The Words are Fine
A pic Moomie took from a window yesterday. I don't feel like
photographing anything today.
I can't get my ass moving this morning. It
was really hard to wake up, not surprisingly, cuz I was awake until around
three or so this morning. I haven't been able to sleep well since
I let him back in my bed. Of course this is all my fault.
Night before last I climbed into Moomie's bed, since
Moomie himself was in mine. Blissful aloneness. I fell asleep
immediately. Next morning was time to pay for it though.
"You must not love me anymore, you don't wanna sleep
with me."
"I have been having trouble sleeping in here lately."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"I don't like it when you hide things from me, you
know why you can't sleep in here with me, why don't you just tell me."
"I am telling you goddamn it, should I have
lied and said one of the kids was having nightmares? I don't know
why I can't sleep in here, maybe just having someone here is bugging
me, I don't know."
This morning it was more of the same.
"Maybe we should take you to see the doctor."
"All a doctor is gonna say is I need eight hours."
"That would be a stupid thing for a doctor to say.
We need to find out why you aren't sleeping."
"I know why. I just can't sleep with company."
"You noticed you can't sleep since I started sleeping
in there, right?"
"Yeah."
"We have to figure out if it's just company or if
it's me. If it's me...it's probably me, because the kids have been
climbing in and out of the bed the whole time. I refuse to move out
into separate bedrooms permanently. We'll get divorced if it comes
to that. There are some things married people are supposed to do
and sleeping together is one of them."
I sat silent as he spoke the rest of his speech.
He doesn't usually speak in sentences and dialogues, he speaks in speeches.
A I write this stuff, I realize that it doesn't
look as mean as it feels. In fact much of what he is saying makes
some kind of sense. At the time, though, it feels like cross-examination,
and grasping at anything that will save his ego, at the expense of mine.
In print his words look rational, sane. In spoken form I feel persecuted,
accused, convicted.
He dropped off the kids at the sitter and come back
to my tear-streaked face, and began another speech, the same speech actually,
the same song, verse 44.
I felt like an ensnared animal, dangling from a
tree, twisting in the wind, but with no strength to struggle. I stopped
struggling long ago. And all that I could feel was the longing for
the bite of steel into my throat, the pain and the warmth and the wetness,
the urge to die. Sometimes I see myself, kneeling, knife in hand,
at my throat, and cutting, slicing...
Then later I get angry. It always comes in
these cycles. Suicidal despair, then intense anger that I should
feel this way, that I should have to be the one to check out.
Goddammit I have every right to live, I have some kind of worth.
Crying, here, I look at the words and try to see
them through the eyes of an outsider. And I can see that it must
be completely incomprehensible to some. The words are not severe,
they aren't. They don't rate the kind of reaction they are getting.
But it's cumulative. It's cumulative over years. Not years
of words like these; that I could take, cuz these really aren't bad at
all. Years of more, worse, actions and tones of voice, not just words.
The words are fine.
Not for the first time I wonder if the primary problem
with the marriage isn't him, but rather me. I know I need help.
I consider myself recovered from my distant past, but there's more, recent.
It was him, it was, but now maybe it's me. I can't let go
of the pain. I can't trust. I want to be alone. I don't
want to love anyone deeply anymore. Those I love, I want to love
mildly, carefully. Keep the fuck outta my heart cuz there isn't room
in there anymore. There isn't room.
Is this a cry for help? I don't want to be
helped. I want to be understood.
link o' the day:
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