We Were Magic

When we first went out, you were in your jacket with suede elbow patches. Tall, gawky, awkward, all tweed and elbows, a balding professor of a Lothario. I asked you why you were doing what you were, and the conversation lasted well into the night. I didn't know if I was attracted to you, but I thought I'd like to see you again, anyway. It was a month later that you gave me the letter that changed everything and shaped the relationship we were to have together, and I still have the letter in a box, along with books, a poster of us, the perfume I used to wear, and the earrings you bought me in Arizona.

We were more than lovers; you were the Father-King and I was your Dark Empress. We were legendary, we were beautiful, we bested the curse of the Thunderbird and emerged clean from the Valley of Death, we drove all night under shooting stars to arrive delirious in the morning in Her Chosen City. We drove through the desert in monsoon, we were struck by lightning, Oh Eater of Souls, the things we saw together! We saw places through our four eyes that no one else has ever seen, not the way we saw them. We saw machine cities, bears and glowing centipedes, caves and herds of elk.

You were the golden plains and I was the road. The railroad track was our story. I made a legend for you, my Spore of the Desert. The legend is alive and growing, even though you are lost to your Queen. It's been taken up and propagated by your people, who are my people. You don't know how it grows, because you're not here for me to share it with. I yearn to show you my beautiful, terrible gift, but the world you are in is not my world. Not anymore.

Oh my King, love of my life. Every time I turn around in the kitchen and you are not there, I feel the gap in my synapses where you used to connect. Can you still feel my feelings, my love? Because I can no longer think your thoughts.

I'll meet you at the railroad tracks when the rains begin again.

Make a wish,

-Snowcap

On exes and their new loves

I have a boyfriend; a wonderful boyfriend. A wonderful person. A kind, gentle, compassionate, strong, willful, accomplished man.

He has an ex, his most recent ex, who is from all accounts an interesting, intelligent, strong, willful, accomplished woman. They broke up around the same time I broke up with my most recent ex, although our relationships were very different.

For me, when I have lost someone loved, it has always been a sort of comfort to establish a friendship with them that included knowing their new loves, even if it hasn't always been easy... even though it's often painful to see someone I loved and hoped for a long life with having that life with someone else. There is also something valuable, I think, in seeing that loved one live happily with another person who is not only my equal but an even better match for them; someone who I can honestly like and feel not upstaged by, but simply recognize them as a better match. It's harder when I perceive an inequity, for instance if I don't think my ex treats the other person as well as they deserve or vice-versa... but usually it is a good thing, remaining friends with my ex and establishing some rapport with their new love.

In this case, my boyfriend's ex wants to remain friends with him, and for many months had a hard time recognizing the boundaries he set, in a fairly intrusive way. To give her some credit, for the first months of our relationship he didn't know what boundaries he wanted to set, didn't know what he wanted from our relationship, and so she perhaps couldn't clearly perceive the lines most of us know by heart; the lines between lost love and new friendship. So it was difficult.

After a time, though, after about six months of our dating, the lines became clearer; he had definitively chosen a new relationship with me and discarded the potential for rekindling the relationship with her, at this point long-distance by some thousand and a half miles. He said in no uncertain terms, this is where I'm at; this is my new life. Still, she persisted in communicating with him as her lover, not her ex-lover. She would not let go of the old intimacy, and rejected news of me as too painful for her to hear or acknowledge.

He, wanting to honor their former closeness, told her that he wanted to stay in communication, but asked that she acknowledge his new relationship, and acknowledge me; and asked that if she wished to stay in close contact with him that she make some effort to befriend me. She refused.

This is where it gets muddy.

It had been most of a year since they had been together, and in the meantime he had allowed a fairly intimate level of communication. By then, she reasonably felt like they had a reasonable relationship for exes. She is quite young, and this was, and is, her first breakup of a very significant love relationship. So, she was angry that he would ask her to accept us as a package deal should they remain friends... and she refused contact with me. And until then, I had accepted his relationship with her as a package deal, thinking, deliberately,  only of furthering our relationship together, and not of how she might still, after six, eight, ten months still be thinking of me as the "other woman".

So it got messy. I got angry. We got angry. I felt heartbroken.

We, he and I, together, got over it.

But she didn't. And she continued to talk to him, via email, obeying limitations we had set, but still not understanding or acknowledging, or perhaps understanding and refusing to acknowledge, how things had shifted; how we had become a package deal.

So, ignoring what he had asked for (that she communicate with me if she wanted a relationship with him) and obeying the technical restrictions he had asked for (that she keep things very surface-level if she would not) she continued to email him, at first infrequently, and then with greater intimacy and frequency. She had been in a car accident  but not been hurt. Then, she wondered why she was so attracted to Pisces men (such as him). Then, why had he not answered her question about attraction? Also, by the way, she was coming to Portland.

He ignored her question a second time, and said that it was too bad they couldn't meet but he wouldn't feel comfortable with it unless she was comfortable meeting me as well... to which she responded angrily that she hadn't asked to meet and never wanted to meet me, and he could never suggest it again.

I don't know what I can say about that. To me, it crosses a line; one that has been crossed time and time before. I have left out many, many details, including the one about how I emailed her at his request, and was replied to with "I am his former lover of two years".

I understand that she is younger. But I was young once myself, and this still feels wrong. Her behavior, from a very early time in our relationship, feels wrong. It feels possessive, jealous, and intrusive. She is an ex, and seems to have no concept of how to behave as an ex who wants to develop a friendship. I have left out many of his attempts at setting boundaries, partly because it's all too much to type out and partly because they weren't strong attempts. It's not because I don't think he meant them, but perhaps in part because I don't think he knew what he meant.

And partly because I, like him, don't quite know what to do with people who can't understand and respect changing relationships and changing boundaries.

Even though I myself have been such a person in the past.

Almost four years ago I embarked on a relationship with a man who was separated from his wife. They had had an open relationship and she left him for a man she had been seeing. From his account, she was an abusive partner and a fairly inattentive mother; from my perspective as his lover, both were true, though it's obvious how such a perspective can be skewed. He cared for his children most of the time, as far as I could tell, and his stories of their breakup tended, as such stories will, to depict her as the villain. I was convinced but now I don't know; was she? I will never have the detachment to know.

Two years after they separated, they got back together. Although the sexual component of our relationship had ended months before at his decision, we had become very close friends and I was very much in love with him. When they got back together it was clear to me that I could not continue seeing him even as my friend, because of my intense feelings for him.

A year later I was in love with someone else, and we started hanging out again.

I called him my love

I don't even know what it means. For months we have danced around this word, "love". He asks what it means, and I have no answer; and tonight, as I go to sleep, I project him into it. My love.

I am not sure I will ever know what it means.

There is so much more to this story.

All other issues aside, I think she is a well-meaning girl. But she has this DOG. The dog is a good dog but totally untrained; she took him to obedience school briefly but she didn't agree with the methods (typical dominance/reward training, very effective with dogs as it fits with their natural pack behavior) so she quit. He has extreme separation anxiety issues, and will bark all day if left alone.

This girl is a postgrad student and is not home very much. The dog DID have range of the back yard, but he really needs to be walked, and preferably taken somewhere to run, twice a day. I don't have time to do it and am not interested in taking over her responsibilities if I did. Her dog is a hunting breed, large and rangy, and dumb as a sack of hair trimmings, but I think he would be trainable if she would put in the effort. He's a barker, very noisy and difficult to control. I am home all day, so for the last two years I have been the person who has put most of the effort into letting him in and out of the back yard and trying to curb his barking.

Now we get to the good part. Because he's not getting enough exercise or attention, he started slipping out of the house and running away, and he does not come when called. He never does it when I open the door, and rarely when the kids do, because we're all pretty good at blocking him, but if ANYONE else comes over he takes advantage of their unwariness to push past them. He has absolutely no wariness of roads or cars and we live near a busy street. It got to the point where, if someone knocked on the door, I would put him in the basement before opening it.

He has also killed several of my trees and shrubs by urinating on them, including a 7-year-old paw-paw that SHOULD have fruited this year. This dog is a huge PITA, and a lot of it could be resolved simply with attention and training... but my housemate wants to spend time with her boyfriend instead of coming home and taking care of her dog.

So, then he figured out he can tear apart the side fence and get out. He did it twice, and the second time, what I had feared finally happened: he got hit by a car. Luckily, only his paw was hurt, but here's where it gets really weird; she handled this by locking him in her room ALL DAY while she's gone. It's ridiculous. A sixty-pound dog should not be locked in a 10x12 room for ten hours at a time. She comes home, takes him for a walk, and then puts him back in her room and goes off to do her own thing. I can understand doing this while his paw is healing, to make sure he rests and doesn't re-injure it, but then

And, OK, I realize I should probably step back instead of letting myself get upset with this, BUT

She is moving out at the end of the month (I am so grateful she decided this on her own, as I was dreading asking her to move) and is talking about how hard it is to find apartments with a big dog, and is trying to get him declared a service animal for her anxiety, so she can more easily find a place. I said "I hate to say it, but to be gently frank, I am not sure an apartment is going to be a good fit with your dog, because of his barking"

And she says, holy shit I could not believe it but she says, "My plan is to (a) move in where they already have dogs that bark and (b) use the spray bark collar and if he can't stop, then I can keep him in my boyfriend's adjacent basement."

The fucking basement. All day. Alone. In a basement. That is so absolutely not OK I can't stand it. I told her that locked in a basement is no life for a dog. She takes him nowhere. Not to the beach or hiking or anything. Ever. She goes to Sauvie's Island all the time with her boyfriend and never takes the dog. He just needs to get out and run, and be trained, and his behavior issues would be resolved. He just needs time and attention. I can't give it to him; I have three kids and two dogs of my own, neither of which have her dog's particular needs. I have neither time nor energy for this dog, which is why I don't have a large hunting breed.

The insanity of a full-time grad student getting a large hunting breed boggles my mind; it's like she has no regard at all for anything other than her own immediate desires. I am upset and frustrated and at the end of my rope; the girl won't even read dog-training books because she "disagrees" with them, meaning essentially that she is willfully ignorant of anything that might contradict what she WANTS to do.

Sigh. I am trying to just ride out the month. After that, what she does is her own problem and at least I don't have to witness it.

On contentment and questionable food.

I am among the nation's great unwashed masses of discontent.

Sunday mornings always do it for me. This is the morning when the fathers come to pick up my children, leaving me in my vast empty house all alone and usually bruised and/or mildly hung-over from whatever Saturday night shenanigans I got up to (hardly anyone was hurt and only one window got broken). I shower and oil my hair and my skin until I'm soft and glowing as an Egyptian whore and, depending on whether they've been assholes lately, put on something that will remind my exes that they will never, ever tap this again, hand off my kids with the requisite polite small talk, and bam. Door closes. Silence falls.

At first I clean. This is my big chance, you know? Three days of not having a sink constantly full of dishes, and towels that have been used to wipe up something questionable, dragged through a pile of dog hair, and then hung back up on the hook for the unwary showerer to anoint their face with.

And then, with a reasonable amount of vacuuming and laundry out of the way, I sit in my office with the sunlight pouring through the window, and I am discontent. An hour ago I was annoyed because my pubescent daughter would not stop rattling on about some anime she's really into, and now I don't know what to do with the absence of her noise. I look out at the cedar fence that separates my yard from the neighbor's and contemplate selling the house. I had a view of Mt. Hood, now I have a view of recently-built, overpriced townhouses. But I've got six, almost seven years worth of growing time on those fruit trees, and my garden is finally, for the first time since I bought the house, perfect.

I am discontent about my view.
I am discontent about my floor plan. This is a really shitty floor plan... who thought that would be a good idea?
I am discontent because nobody has called me back about hiking today and I don't really feel like going alone.
I have the problems of the lucky.

I am an ingrate.

Yesterday, in the grocery store buying birthday presents for my son's friends, I stopped in the frozen dinner aisle for what may have been the first time in my entire life, and I saw these little microwave entrees for a dollar each. A dollar. What the hell, that looks pretty fucking questionable. I selected a dozen of the more revolting-looking ones and trundled them along with my sixer of High Life tallboys (for the demolition, for fuck's sake. You can't do proper demolition without Miller High Life in cans) to round up my son and make my purchase.

Now, for fun, for shits and giggles, I'm sitting in my office eating a goddamn Salisbury Steak I got for a dollar. It is 100% as disgusting as you probably imagine it to be, and I'm enjoying the fuck out of it.

Later, I'm going grocery shopping at the Dollar Store. For thrills. For food that not only I, but pretty much no one, wants to eat.

This is America, guys.

Don't be here now

I don't want to fall in love again. Not anymore. Too much heartbreak, all at once. Abandonment, rejection, loss, in rapid succession like machine-gun fire because I fell for someone I shouldn't have. I just can't do it anymore. I feel numb. Even seeing last summer's lover was no great hurt... after all that, after the beautiful summer and the ending and the anguish... he walked up to me and gave me a hug and told me he was sorry, and instead of my friend buffering me from my former lover, it was my former lover trying to shelter me from the loss of my friend.

My other friends, they're angry and sad. I don't know what to say to them. I don't want them to be angry. They think I should be angry, too, and maybe I will be but I'm not ready for that yet, I'm still shell-shocked.

You would think I was writing about a death, reading this. It's not a literal death. It is a pushing-away, a walking-out. I don't know how to adjust from having someone go from being a constant presence to the gaping absence of them. Just being gone. It is like a death; in a way it's almost worse, not quite but almost, because he could call me, he could see me... but he doesn't want to. It's hard to wrap my head and my heart around the rejection.

And I miss him. I don't know how to lose my friend, not-quite-lover. It reminds me of my divorce, except by the time we got to divorce my marriage was already dead, I just had to make the decision to cut the rope and let it fall. There was nothing dead or over between my friend and I; no fights or anger or anything but laughter and comfort and love and support. As much as the divorce was a lingering cancer, this is a freak accident. He has seen me at my best and at my worst, and now I'm at my worst again and I can't call him... or, I can call him, but he'll never call me back. He made himself my home base, I let him, and now he is gone and I am anchorless.  


I saw a plastic bag driven by gusts, tumbling in the air above the trees, and I thought, there I am.  


I'm jumping the gun.


I have this problem of existing too much in the present moment. People say "live in the moment" as if it's a virtue to strive toward, but it's not a blessing, it's a curse. When the moment is all there is, it becomes all-encompassing, whether in happiness or sorrow. If you truly live in the moment, you have no perspective with which to temper your emotions.


I hoped a lot for a long time, and now I'm afraid of hope because that's what gets you, really. Despair is tiresome, but it's almost a relief, once you accept it. If I believe, or hope, that this silence is temporary and he'll be my friend again, be allowed to be my friend again, I'll be waiting for him every day and I'll go to bed sad every night. If I believe, accept, that it's over, my heart will break and be broken for a while, but it won't break anew daily.

We used to get sandwiches and two bottles of beer and go hiking together, and eat lunch out in the woods. We'd each get a different kind of sandwich and a different beer, and swap halfway through. We never hiked long; just an hour or so, long enough to get some air and get a little winded, and go back to work feeling good. It was one of my favorite things, a high point of my week. Even before I went off on his wife, she would fight with him over that, because she thought he was "wasting time" hiking instead of working or looking for work. Just two hours, once a week. I miss those two hours. He'd call me and see if I could take an hour off work to pick up chicken feed, and it was  fun. Everything we did together was fun. We tore the rotted old arbor off the back of his garage year before last, and even that was fun.

You know, when I met him they were split up and I used to wish his wife would come back to him, because he was so, so sad. I've never seen anyone as heartbroken as he was. I wished it until I actually saw her manipulating, controlling, and putting him down, giving him hope and then yanking the carpet out from under his feet a few days later. And then, finally, she was engaged to another man, she was living with her fiance, and he was ready to be done. He was ready to file divorce papers, and suddenly, she broke up with her fiance, she had nowhere to stay, she came back. Now he is more miserable than he ever was when she was gone.

I know it's not the same thing, but I don't want to be waiting for him like he waited for her, and I don't want to hope for him anymore. I do want him to split up with her so we can be every bit the friends we were before, and I do want more than friendship if the universe would happen to go that way, but I don't want to do what I know I will do if I don't assume it is over, which is wait here with my little bloody heart wide open, hoping, trying to sew it back into my body every night so I can sleep with the disappointment of not having heard from him, again.


Your fingertips across my skin
The palm trees swaying in the wind
Images

You sang me Spanish lullabies
The sweetest sadness in your eyes
Clever trick

I never want to see you unhappy
I thought you'd want the same for me

Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do

We walked along a crowded street
You took my hand and danced with me
Images

And when you left you kissed my lips
You told me you would never forget these images, no

I never want to see you unhappy
I thought you'd want the same for me

Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do

I cannot go to the ocean
I cannot drive the streets at night
I cannot wake up in the morning
Without you on my mind
So you're gone and I'm haunted
And I bet you are just fine
Did I make it that easy
To walk right in and out of my life?

Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
Should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do


(Almost Lover - A Fine Frenzy)

The End of the World

The end of the world. It’s a different place for everyone, but everyone knows where theirs is, although sometimes they don’t know how to find it until the moment they need it.

That highway calls to us, the highway to the end of the world. If you feel inside yourself, you’ll find you know instinctively where the beginning is. Sometimes, driving, you might have the sudden urge to make that turn, take that freeway entrance, and just go.

It’s not like the lure of the bridges; the bridges are something outside of you, coercive, malicious. The siren song of the bridges is to distract you, to trick you. The bridges, beautiful, old; they have no love for you, other than their love of your sorrow. Just walk across one, you’ll see what I mean, the water glinting grey and deep between the slats under your feet. I have the fear sometimes that a bridge will get me and then that last moment will be eternity, the fear and loss and the cold and the choking, the taste of mud and corpses and sewage, the bones breaking as I hit the water, regret and heartbreak and agony all rolling into one permanent instant as I wish I could change my mind about the bridge, about everything, walk back up the street for a pack of cigarettes, a shot of bourbon, cry it out, shake it out, scream it out, sleep it out drugged and curled on the couch, anything but experiencing that one last moment more than forever, because when time stops there can be no end of the world.

No, the end of the world is something inside of you, which is why all the bridges stay the same for everyone, but everyone’s end of the world is different. It may be only a few minutes from home, but usually it’s a long drive away. The end of the world is not danger, it is solace. It’s where you go in your mind when everything is crumbling, the place you long for when the steel band circling your heart is two notches too tight. You close your eyes and feel it calling for you, yearning for you, loving you. It wants you there as much as you want to go.

Down the street, a left turn, a slight right, up the freeway north, north through the city and past the volcano, past where the cooling towers used to be, through the small towns and the capital, past the religious nut with the billboard and past the 47-year-old Columbus Day Storm snags of trees jutting like broken teeth along the wind tunnel of the I-5 corridor, north into the riparian jungle, the wetlands and marshes, off the freeway and onto the highway, past the casino, off the highway and onto the winding rural roads that take you through the reservations and the small, small towns, north until you get to the place where you can’t go north anymore, and you get out of the car and walk through the trees to the spot where the water crashes against the rocks 60 feet below, and maybe you take a small object out of your pocket and throw it, or maybe you sit on the edge looking down, or maybe you don’t, and you know that in all this solitude, in all this quiet, your dirt and loss and all your pain will be washed away, washed clean and smooth like an eggshell, like the blank slate you imagine you used to be, and out here at the end of the world no one will ever, ever find you.


I don't think anyone wants much more of an afterlife than they want from this one; a warm spot in the sun, a garden, that moment of bliss when you wake up in the morning and sense that the warm body next to you is someone you love. It's when all that goes awry that we have to run, have to lock the car doors and piss in a bottle driving ninety up the rain-slick freeway at one am to get away, to get the hell away from the city and the bridges and the wreckage of hope. Or you run by pouring it out onto paper or into song or by pouring whiskey down your throat, or you run by fucking someone new but the new never quite stops reminding you that those brown eyes and that smile are not the brown eyes and the smile that you're running from, and pretty soon, no matter how far you run, you can't quite remember if you were running away from something, or trying to chase it down. 


That's why we need the end of the world, and that's why we need the wastelands and the bridges. The wastelands and bridges, their siren song scares us and makes us run, and the end of the world is the place where we get to stop. It's not the afterlife but it's close enough, close enough to let you sit down and catch your breath and try to remember whether you were chasing something or fleeing from it, and remember that the cigars and the bourbon and the tranquilizers and the sex and the running never did get you any closer or any farther away from whatever it is. And maybe you just take a minute, and that's all you need, but maybe sometimes you go to the end of the world and you never come back, and if there's anyone to talk to, you never, ever talk about why you're there.


Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them sevens with nothing lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind

You called all your shots
Shooting 8 ball at the corner truck stop
Somehow this don’t feel like home anymore

And this ain’t no place for the weary kind
And this ain’t no place to lose your mind
And this ain’t no place to fall behind
Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try

Your body aches…
Playing your guitar and sweating out the hate
The days and the nights all feel the same

Whiskey has been a thorn in your side
and it doesn’t forget
the highway that calls for your heart inside

And this ain’t no place for the weary kind
And this ain’t no place to lose your mind
And this ain’t no place to fall behind
Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try

Your lovers warm kiss…
It’s too damn far from your fingertips
You are the man that ruined her world

Your heart’s on the loose
You rolled them sevens with nothing to lose
And this ain’t no place for the weary kind

(Ryan Bingham)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zelvaxvTaUk