The Final Cut
Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes, I can barely define the shape of this moment in time.
And far from flying high in clear blue skies, I'm spiraling down to the hole in the ground where I hide.
If you negotiate the mine-fields of my mind ...
... and if you beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eye ...
... and if you make it past the shotguns in the hall?
Dial the combination.
Open the priest-hole.
And, if I'm in, I'll tell ya.
There's a kid who had a big hallucination -- making love to girls in magazines.
He wonders if you're sleeping with your new-found faith. Could anybody love him ... or is it just a crazy dream?
And ... if I showed you my dark side, would you still hold me tonight?
And ... if I opened my heart to you -- and showed you my weak side -- what would you do?
[...]
Would you take the children away, and leave me alone?
Would you smile in re-assurance as you whispered down the phone?
Would you send me packing ...
... or would you take me home?
I thought I oughta bare my naked feelings.
I thought I oughta tear the curtain down.
I held the blade in trembling hands, prepared to make it, but --
Just then the phone rang.
I never had the nerve to make the final cut.
I'm going to bed now, calm and cool. This is not a cry for help. It's just the only song to which I know all the lyrics by heart, and which I sing pitch-perfectly every seventh-or-so time I go out to smoke, and which probably annoys the hell out of my neighbors and the happy couples engaging in clandestine nocturnal carnal rendezvouz in the park.
Do not call the cops. Do not have their standard issues kicking in my door. Let me relax, where maniacs don't blow holes in sad men by remote control.
Where everyone has recourse to the law.
And no-one takes the children anymore.
No-one takes the children anymore.
The Verdict
Opposing counsel accused me of being an alcohol and marijuana abuser. How did she come up with any marijuana abuse? Apparently she subpoenaed ECMC. Can they do that? Isn't there some kind of doctor-client privilege? Oh well. In any case, I was presented in quite an unflattering way.
So, I arrive at nine-twentysomething and the hearing finally commences at sometime after noon. All this after (a) having my fucking Droid lose its GPS connection, (b) driving around the labyrinthine streets of downtown Buffalo for far too long, (c) waiting in line at the security checkpoint for ten minutes, (d) finding the court part has been moved, (e) the absence of our law guardian (lawyer for the children) the first two times we were called, and (f) fuck Justice.
Some very cute young ladies in the waiting room, though. Gotta check Craigslist for any "missed connections."
So, we go in. Petitioner's attorney begins with a brush wet with malignant accusations. I get my turn, and have no idea what to say, so I begin to refute her allegations.
Long story shortened, I could not in good conscience consent to the petition, as it consists of harmless incidents inflated grossly into what could be construed as dangerous intentions. Thus, the judge ordered what I presume to be the "fact finding hearing" in July.
Another month separated from my daughters.
Again: I do not know if my daughters even know I am alive, and every day gone by makes them wonder if I still care.
I was, at least, respectful to the court.
The judge provided an order for assignment of counsel. As I am (now) giving roughly half of my gross income to the exish, I cannot afford an attorney. However, on paper, I do not qualify to be assigned one.
Thus, I continue pro-se, representing myself.
I hope the exish realizes what she's doing to her daughters. She must. She must know this. She must know they miss me.
They need me.
I did sneak in an "inadvertent" reference to her as "Ms Haze" a la "Lolita." Maybe she got it.
In any case, now I wait until July.
Of course, if you find yourself in this manner of situation, and you can afford an attorney, by all means get one immediately.
Me? I'm stuck with telling the truth.
And that doesn't go over all that well with Lady Justice.
Fuck You
All of you.
All your fear.
I lie, inasmuch as I don't know the truth. Inasmuch as everything I say is some dialogue of script I've written moments before, seconds before, split microframes of life before speaking it. And I mean it. At the time. But it all fades. Truth is ephemeral. It's a whisper misheard and repeated with mutations and twisted with prerogatives and turned into hateful resentment.
I'm drinking now, and I'm posting publicly. Now, I know this is the wrong thing to do. I know this is what caused some ... some person to ... to cause me to be committed to a mental hospital.
But I won't stop. I can't stop. We can't stop. None of us.
Just say it. Do it. Act what you feel.
What's more true than the words and motions queuing up in your frontal lobes, waiting to be spilled upon the world? If they don't understand, fine. If they don't understand and don't try, it's a pity. If they don't understand and don't care, then fuck them all to Hell.
Years ago.
What if she'd been honest? What if, instead of skirting around her real feelings, hiding behind some ludicrous fear, what if she'd told me how she felt? Because, honestly, and truly, I had no fucking idea. I didn't know. I couldn't understand. She'd try to explain, sometimes, and I'd listen, intently, trying -- but it was all gibberish. We were speaking different languages.
There's only one language we all understand, and that's the rage and tears that spill from an honest heart.
Fuck you all and fuck God. What kind of world is this, where we can't communicate? Babel was never dismantled. It was never finished as a vain, clever gedankenexperiment by a smug watchmaker of a God. It persists, and none of us can relate to each other. Our fears, our pain. They can't be quantified or qualified. They're boolean values.
We are afraid and we hurt.
And instead of trying to fix it? We go on to someone else. We think they're different. We think they understand us. But they're the same beneath a different shade of paint. We'll get tired of them. We'll find some flaw. We'll hate them as much as we hate the man we left, or the woman we left -- the person we couldn't stand to even try to be with anymore.
Some goddamned cunt looked me in the eye over her bifocals at CPEP and said she had never considered suicide. Never. Never in her life had she just wanted to turn it all off. Deluded, or a fucking willful liar. She must have been a doctor, a doctor of the mind, a mesmeristic witch pretending to know how people tick. Had she never looked at herself? How can she even be real? Just another slug sliming her way across the illusory manicured lawns of this putrid Earth?
Is someone going to call the police? Is someone going to say this poor man needs help? That he's in a crisis? That he's a bad father? That he doesn't deserve to live but he wants to die so you should put him in a cage?
Fuck you all.
Every Christ-fucking one of you.
Crash?
I'm not really "up" this late. Had to have a piss, remembered a bag of chicken-wing side-carrots in the fridge, saw my phone flashing, wrote an email, then had a smoke because my mind was out of sleep too long to just splash back into the pillow and the thoughtless bliss of dreamland.
That last post is about my exish/wife inadvertently (ahem) instigating my being committed to a mental institution for a week.
Wanted to give that synopsis, and didn't want to wait until morning because I thought the bit about getting up in the dead of night and eating a bag of baby carrots was funny and had to use it while fresh. Anyhoo, I'm doing better now, besides lacking the financial resources for an attorney to fight the decision of She (in the HR Haggard sense) that I should not see my daughters for three months, with the implication that a dispositional hearing would either cancel it, or "permanently" extend it to two or five years.
Watched "Lolita" last night (the one with Jeremy Irons), which is a frighteningly accurate example of what can happen to a girl when she is denied a father.
Now, if you'll excuse me, there is hopefully a dreamscape better than reality waiting for me in the next room.
Protected: Crash
Geronimo’s Penultimate Trip
Geronimo Horatio Wilder sat on a wooden bench, fingering a holdout pistol in his pocket. Like the ones gamblers used in the wild west, a century before he was born. Like it, but not quite. Rather than gunpowder to propel its deadly charge, its sterile casing contained a real charge: a bundle of caged electrons straining to deliver a single 50-watt laser blast. It was appropriate for his wild-west birth-name bestowed by his whimsical parents. An outlaw. A geriatric outlaw.
Out to kill himself.
The slats of the bench creaked beneath him as he adjusted himself, withdrawing his hand to rub his back. Aches, pains, everything hurt. Everything had been hurting for as long, for as deep as his memory would go before becoming a murky cloud of mixed-up reminiscences. No reason to go on with this.
"Dad?"
Laura. His daughter. She'd told him she was visiting, but he'd neglected to remember. Another Sunday afternoon, another hand-holding session with his forlorn single daughter. Into her forties and not a man in her life. Did he scare them all away? Did he scare her away from them? He wanted her to experience everything he hadn't, so she wouldn't make the same mistakes out of misbegotten regret. She didn't. She was a good girl.
A dull girl.
"Ready?"
Gerald looked up at her, effortlessly forcing a smile. She knew he loved her. She'd always known that. Maybe he didn't "know" it in anything but an obligatory sense, but she knew and believed it.
He called himself Gerald. Never appreciated the whimsy of "Geronimo", and came to think of it as downright offensive during his politically correct years, which didn't last long, but long enough to discard his "Christian" name.
"For the trip? Remember?"
Gerald remembered. She had something planned this week. Kind of a conflict with his plan to disintegrate his being, to unravel the tightly-wound cords of his brain that composed his self.
"Oh, yeah!"
He faked enthusiasm. Again, effortlessly. What does it matter if it's sincere? He's saying it, and she believes it. Always an act.
"We're going to try that new travel service."
"This block looks familiar."
Gerald sat in the back seat. He joked to Laura that it made him feel important, as if she was chauffeuring a big man about town. The buildings were new, the façades were were different. The ground was the same. Something was familiar about it.
"It's where you and mom lived when you first got married."
Gerald nodded into the rear-view mirror. When we first got married.
"Hello, sir, ma'am. Do you have an appointment?"
Laura went through the pleasantries and rigmarole as he found a seat reasonably offset from the other patrons, thumbs twitching through the pages of their e-mags. He laid his head against the wall and closed his eyes, assuming his usual pose reserved for waiting in rooms designed for waiting. E-mags and uninspirational inspirational posters and stale classic hip-hop. He didn't like it in the 90's and he hated it now.
He opened his eyes, sensing Laura above him. She was smiling. He smiled back, rose at her implied request and came with her to the receptionist. She reached for his coat.
"No, I'll keep my coat, thank you." The receptionist shrugged. He gripped the blaster. She led him beyond the threshold of the waiting room into the hallway toward the business proper. Whatever that was. He didn't get what his daughter had explained to him. Not because he was intellectually incapable of it, but because he didn't care.
Laura called to him, "I'll meet you when you come back, dad! Have fun!"
"Well, we put you in this transparent booth, and we send the booth back. Nobody can see you, and you can't interact with anyone. But you can see, hear -- even smell -- everything. It's a window to the past, Mr Wilder."
"Where will it go?"
"Anywhere. Anywhere you like. Your daughter has gifted you with our premium package. From the moment you walked in, all the way back to the very origin of our species: all of time is on the menu, sir."
"2002."
"2002?" The representative seemed disappointed. He was nondescript according to Gerald's perception. When he was young, when he was learning to categorize people, there were still categories. Blacks, Indians, Asians. Everyone was the same now. That same gorgeous tan skin, the light brown eyes. Everyone and everything was one, melded together into the future.
"Certainly we can deliver you there, but -- but why? It's only forty years or so back. Why, it's a mere generation from the Threshold, when our peculiar form of time travel was discovered."
"2002."
"Alright, sir." He sighed, and turned soundlessly in his swivel chair to punch in the destination. Then he rose, took Gerald by the arm, and led him into the booth.
She was crying, on the bed. A blue comforter was wrapped around her. Floral print. He knew it. Familiar. Again. Everything was familiar. The arrangement of chipped paint on the walls. The warped creak of the ceiling fan. The door that wouldn't shut all the way and bounced mockingly when you tried to slam it.
Gerald stood in the machine. The rep had put him in there cursorily, closed the door, tapped onto the interface, and now he was here. Wherever he was.
"What was it? How..." Gerald struggled with the sparse controls, the half-dozen sticks and knobs too much for a brain cluttered with decades of dusty trivia, rusty knowledge, and rancid emotion. "Ah, there." He twisted a knob slowly, then staggered as a blast of noisome air rushed into the chamber and abraded his nose and throat. He quickly turned back the knob.
"Must be this one..."
The image of the woman, of everything around him, magnified. He became, well, not truly, but seemingly, smaller, hovering half-way inside the mattress.
Her hair. That shock of grey. The mole on her shoulder. "No. No, it can't..."
At that moment, she jerked in bed and flopped around to face him.
"Daria?" His cloudy blue eyes widened. He slapped his hands against the plasticene wall. "Daria!" Started pounding. She paid no heed. "She can't hear me. She can't. I can't."
She wiped tears from her cheek, snuffled, stared through Gerald and out the window to the fluttering leaves of a ginkgo tree. Gerald followed her gaze. "That tree, this room, Daria. It's our old house."
He stopped. Body slack. The wrinkles around his eyes dropped and smoothed. Skin quivered. "It's 2002."
"It's the year... it's when she left."
The door opened abruptly and an average-sized man entered. Average in the physical sense, but blown up with rage like a predator expanding itself against wild prey to appear larger. Fire blazed behind him, burned in his eyes. He stopped at the foot of the bed. He didn't touch her.
Gerald whispered aloud to himself, "I never laid a hand on her. Not in violence."
"What? What did I do now? Why do you always do this?"
The woman -- Daria -- lay still in bed, staring out into the early spring sunlight filtering through the branches.
"Look." Then-Gerald sat on the bed, the trail of fire smoldering back into him as he calmed somewhat. "I still love you. I just don't... I don't know what love is. I never had the adventures you had..."
She cringed.
"I want to experience others, other people, other women."
She rolled her legs up and turned over again, positioning her back solidly to him, putting up a wall between them.
The man sighed, reached over to stroke her calf, sticking out from under the bedsheets. She withdrew. He sighed again, rose, and walked out, pulling the door, then pulling again harder to force it shut.
Gerald watched her. The smooth pale skin, the freckles from sunburnt pre-marriage holidays with her parents, the legs, the curve of her belly under the sheets, her breasts. He saw her beneath the covers, he remembered her completely. She was the first and only one he loved. The only one he ever loved.
She got up, throwing back the thick sheet, and walked into the bathroom. Gerald's heart began to thump. Sweat beaded, then poured down his face. "She's going to do it. Now. She's going to do it."
Daria walked to the closet, opened the door, reached inside, and produced a rifle. Then she tip-toed toward the shelf. She was wearing nothing but a long t-shirt. Gerald watched the curve of her bottom exposed beneath it. Not with lust, but with that wonderful familiarity a man feels for his wife. As powerful, as sexual sincere as lust, but not as base.
She grabbed a single shell. 12 gauge. Gerald knew.
She went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Almost immediately after the door closed, a deafening blast. Gerald screamed, fists clobbering the wall between him and his past. "No! Daria! No!"
Too late, and useless anyway.
Now-Gerald watched in a panic as the paramedics rushed in, ahead of a haplessly guiding then-Gerald, his own panic evident. They swarmed into the cramped bathroom, shaking their heads in that instinctive cliché gesture of "dead -- nothing we can do" we learn to imitate from television dramas. Now-Gerald strained to see. The knobs weren't working. He struggled vainly with all of them, then the olfactory trigger kicked in again.
Death. Rusty blood and earthy-sick unleashed viscera. It filled the chamber. He couldn't turn it down. One of the paramedics moved aside, and he saw the stump of her head, as through a synaesthetic haze of this death-stench.
"I only even used the shotgun once. Why did I even keep it in the house?" Now-Gerald shook his head, then slapped it against the glass. Then he heard:
"Wait. This woman's pregnant."
A medic turned to then-Gerald. "Sir, did you know your wife was pregnant?" The color in then-Gerald flushed to his feet. Now-Gerald rose his head from the wall slowly. He knew what was to come; he knew what then-Gerald didn't. He knew the horror. The shame. The crushing shame.
He felt it all over again.
Gerald slumped in the corner of the booth, stuffing his hands into his overcoat pockets. His right hand knocked against the cold blaster, his brittle finger bruising at the contact. He pulled it out, sucked on the knuckle, then the clouds in his eyes parted a bit, a revelation sweeping through.
He took the blaster out, held it to his head, and pulled the trigger.
"Geronimo!"
Gerald opened his eyes. It was white outside the booth. The booth. How did he -- oh, yes. He remembered. But where was everyone? The paramedics? His younger self? His dead--
"Daria?"
Gerald felt himself balloon, heave, swell -- expanding toward infinity and everything as the woman, on her knees, fell into him, wrapped her arms around him, crushed her soft breast to his thumping heart, kissed his neck, his cheek, his reflexively closed eyes.
"You're back. You're you!" She squeezed him. "Oh, my Geronimo."
Gerald began to cry. He hadn't cried in fifty years. It was like a squeaking trickle through an unused garden hose, then a splash, then a deluge. All that rancid emotion was fertile ground now, green and flowers bursting from it. All coming back. All he'd lost. All he'd forgot to feel.
Like a child.
"Daria." He wiped his cheek. She pulled back to look at him, her green eyes full, of love and life and selfless, mindless devotion. "Daria. Wha-- where are we? Why are yo-- why are you ... alive?"
She looked down slowly, but not sadly, scooted back on the floor of the chamber and sat cross-legged in front of him, elbows on her knees, cupping her face, staring at him, smiling softly.
"What? God-dammit, Daria. What? What's going on?"
She laughed to counter the wet, impotent frustration on his face.
"We're both dead. We're both alive. It's all the same here, but, well, I can't say 'now' exactly, but I will. 'Now' you're with me. 'Now' we're together."
He stared back blankly, bewildered.
"I've been waiting for you. For fifty years, for an hour, for a moment, for a second. Waiting for the you I married, the you I fell in love with, the you I knew you'd become again."
He drooped his head and closed his eyes. Whispered.
"I killed you."
She touched his cheek, lifted his face to her, thumb dabbing away a tear.
"I killed myself. You killed yourself."
"We all kill ourselves."
She nodded, voiceless, still smiling.
"What now?"
"Anything. I can show you what I've found, what I've learned. It's probably all white, but, well, not white exactly. Blank. It's blank for you." Gerald nodded, looking out as if underwater, clear and endless, with no boundaries and nothing to quaver in reflection. "But that's the beauty of it. It's a canvas. Once you learn, you do anything."
Gerald stared into the emptiness. In the intangible distance, shapes began to swirl, colors began to emerge.
"You remember lucid dreaming? You loved to dream. We talked about it. When we talked, when we shared. Now." Gerald nodded, still staring. "You regretted not being able to do it since you were a teenager. To touch dream-things, to feel their texture and weight in your hands."
Gerald turned to her, her face bright, full of hope and wonder.
"You can do it here! It's an unreality more real than the one we've left!"
Gerald remembered now. The blaster. He was dead.
He didn't seem to mind at all.
"There's something wrong here. There's two in the booth. How the hell..."
Laura recognized her. From pictures. "Mom?"
"I'm sorry, Ms Wilder. He's -- they're both dead."
Huddled in the corner were the old man who'd entered the booth an hour ago, and an out-of-that-time beautiful young woman with a shock of gray through her raven-black hair. Arms around each other, her head on his shoulder, his resting against hers, one hand in mid-stroke of her hair, the other clasping hers in his lap.
Smiling.
Wordlessly and soundlessly, but Laura could swear the word tumbled from the young woman's lips:
"Geronimo!"
Everybody Hurts
I pick the girls up on Friday around 7PM and bring them back at 2PM Saturday. Friday usually goes awesome. We get something to eat, bring it home, and watch some movie or two.
Saturday, not always so well. It starts good, but as the leaving time draws nearer, the Elder will start to get grumpy, and sometimes go into a full-on tantrum. Every parent knows what this means. They're hungry. They didn't get enough sleep. Something is wrong and what they claim to be the problem probably isn't.
Worse, every parent knows the hell of this situation. The kid won't listen. The kid tosses off her shoes and runs a block away and stands there, and every time you approach she moves further as if the bubble of your existence is pushing her away.
We had an 11AM lunch at Old Country Buffet. They had a hell of a good time there, picking at all manner of foods. This one happened to be beside one of those Spirit Halloween seasonal stores, and they were looking forward to going there, so we do.
It all starts fine, and they're having fun being scared and looking at goofy costumes. But the time wears on, and we'd planned to go to the mall for some shoes, and so I start telling them it's time to go. And I make the mistake of saying they can get one thing, under $5 or so. But Elder can't make up her mind, and eventually gets frustrated and starts out the door, so I have to tell Younger I can't get her something and not her sister, so we'll just have to go. Younger is preternaturally easy-going, and though mildly disappointed, OK with that, and we go outside, where Elder is leaning against a post like some 50's juvenile delinquent, casting me an icy glare as I approach.
So, the usual chasing to and fro with her in her socks. I finally get her to stand still, and she says she just wishes we had more time. I tell her I'll be taking her and her sister down to my mom's next week and we'll have the whole four days and she responds "But that's a whole week from now!" and moves to another post.
I follow, kneel down, and look at her, and she's so sad. And I did this to her. Not all me (not by a mother fucking longshot, which is part of the frustration), but I brought her into the world, and once I told her that "your mommy and I will never split up, honey." A horrible promise to make to a child. So why did I say it? Because mine did. Half-dozen marriages between them. And I was never going to do that to my kids. And at the time, I was blissfully ignorant of my wife's deep dissatisfaction with the marriage and still assumed she just adored me as she always had and we'd always be together as per the father/husband role I had assumed and settled into over the past decade.
So, I am kneeling, and thinking these things, and knowing I have a part in making this poor little beautiful innocent girl cry. I gave her life and then turned her life even worse than life usually is. And I'm frustrated, because I can't tell her why this all happened. I don't know, myself. I know if I'd had my way we'd still be married. Not to the woman my wife has become over the past two years, but in that apex of the marriage where all seemed right.
And I start to sob.
And I croak out, "I'm so sorry, honey."
And I grab her to me and hold her and cry into her chest, "I'm so sorry" over and over and I can't stop myself.
And she starts crying.
And the Younger is nearby, just watching, and I tell her to come here and I hold them both as tight as I can and I'm still crying saying "I'm sorry" repeatedly.
And the the Elder pulls up my chin and strokes my hair, but the Younger, she's fucking laughing! And I ask her, "What the hell are you laughing at, you stinker?" and she says, "I've just never seen a daddy cry before." So both of them start laughing, and now I'm laughing and crying, but mostly sobbing terribly.
A side note: My voice has been shot all week and I can barely speak as it is, so it really is with a croaking voice that I'm apologizing to them.
Finally, I compose myself and the kids seemed to have achieved an exquisite cathartic release in seeing daddy cry, so we all start back to the car, but I'm still weeping and stuttering out apologies and trying to tell them I want to say something, but I physically can't get it out through the sobbing and coughing.
And that's the meat of the story. The epilog is similar to the final scene of "Ordinary People" where Conrad (Timothy Hutton, the son) and Cal (Donald Sutherland, the father) are sitting outside talking about Cal's separation.
CONRAD
It's my fault.
CAL
Don't do that to yourself!
It's nobody's fault! Things happen.
People don't always have answers.
The Elder girl says it's her fault, and so I snap at her, "No, it isn't. Never say that. It's not your fault."
She seems to understand.
But she'll always blame herself. We always do, just a little, for everything.
And everybody hurts, and everybody cries.
Even daddies.
From Parnate to Nardil
Last week my doctor switched me from Parnate (tranylcypromine) to Nardil (phenelzine).
At least it's easier to spell.
Yesterday at work my friends kept asking if I was high. I was very tired, maybe slightly euphoric in that tired kind of way. Not a particularly pleasant high, unless all I had to do was sit in the sun. Not if I had to correct the code of others in the middle of a deploy.
After work, I had a date at the pub up the hill. I don't know how it went. It seemed fine to me. I don't think I did or said anything particularly offensive, as I am wont to do. I like her, she's attractive, was fun to talk and be with. It was a good time, and then it ended.
Eh, it was a Monday night. Whaddya gonna do.
Nardil isn't making me any happier. On the contrary, I feel somewhat worse than when I was on a steady flow of the former MAOI.
I've got to admit a gross violation of the suggested dietary restrictions for MAOI and any other anti-depressant.
I consume alcohol daily. Sometimes not a lot, just a beer or two. Sometimes an awful lot (a bottle of wine or a bottle of whiskey apportioned in overpriced servings), sometimes nothing at all. But I do it, and I know I'm not supposed to, but fuck that.
It's the only thing that makes me feel "good" at the moment.
So, I'm not giving that up. It isn't going to happen. Same with smoking, although that doesn't affect the anti-depressants.
Maybe Nardil is less tolerant of alcohol than Parnate. I've read bad things about most of its "hydrazine" class being recalled due to hepatoxicity.
In any case.
Sometimes.
I realize, where I've landed.
And, although I say I am happier than I ever was when married, and in a sense, I really am, when compared to the loveless marriage of the past few years, and others think so, too.
Sometimes.
I wonder.
Where is my beautiful wife? Where are my beautiful girls? Why am I all alone?
Why am I fucking crying?
Suddenly
I feel that this has given me the most incredible and wonderful thing that I have ever been given, and also, the worst. [...] I've had my whole soul undermined by it — on the one hand. On the other hand, in one sense, my experience has been about finding joy.
It was Memorial Day weekend. The day before, maybe. End of May. Sunday? She was taking the kids to visit with her parents in Rochester. As they went outside and she was about to leave, she turned to me.
I was sitting on the loveseat (ha), sipping a cup of coffee, facing her and the door.
I knew that look. It meant she was pissed off about something, and I probably did not have any idea what that something was or why it made her so angry.
This time, the something was a Facebook post: a link to a write-up on a role-playing session. The tragic opening sequence contained characters she felt were too similar to our family. I'll skip the details, except to say that some of her ... friends had told her that the story was grounds enough to get a restraining order against me. She seemed more angry and embarrassed than concerned or afraid for herself and the children, and she left that way.
Maybe an hour later, I get a message on my phone. She's not coming back until I'm out of the house.
"OK."
I stayed at hotels most of that week. I didn't see the kids. I frantically searched for an apartment while trying to work out a budget that would allow for us to maintain two households under my single salary. There wasn't time for me to feel much (if indeed I ever "feel" anything) except frustration and a kind of passive, harmless anger.
It's a month later. I've got my little one-bedroom in the basement of a building in a park. It's nice. Heat included. I mostly eat tuna sandwiches and cereal, maybe pizza on Friday. I've got Internet, and a great "open box" special of a deal on a big-ass TV from Best Buy.
I've moved a couch, a California king-size bed, a dresser, a desk, a table, all by myself in my trusty old Forester. I'm very proud of that. It wasn't easy, especially that goddamned $25 thrift-store couch.
I saw the girls a few times while moving things after that first week. Now I go over after work every Wednesday to spend time with them and put them to bed and whisper "I will always love you" to each of them until they get sick of it or fall asleep.
They seem to be taking everything remarkably well. Is that a credit to how they were raised? Their natural temperament? Do they truly realize daddy isn't coming back to stay?
God damn you.
Fourteen years together. Two kids. Two years ago, she decides she isn't happy. Fuck it. She has her reasons. I won't go into them, because quite frankly, I don't fucking understand most of them. Part of the problem?
It makes me angry. Sometimes, like just there. However, surprisingly, most of the time, I am happier than I have been in years.
No more dreading going "home" to a wife who despises me. Ah, she may beg to differ. Well, her behaviour, her detachment, the complete lack of any affection over the past years -- that's been a worse hell than anyone who hated me has ever put me through.
I'm sure she suffered. Poor thing.
Fuck you. This is my fucking blog, and it's fucking about me.
She thought I was a danger to the children! My children. What's the worst thing you can say to any parent? That he's a bad parent. That he's hurting his kids. That he would ever hurt his kids.
By all accounts, I should be angry, or hurt, or something. Profane outbursts aside, I'm really not. I'm content.
I've also learned that I am not what she said I was. I'm charming, considerate, intelligent, witty, and maybe even reasonably attractive for someone my age. I add that last part just because it's important with regards to finding someone else after being with the same woman for the best goddamned years of your life and expecting to be with her forever.
Through sickness and in health, til death do us part.
Was I ever depressed? You know, she's the one who prompted me to start treatment. Treatment that has never worked. Hell, maybe years of anti-depressants have made me worse.
This was supposed to be a celebratory post.
I'm as close to "happy" as I've been in years.
I wish her the best of luck as a single mother, but when the kids are no longer kids, well, I don't like to end on a down note. Here's a song.
Turn around.
Every now and then,
I get a little bit lonely,
and you're never comin' 'round.Turn around, bright eyes.
Every now and then,
I fall apart.And I need you more tonight.
And I need you more than ever.
And you'll only be making it right.We'll be holding on — forever!
That's a joke. She'll get it, but she won't be laughing.