The mornings are a time of hope. For a few moments the insulation holds and I am allowed to roam undisturbed in my own mind. The outer world is not yet able to impose itself and so questions of what is possible and practical can not take hold. It is a happy time for me. For those few moments I have the space to love purely and safely.
Then the thaw starts. It's like once I notice it (and by "it" I mean the world outside my mind) the sun shoots up like I'm watching a time lapse recording of a sunrise and the ice thaws that protects me from them. I feel more and more unlike them. I feel less and less confident in my ability to get through. David's words have been playing in my head from his program notes to Testament:
When I consider the darkness that we carry,
the pain we inflict – on those close to us, and on those we don’t even know,
the death we bring through rage, ignorance and indifference,
I say “Please God, help us to melt the rage into love,
And love into understanding and acceptance.
I feel so sad today. I think there is something fundamentally different about me that they can't understand. I seek to make them laugh and help them find a way through their pain and so often they see only some low resolution approximation of the most superficial layer of that. I keep seeing in my head the image of Lenny from Of Mice and Men after George tries talking with him. I am this big stupid ogre of a man trying to love people who I seem only able to hurt.
I miss her every day. Every day some part of me that I don't show or talk about bleeds and screams in pain. I am grateful that the pain is less today but it certainly isn't anywhere near gone and it remains substantial and defiant, like her. It has been one thousand one hundred and seventeen days since she left. My best guess is we had somewhere around 6,000 days together before that day. I estimate about 5,500 of those days she didn't hate me. She didn't describe me as a predator or a rapist or abusive or having taken advantage of her. In her mind I was not yet an oppressor or a symbol of all that men have done to subjugate women the past millennia. I was her person. I was who she called when she didn't know how to go on and couldn't find words to say it. I would sit there with her hour after hour and just be with her. Never knowing how but entirely unable to do anything but try. I thought after 15 years of doing that she had come to know who I was. I even dared (stupidly) to begin to believe she did not see me as that ogre accidentally squeezing the life out of people I loved but that there was something worth living inside of me. Even at the height of this hubris I never imagined anything grand. I just began to slowly soak in the idea that there was a little sliver of something inside me she found beautiful. And I loved her so much I could not have cared if any one else ever saw it. The only thing that mattered was what she saw in me through her eyes.
It felt so good to feel that for a short while. I suppose it must have been 900 days or so I got to feel that. For 900 days I got to try on the feeling of worthiness. It felt so good. I still close my eyes and breath it in sometimes. I can feel it on my skin like a favorite sweater until the outer world imposes itself again and that disappears.
I was just telling someone yesterday that after she left and took all that with her, I was left with a choice. I choose (most days at least) to keep on loving her and to wrap my arms around those precious days in my mind. I don't know why my life has unfolded in a way that has been so persistently filled with suffering, nonetheless I choose to keep the good memories compartmentalized from the bad. I want to be able to look through the photo albums of beautiful memories in my mind and enjoy them, even knowing what came after. And moreover I want to be brave enough to choose to love that way again.
The only thing I want out of whatever days remain for me is to taste again what it feels like to be loved down through to the bones. I'm not optimistic it will happen but I promise to cherish it if it does. I can sometimes imagine a life with someone and my god I would cherish it. I just don't think anyone can see that shred of me worth loving. It seems more and more likely it was never there. I want to believe that her insanity stopped her from being able to see the part of me worth loving anymore but the logician in me is making the compelling case that her insanity is what made her think she saw it in the first place.
Teach us how to forgive; teach us how to be forgiven,
because it is not a simple business…
Is it too much even to dream for a George to make the pain stop? Someone who at least cries while it happens.
