You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2007.
First, thank you all for your comments on my last post. It was kind of hard to put up and really hard to have to write, and it’s nice to think that there are people out there on the internet rooting for me (or something). It makes me feel a tiny bit less alone. Things have been weird here. It’s awkward and yet not at all different in some ways, and I guess you can get used to anything, so I’m getting used to this living together but not technically being together, getting used to loving someone so much and not getting that same love back – because he does love me, he just doesn’t “love me like a husband should love a wife”, to which I say “Dude. We are best friends. We have great sex. We have fun together and we get along pretty good and we split up chores and all that stuff. Do you need to be all flowers and heart-shaped candy boxes? Can’t we have this quiet, simple love?”. But I guess it is different for me, feeling so deeply, I can’t see beyond my own emotions.
E had knee surgery a few weeks ago, and I’m getting used to other things, too: sleeping on the couch so that the leg has room & I don’t kick it, getting used to doing all the driving and the shopping and the fetching and carrying and chores. And of course because all this is going on, we are having noise complaints from our stupid downstairs neighbors. Because, get this, we walk on our floors!! And, sometimes, we talk! Or shower, or do dishes, or, I don’t know, limp around on crutches because there was surgery??!! And it’s turning into a big fiasco where we got this certified letter saying if there was another complaint we should start looking for another place. Now, fine, W is loud. He’s 5, and he jumps around and yells and plays; and we try to keep him down as much as we can, but how much can you keep telling him to stop being a freaking kid? It makes me feel so evil. The first thing is, though, that he is loud from 7 or 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. He’s not running around at 3 in the morning. We’re noisy, but not at ridiculous hours, but they told the landlords that we’re up making noise late at night, which is bullshit. The other thing is that our neighbors are horribly loud themselves – they have an exercise machine that thumps loudly, and they hammer or something randomly, and sometimes these things happen in the middle of the night or very, very early in the morning. We never complained because, you know, when you live in an apartment building, you deal with that shit. You deal with the fact that you know every time they turn on the bathroom fan or the shower, because you can hear it through the cheap floor. You deal with the stink of them cooking squid dick in garlic (probably not what they really cook, but really what it smells like) and making you feel sick when you walk in the hallway. You can’t stifle people and make them uncomfortable in their own homes, it’s ridiculous. So now we have been complaining, too, because I am a petty bitch; and if I get thrown out on my ass after living in this place for nearly 5 years, after putting up with all the bullshit of the awful useless handyman and fixing everything ourselves, after the drunk old lady across the hall and the kids a few buildings over who threw trash all over our lawn – well, they sure as hell are getting in trouble, too. They’ve been here less than a year and we are the people who are getting screwed? We’ve never had complaints before and suddenly they’re going to take the side of these people, when we’ve been good tenants for all this time? Such total bullshit. And I really don’t need any more stress right now.
Blah blah blah, I am a huge complainer. Let me just add in that vein that poor W has a nasty cough, and he gets coughs every year and has had bronchitis a bunch of times, and dammit, he’s sounding barky, so next week it’s to the doctor for him if it doesn’t get better fast. I just hate pumping him full of antibiotics all the time and shelling out the copay for the doctor and then the pharmacy on top of that. Stupid health care system, not being free. Also I have a weird painful zit right on the bridge of my nose that makes me look like a Klingon. If that’s how you spell that.
But! The good part? I am on MOTHERFUCKING VACATION! ALL FUCKING WEEK! TAKE THAT, BITCHES!!!!! I am so looking forward to just hanging around and playing with all W’s Xmas toys and games and going out to do some fun shit together. I’m not so much looking forward to cleaning up the remaining Xmas residue and finding time for homework (because, stupid me, I started classes again last week, too! Because did I mention needing more stress?). You know what, though? I think right now I’d rather be here scrubbing the bejesus out of my floor than at work at my cushy desk job. I am really fed up with work right now and tired of getting up and dragging my ass there every day. I really, really needed a vacation.
Okay, happy new year, people! Hopefully 2008 is much more awesome than 2007!!
“i dreamt of you last night. i had taken your photograph. we were laughing and swimming in the sea. i woke in the dark and wanted to tell you. i reached out to touch you. my arm cut through the empty air around me. my knuckles knocked hard against the wall. you weren’t there and you never will be. i am always alone.”
One day you will read these words and know that they are not for you. They are never for you, they never will be for you, you don’t even fit into the picture. You will think of all the awful things you said and did and want to take them all back; you will think of all the sweet things you said and did and want to take them all back to; you will want to wipe it all clean, erase it all, make it as smooth and creamy and untouched as the skirt of your wedding dress. You will think that you should have known then, you should have known when you took off the dress and the bottom was all dirty from dragging on the ground against your bare feet. You will think that you should have known that first fight, whenever it was, the details all fuzzy now but the sensations still quick to course through your body, the adrenaline rush and the tears all flooding back to fill your stomach with pain. You will think that you should have known a hundred times, a million times, all the times when things were wrong. You will think about how even a clean slate isn’t enough, how it will never be clean, how it’s all going to be as dirty as that hem forever, how you can’t erase it now and how you desperately don’t want to erase it, how you want to wallow in it and bathe in, soak your body in all of it until you are as dingy-white as the snow caked on the roadside all streaked with salt and dirt. Your face will be streaked, too, and the tears won’t stop, they will sneak up on you at inopportune times, you will cry and wail in the car on the way to work, on the way home, in the bathroom late at night, as you brew the coffee in the morning, as you set up your Christmas tree, again when you take it down. You will be surprised at all the tears, at all the pain your body can dredge up again and again and again. You will be scared by how badly it hurts, by how much you keep pushing at it, at how much you will need to poke and prod and make it worse, at how often you will read and re-read all those words that aren’t even about you, that don’t mean you, that will never be for you, and how much they hurt every time, at how each word stabs and stabs and how you keep letting them stab. You will think that probably the whole thing, everything, the world itself, is a mistake, that it’s all a huge mistake that should be wiped out; erase it all and clap off the dust and leave it blank and clean. You will obsess about cleanliness, blankness, emptiness. You will stare at white unprinted pages and revel in them, stare at the field of snow and revel in it, stare at the turned-off computer screen and start crying again. You will start to obsess about the bottle of Xanax sitting on the top of your fridge, about the smoothness hidden in each small pill, about how white and clean they could make you feel. You will wonder why you want that when inside you feel so empty already, except that the empty is so black and maybe white would hurt less, maybe it would be less jagged, maybe it would feel less like emptiness and more like something smooth and solid.
My husband is leaving me.
Would you believe me if I said the reason I haven’t been around is because I was kidnapped by elves wielding sharpened candy canes and wearing red fishnet stocking masks to disguise themselves; then I was held in the storage room at a Christmas tree farm for weeks until I managed to use a saw fashioned of pine boughs to cut through the door and escape? One would hope you believe, because that’s my excuse and see all the details? Details mean it’s TRUE. Seriously.
Also, my life is just really, really insane and everything is simultaneously coming together and falling apart. Well, really just more falling apart. Though I have lost 12 pounds, which is just awesome, except that my calves hurt all the time and I can feel all my muscles individually all day long. But that’s one of those things that is awesome and weird and kind of annoying all at once and not really a complaint. The real complaint is one that I don’t want to voice at all, because when you say something, it makes it true, you know? And I don’t want it to be true. And I really, really meant to post the truth and explain all the constant crying and all that stuff that’s been going on, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m getting shaky and butterfly-stomached just thinking about saying it and I am just going to wuss out and not put it up for a little longer, okay? I just can’t deal with it right now.
I just wanted to put something up because I haven’t posted in so long and I feel guilty; and guilt is something I don’t need more of right now. So, happy Xmas to all and I hope you’re having a way better December than I have, and I will grow some balls and get the whole shitty mess that is my Lifetime movie of a life up here soon, I promise.
