Press One If You Are On A Ledge, Two If You Are Holding A Pill Bottle…

As the Ex and I drive back from our little vacation (more later), I call Big City Lover and let him know that no, I can’t continue my drive to Midwestern City, I need to go home. Husband needs me, I need to be home. He is, to his credit, totally cool and understanding about this. Mandy Brain is amazed that a guy is OK with her not driving five hours out of her way today to fuck him (he still likes me?!?!), thus again demonstrating the self-esteem of a walnut.

We plan to meet up Friday instead, and I arrange my day and my excuse. It will still be a five-hour drive, but at this point, it would be nice to spend some uncomplicated time with a man as resolutely non-dramatic as Big City Lover.

I wake up with the beginning of a yeast infection.

Determined to soldier on, I apply cream (bought by the ex, anal always spreads things around) and head out to get a new phone. At the phone store, I discover that I need to forward all my saved texts…shit. As I send them from one device to the next, I trace the dissolution of the relationship. I ask the guy behind the counter what to do about my pictures. He grabs the phone to help me, then blushes and hands it back.

“Whoa, maybe you want to do this yourself…”

Um, yeah. Zurich, my breasts, Zurich in a towel, me in the shower, hot shoes, more breasts, the last hotel, and of course, at the bottom, Ex-Lover’s hand in my ass, his cock inside me, facing away.

The photos may not be salvageable. There is a cord to be bought, I’ll make another attempt. My attachment to the photos surprises me – there’s the drag show from the time we spent in the islands, the mermaid I painted, the Mary Magdalene he sent, sunset in Vegas.

I learn how to use the new phone and seek food – I had no breakfast or lunch and have no appetite but maybe that’s why I’m crying over a set of old photos. I call Big City Lover and plan my departure. I don’t want to go. And when I cruise up the street towards my home, the sign for unleaded at $4.18 triggers and the waterworks start.

Google for my last therapist’s number. Voice mail, if this is an emergency call…I feel ridiculous and hang up, then call back and get the number. It’s a holiday weekend, I don’t want to bother her. Still crying.

Pull out of the parking lot and speed dial 3 for Beautiful Girl. Voice mail.

Scrolling through, my main concern is this: I grew up in a state where if you threaten to harm yourself or someone else, you can be involuntarily committed. I can’t face that, I don’t have time to spend peeing in a cup and wearing a cocktail napkin that ties in the back. Two weeks at 15 was more than enough.

Directory Assistance. The hospital please. Yes, I know the ER does not answer medical questions. Hold. Sure, I’ll talk to a social worker. Hold. Yes, they can commit me, but they probably wouldn’t, you don’t have insurance, why don’t you call the hotline?

I leave a message on my therapist’s office voice mail. Still crying.

Text to Big City Lover: Have started crying and cant stop. Probably will not make it after all. V sorry.

Hotline, please hold. Yes, I’d like to talk to a counselor. Hold. Heidi is pleasant and I feel stupid taking up her time when there are probably people with real problems who need the line I’m tying up with my stupid baby life. I can’t face explaining the whole thing from the beginning. She wants my number to follow up, but I’m not able to give it.

Best Friend, five times zones away but she’s a night owl. Answering machine. Mobile. Voice mail.

Tom Paine. Gone, I think I remember from his blog, and gone he is.

Another friend picks up and I realize I can’t tell him, can’t bear to explain enough to make sense. Let me tell you about my website guy, my video girl, the media company that’s working out for me.

Hairline Boy. Voice mail. Secret Scientist is probably having a lovely weekend with his lovely girlfriend, can’t wreck that up.

I call another friend, let her think I called because I’m a good friend who calls for no reason. I’m generally a pretty shitty friend, so at least some good is coming from this.

Beautiful Girl, still no answer.

I call my therapist’s emergency number. Voice mail. I leave a message asking for an appointment, at least it will be something to look forward to.

A few hours later, she rings me, she’s in China, she’ll call Sunday when she’s back. And there’s the lesson, the one I should know from my dedicated devotion to clients in all my professions, the one I should know from short-changing the Ex my attention, the one I should know from skimping on wifely duties.

You get what you pay for.

Day Seven: Fumbling

I breakfast with Beautiful Girl, two days in a row. Sunshine, patio, internet, business, boyfriends. She knows me. She knows nearly everything. I have written her paeans, she has been my favorite girl to flirt with.

The flirting is gone - we are deeper friends than ever, we can say anything, but we no longer say that. Perhaps it's the way I've shrunk while she's expanded. Maybe it's that we're both wrapped up in Boy Troubles. Maybe it's that I can barely juggle whoring and wifing and dying inside a little every day, let alone adding another orange to the pattern. Mill's Mess, indeed.

The first day, I realize, she is right. I should be moving on. The second day, she sits across from the table and sends me this. Yes. That is how I feel.

I speak to Be-My-Real-Friend. I wonder if he feels left out, that I haven't written yet about our last time together. It's on a napkin, it's in the notebook. Many things are in the notebook. Big City Lover - an hour's pleasure. A musician and a video chat (he's emailed twice, just the sort of thing that makes my ego beat a little faster, I cannot bring myself to answer). Folk Rocker and the writing block and how it passed.

And I lie next to my husband, ostensibly napping, and I wake weeping because I realize this is it, it's not fun any more. Writing isn't fun any more. Whoring isn't fun any more. Fucking isn't fun any more. Even the challenge of thirty days has been mired in work, work, work - it's been 21 days without a day off, 21 days of bed after dawn, wake before noon, manage and boss and lead and take on one more job because running and bossing and struggling and resenting the load are all better than thinking or feeling.

The blog is in its throes. I've no call to write the bits of flesh rubbing together that make everyone happy, give us all a wank. It's tripping sadly down the path of the lame little diary, whining about my life, come and share the pit with me, I can't get out.

Day One: Aftercare

There is the blank page.

There is the empty notebook, the block of time constantly rescheduled, filled in, replanned. No time to write, so busy! So busy…

I have been having a writing holiday. Taking four weeks to travel, restore my spirit, see the world with new eyes –

(that’s a lie)

Not much has happened around here, the sex has been marital, the adventures limited –

(liar)

I haven’t written because I have been focusing on my marriage, on my husband, exploring Amsterdam, Paris, my sacred city Bruges, reveling in the Northern European cold, the white and startling snow that followed us from city to city, “I don’t know whether to say Merry Christmas or Happy Easter” from our tiny gay host—

(also a lie. Fact, but a lie.)

I’m debating whether to continue whoring. Continue sleeping around. Continue blogging. Continue writing—

(closer)

I am afraid. For the first time in my life, I am afraid to write, afraid of what will come out – this from someone who used Columbine as material, triumph coming at last from the memories of the days when I would have done the same. I cannot eat, it is dangerous to open my mouth. Telling the first word means telling them all; I don’t know if I can stop. The poison dissolves me from the inside, wracking my guts, destroying my sleep, calling me to the Dread, the lure of the medicine cabinet, the icy road, the rope, the knife, the gun.

There is something in BDSM called aftercare. It’s when the parties involved calm down, come back to “normal”, release each other from their roles. Mostly, it’s the dominant partner bringing the submissive partner back to a place of equality and comfort, soothing their wounds, their ruffled spirit, their mind.

Ex-Lover used to be very good at this. “Good girl,” he’d say, and I felt approved, that my efforts to please him, to scream when he wanted, to fight against screaming when he wanted, were well-received, pleased him as much as they took me down the dark hallway of terror and release. For four years, he cut me open and sewed me up, told me when to do the job myself, put me back together. Not just with my clothes off, but in my head, my daily life, tormentor and refuge, hell and hope. I fucked no one else without stepping outside my body, recording the scene for him. Lately for you, too, Gentle Reader.

I debate for three and a half weeks whether to see him in Europe as we planned. There is the pleasure of making Cute Girl uncomfortable, the worry on what the time together will be like, the sense that this is senseless, there is no friendship to be had, no going back. Finally, I weep with my best friend in her foreign city, I weep with Beautiful Girl via Skype, and I change one plane ticket. I will go only to the city that finishes my trip, wait in the airport, get the next flight home I can. I tell this to Ex-Lover, first via text, then phone to be polite.

He meets me in the city, taking a train some six hours to be there. We share a room, a bed, a walk through a street festival, oranges, chocolate lemon rind, meals he orders in the language I do not speak. We sleep on separate sides, we dress in the bathroom. We see the church. We decide to go to another city, where we meant to spend time. And there we take long walks, hold hands, share candlelit dinners, look at views, have conversations. Everything is as it always was, except we do not fuck. Or kiss. And in the night he says to me, “roll over and I’ll hold you,” like he always did. He wraps his arms around me, so tightly one of us is drowning, one of us cannot breathe. Three nights next to each other, three days side by side.

And still, there is his girlfriend nervously texting, trashing my company (for which she works) on her not-so-private-as-she-thinks blog, snarking at me in email for business decisions I made after weeping and then clear-eyed asking my partner to choose, to be even-handed, to be fair fair fair enough to cut off my own finger lest she think I’m pointing at her.

And still, there is everything there always was. Right down to

I love you.

I love you, too.

And in the night his hand reaches across my body, he mumbles in his sleep,

mine.

His hand on mine, my hand on his cock,

yours.

We ride together on the train, he sees me to the bus. I lose my head, I’m nervous, I say, still yours, just a little bit. Still mine, just a little bit.

He turns three times as he walks away.

I am happy. I think I am happy. And then there is the long ride over the ocean and I pour out into emails what I do not even know is in me, I realize I am shaking in the corner, raw and beaten and the man who is excellent at making the hot girl writhe beneath his hand has no time for the bloody creature at his feet, there are new games to play, a fluffy new puppy to pat and love, and I watch everything that should have been mine (all anger comes from should thoughts), everything I need to come down, unspool, release, be let go, let out, told that was enough, that was good, it’s time to go now, watch it all be given away.

I am waiting to come down. I am waiting to be released. It’s not enough to walk away, to be my friend, to plan things that feel like dates and thread me on. I have spent four years learning to stay wired until he fades the dimmer and it is not enough to simply flip the switch.

He texts:

I feel like once you’re serious about another lover things will be easier with us…I keep hoping for simple solutions to complex problems, and that one would require nothing from my lazy ass

I can’t come without weeping. I can’t touch anyone else without remembering his hand on me, starting the recorder in my head. I don’t see another serious lover in this picture.

He is not worth it, and I know this. Beautiful Girl knows this. My best friend knows this. He knows this. I start a phone call, “Maybe we shouldn’t be friends any more.” The call finishes with plans reaffirmed, plans to talk again soon, a request for my schedule to make that happen.

So I will write. I will hide the limp and swallow back the poison and open up the vein to dip the pen. I will write for you, Gentle Reader, and for me. There are things in the notebook waiting to be shaped, notes from time with Be-My-Real-Friend and Secret Scientist and Folk Rocker and Big City Lover and Zurich. Some of them are lovely, full of drippy porn and happy laughing faces.

Thirty days. Every day. An obligation to you and myself.

And then - ?

Perhaps I will be done with him.

Perhaps I will be done with me.

Jealous

(A Paean to Beautiful Girl)

This is the girl who loves me no matter what I do and she is beautiful. There is a
scarf wrapped three times around her neck – there is always a piece of silk or amber there, in case her voice is stolen from her by the kind of spirits that respect talismans like silk and amber. Beneath the scarf, her skin is pale, she’s a hats and sunscreen girl, you’d never know she works outdoors except for the length of her stride. She’s from Appalachia. She was unpopular in high school. She has lived in tents and vans and little trailers with the original brown paneling painted periwinkle and violet and magnetic poetry on the tiny oven in which she doesn’t bake.

She still checks her ex-boyfriend’s email, and has lately been amused to note that someone else is checking it, too. She’s tempted to send the other checker a message, “Hey, sweetie, still the same blue-eyeshadowed slut?” but she refrains by thinking of her current lover, who, although he sighs and protests, will sometimes throw his arms out to look like Jesus when she straddles him. He is the Penis Flytrap, he is unmotivated and owns a dog and smokes too much pot and reads her journal and lies to her about things that don’t matter, and yet she loves him anyway, fucks him joyfully, lies there afterwards with the tiny nibbling feeling in her hindbrain that she is already tired of him, but is too trapped in the inertia of sweaty joy to send him away, tell him to slink off with his dog behind him, tails—well, you know. It wouldn’t actually be leaving him. You have to be at a destination to leave it, and she’s not there. Not from the neck up, anyway. The Flytrap has covered her with sticky botanical mucus from the neck down, and her body is so dissolved by him that she wonders if partial digestion by vegetation is really such a bad thing.

She wants to live in a Japanese garden, white walls and white rocks and pale pine benches weathered to a gentle grey, so calm that the space between breaths becomes important. Instead, her tiny studio in Ugly Southern City is cousin to the kind of used bookstore with a big metaphysical section and a brisk trade in secondhand crystals and sacred objects, a tarot reader in the back on Tuesday afternoons, mugs by the sink so stained with tea they never bleach, and really, when all you drink is tea, who cares? I think of her doing yoga in the morning, rising around 11 from a pile of throws and toss pillows and a puffy duvet with a cover made by a friend from textiles brought back from India and a clinging smell of a hundred nights on the road without a pause, the rhythm of non-home settling into the pulse that’s the feeling of home. I think of her in her pajamas, shifting through the poses, advho mukha svanasana, urdvha mukha svanasana, chatauranga dandasana, eventually reaching savasana, the resting pose, corpse pose in the literal translation, her hair fanned out like underwater, eyes closed, in the state of awareness and withdrawal.

I don’t know if she does yoga in the morning. Or what her bed looks like now. But her pajamas are old friends, veterans of mornings and tea and trailers and new locations for five weeks at a time, and I can see her pale legs in the light from the probably too-small window, pants sliding up her shins as she sits cross-legged in the wreckage of the bed.

I have met the succession of her boyfriends, invariably gorgeous or burning with passionate intensity, in inverse proportions. I know they have lived with her, slept with her, played in her succession of soulfully-named folk bands, taken her to swingers’ clubs, pierced her above and below the waist, and yet she remains virgin, the hymen of her heart firmly intacta. They’ve been down and pitched their tents in the valleys of the country, embarked on expeditions well-fitted or poorly supplied, returned home resigned or discouraged or embittered or confused or bewildered or simply tired, but they and all their sherpas have not made the final climb.

Don’t get me wrong – she’s been fucked. In many and righteously shagarific ways, just as she wishes on me. But there’s a note on the back of an envelope that begins, “My darling daughter, you are now two weeks and two days old,” a note from the woman who every day took her into the room with the changing table, and in the reek of her baby sister’s shit, told her, “This is what marriage does. This is what men do. Do you want to be anyone? Do you want to do anything? Do you want to get out of the mountains and away from boys with clumsy hands and girls who whisper as you pass because you’ve committed the ultimate sin of Not Being Like Them?”

Yes, she does.

And her mother’s hands swiftly diapering the baby who will be her sister, “Never marry. Never let a man do this to you.”

She is, of course, in therapy. She is also in school, and in the pit that is Ugly Southern City, and in thrall to the Flytrap, whose name is Sam. Sam is also beautiful, with a grubbiness that keeps him from being effete, and he plays the guitar with whichever group needs a guitar, and records with her, and works just enough to keep himself in pot and gas and dog food, but not enough to stop his ceaseless whining about being broke. This whining drives her crazy and makes her disrespect him as much as she disrespects anyone who whines without trying even the tiniest method of solving their problem, probably more so because after all, she’s still with him, and the self-loathing amplifies the disrespect. And yet they are committed, she is committed, not so much to him as to the next six months of work, Florida, Georgia, Chicago, Missouri, because singing for your supper beats working for it any day of the week, whether your accompanist is a whiner or not. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s uncomplicated, and if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that she could do better, it would be fine.

I am deeply jealous of Sam. Perhaps she is, too. After a day of Music Tech 385 and Arabic 110 and an hour at the Financial Aid Office trying to make sense of the forms that will not only allow her but pay her to go to Morocco where she will chant with dervishes and play her flute in dusty souks and sing with the voices of a hundred other travelers as filled with music as she is, her evening is unrestful still, her desire to burrow in the bed prevented by the pile of paper that must be attacked and subdued to feel like she is Getting Somewhere. And Sam? Sam on the floor with the dog is an indolent reminder of the ease of a life in which one cares much less. A life in which one’s beautiful, soulful, tender man does not look up and ask “why are you so tired?” at the end of the day.

But I am also jealous for another reason. I think she could do better. I think she could do me. Ridiculously, I think of playing Toklas to her Stein, or perhaps we’d take turns being the one who is merely ugly instead of jolie laide, the typist, the cook, the cleaner, the keeper. I think of sharing a house, on the outskirts of the funky, mostly-gay neighborhood in some mid-size city with a good Ph.D program. I think of sharing meals. I think – when I dare – of sharing her bed. I see us in the evenings, books open, or she with a instrument and I with a pen, and she plays me a verse, or I read her a passage, and she laughs, her hands slim in light of the death of the evening, her hands gentle in her lap, fingers strong on the strings, fingers strong or gentle in my hair. I see us in the train on the overland journey to Pamplona. I see her going to India, to Morocco, to Spain, to all the countries that grow oranges and hide women’s hair, free in her headscarf and long skirt, free of Sam, free of me. In the end, one of us would have to be the free spirit and one the anchor (or the brick, or the rock, or the leaden albatross around the other’s neck), one of us would have to be Sam.

I turn my face towards her as I read this at the sushi bar, she, and I, and the musician, and the girl from the Peace Corps who doesn’t quite understand what she’s in the middle of (but unlike us, willing to admit it), and I see her blushing, and smiling, and touched, and teary, and in the end, knowing me like I know her. And that is, and will never be, enough.



(written a few years ago)