no, but I'd also never broach a topic that brutal, that potentially destructive, with her. Hence the "cowardice" theme of this blog. Her selfishness during sex. The odd, passive, nearly dissociative quality alluded to in a different post. Other, more intimate, if prosaic problems. Things I never said to her that I should have at least brought up. Too late now, obviously. A catalogue of cowardice, compiled too late.

So now what?

Well, clearly, #1 is don't die.

#2 is don't try to enter into relationships because they're there right now. In other words, don't be as desperate as my ex. And especially don't do this with UIW.

#3...I've got to somehow move beyond this past weekend with the ex. It really hurt, albeit not in the typical ways (jealousy, rage, etc). It's hard to explain, particularly in brief, but I think/thought very, very highly of this woman. I respected her, thought she was morally highly evolved & conscious, unlike a few of the women I'd been most recently involved with before her. She cared about how people felt, she thought about how her actions would affect others, she was thoughtful: she was fully human, in other words, something so rare, when you think about it.

That she now doesn't seem quite so ennobled is unfortunate, but has little to do with me. She has her needs, and I have mine. I simply have to concentrate on retaining the strength I need to not fall into the bad patterns (see: UIWs). Whether or not she has the strength of insight or character to see into herself that deeply can't occupy me, however fervently I want to believe in that vision of her.

Don't die

Just repeat as necessary. Prayer, mantra, intervention, self-hypnosis. All the psychic power of the tone-poem dervish of the whirling mind brought to bear on one thought, one idea, one heartbeat, one thing that must be known out of the ocean of that which cannot be known: don't die.

Don't die. Don't die. Do not die. Just do not die. Repeat as necessary, no matter how enticing the invitation, how reassuring small the guest list. Mindful of this one thing above all else - don't die.

Lather up the scrubbing bubbles of the simplicity of the phrase, rinse, and repeat: don't die. Do not go out and die. Do not lay down and die. Do not curl up and die. Just don't die.

If you're capable of it and you've got the necessarily lustrous body for it (some of us are thinning), add the creme rinse of contract: you can't die because of your mother/because of your friends/because of your ghod/because of the mess it would leave for whoever finds you/because of the one you love. You can't do that to them, so don't die.

Unfortunately, all the shibboleths of the demiprofessionals (suicide hotline phone answerers, bad therapists, cops called to your house by terrified friends or lovers, moderately informed friends, late-night radio talkshow hosts) are like baby shampoo - unequal to the task of deep mindful cleansing at hand.

Permanent solution to temporary problem? No, that is incorrect. Rather, permanent solution to the current acute outbreak (among how many excruciating outbreaks? how many must be borne?) of a recurrent, seemingly incurable and permanent disease.

Selfish? This is a charge simply too stupid to bear much scrutiny, except to point out that the very last thing most of us are feeling at this moment is a surfeit of self. Quite the contrary. The idea is to get very, very small indeed, smaller than a concept, smaller than a notion: certainly we are already smaller than an identity.

Mantra, self-intervention, hypnotic prayer, numbing repetition until the correct drugs are found, the right cocktail mixed, until the tumblers fall into place, until the therapeutic/pharmaceutical philosopher's stone transmutes the base metal of dosage and talk into the gold of a quiet mind: don't die.