February to April 16th

so this is what you gave, security and comfort while you please
and grief that brings me to my knees.
For years you held me in trust, acted as humans should; caring for each other and putting aside their selfishness when they are needed. And then when I need you the most you become opaque and only used compassion for yourself. You tried but it was in vain because you stayed wrapped up in your own heart and mind. That’s not compassion, that is selfish greed of protecting your undone deeds. You valiantly guarded your wounded heart, while fighting a battle that pierces my heart…over and over and over again.
so this is how it is, for my next disappearing act I will perform “man lies to lover, the woman who carried and lost his child making her losses even more costly to her heart. As if that is not enough, he will show you the’ knife-twist trick’, pierce the heart and ream it out with the dull point of a blade so that the wound is jagged and sore, heart blasted out like a bullet hole.” This is what I will do and all the while I will bounce from romance to romance worse than a junkie in an alley, sticking the needle of supposed love into my vein over and over and over again to run from myself. And I will take her down, the woman I loved for years and years, the woman who told me our baby was dead through her tears. For my next trick, I will show you all how to be numb: it’s easy you just go out and fuck someone. But to be sure that it works, ensure that you develop an attachment, that you fall in “love” but never stay. Never give your heart away. you just steal the sentience and life-energy of these women’s hearts. You are a vampire of the heart. your heart is numb so you have to constantly drink of the hearts of others. your confusion so great that you have to distract yourself always to the point of destruction.
The lines are blurred, the reason is lost, you dropped the ball, you missed the mark, you smashed her life. And yes, it hurts to be stabbed in the back. And no, you didn’t make the cut for acts of kindness.
so for now, you can burn in hell.
4/26/08 I want to build an effigy to our love, our baby, our life. Simultaneously, I want to throw a brick through your window, burn your clothes and trash your house. I need to somehow express how deeply this hurts, how strongly it cuts to the core.
I keep thinking about how appalled you were when the best-friend-of-10-years-almost-lover acted so hideously towards me. You condemned him and his actions and could not believe that “he could treat someone as sweet and gentle as you like that.” Well, now you should know because the similarities in your actions are striking. The lack of sensitive action you exhibit mirrors his behavior.
And now, just like during the falling away of my friendship with him, you are vividly invading my dream world. Last night, with your family, someone had died. Tiptoeing around each other, talking without speaking, touching without feeling and then I gingerly approached you and finally lay my head on your shoulder in a warm embrace. Everything came into focus at that moment and instead of being vague became vivid. you were wearing your gray Ecuadorian sweater and you leaned down to kiss my head. I woke up confused, and was bewildered that I have lost you to such an extreme. I woke up looking at my wall, confused as to my whereabouts and startled by the loss–a familiar feeling 2 years ago when I lost the one of 10 years. will it go away twice as fast since our love was only 5 years?
4/27/08
today this is the pain: every morning I wake up to remember all over again that you are completely lost to me. That it would be unhealthy for me to try any communication with you. I walk across the street, flannel pants blown around my newly shaven legs like I wanted your caress to be around me. You denied me. New silk slip shifting on my bare -breasts, as I loved your hands to do. A dream of a view on top of a building reminds me of telling the story of how our romance started. It was almost sickening in it’s romanticism. I mean, how many times do you get to start your love on top of a building over looking a lake, a beautiful theater and a city? Not only that, we had climbed the fire escape to get there.
I remember so many things these days because although I lost your devotion long ago, we broke up before, but this is the break of our friendship. That makes me more sad (I think) than the loss of our love. It’s strange how the mind works. Once you are far away enough from something painful, you forget and your brain becomes a constant live-feed of every happy memory and thought you’ve ever had about the one you hated/loved and now pine for. I consciously try to dredge up all of the bad parts of the past 8 months just so that I can remember why it wasn’t working. Lying on his couch, morning sick 7-ways from Sunday. So sick I couldn’t crawl the 3 blocks to my own house where someone might have been there to care for me. Waiting for him to wander back two-blocks from a party to bring me some crackers, something, anything to keep the cocktail of baby hormones at bay. He says it will be an hour…..1, 2, 3 hours later I reach him by phone again wondering if he had been mugged an this Saturday night in the Mission. No, he hadn’t. he was just drunk at a party and “lost track of time and didn’t hear his phone.”
Or, worse than that telling him that I was pregnant, that the baby we had always wanted had been created. He said that he still wanted to be with the ex-girlfriend from 7 years ago who he had only recently seen for 1 week. 1 week of passion over the cumulative interaction and love of 4 years.
On my birthday, he wakes and greets me apathetically, eventually, reluctantly lurches out of bed. Apathy, discontent, angry vibes from him as we walk down the street . I try lightheartedness and he remains frozen. In the car, he screams at me about how ungrateful i am. He yells until I hang my head and pull my hat down over my eyes and then he drives. Drives around the mission like a bat out of hell. Narrowly misses pedestrians and takes the corners so fast I feel his unwieldy bronco almost overturn. And he knows that this kind of thing with cars is one of the things I am most afraid of.
There are so many happy memories that are swimming around in my brain and body these days….last year going into the church near Haight street. It was a horribly rainy day. We had breakfast and then went to sit in the church. It was beautiful and we had to leave since we were feeling a little too feisty for religion. We were cold so we went to my house and snuggled down in my bed. It was one of those delicious gray Saturdays where laying in bed with someone you love is perfect. We had plenty of times like this even when we were supposedly “broken up”.
I have scores of sweet things like this I could retell. Especially before the baby. But that’s just it. I have to remember what happened and how he treated me once I was pregnant, was going to have a child, and then lost the baby. He was selfish. He was often apathetic, mean and unsupportive. So although when I try to kiss someone else and it doesn’t work because I have tender memories of staying in Manhattan with him, I need to remember the bad parts or I will be destroyed. The weight of the years could crush me. But so could all of the sadness and hurt.
I want to rage, I want to run-away. Right now I want to curl up in a ball on this bench and wail. Put my head between my knees and scream. Put my fist through a wall. Scream at the sky.
I have swallowed all of this for so long, pretended that I wouldn’t miss him so because of my stubbornness. Up close his ugliness was so stark that I could feel why we shouldn’t be…friends…lovers….I don’t know. I felt big and now i feel small. I felt numb and now I feel raw. I felt capable and now I feel dysfunctional. I didn’t mourn our baby and now I feel the loss. By myself. I want to put my head in your hands so that you can carry the weight of it for awhile.
And I can’t keep up the pretense that I’m okay. i am not okay. I miss you. I finally took of my rings the other day. My pinky habitually creeps across my ring finger to gently rub the ring on my finger when I am thinking, sad, nervous. My pointer finger on the other hand habitually points down to push the ring on my thumb down so that it wont fall off. This still happens 3 days after the rings are gone. Every time it happens I am startled that they are not there just like I am slightly startled every time I want to call you to tell you something I wonder if it would have been better to leave the rings on so that my fingers could keep doing their dance of habit while I remained unaware of it. I think this is longest I’ve gone without speaking to you in the past 5 years.