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Is a woman I served yesterday. She gained this title even before she started crying at her table, making her son and parents visibly uncomfortable.
Which brings cause to point out that this was not a young woman. She was not some mewling lass in her early thirties with the kid she'd obviously birthed in her late teens. No, this was a woman in her fifties, with a son in his mid-twenties, and her elderly parents.
This title, The Most Miserable Woman In The World, she earned almost immediately. It was the way she awkwardly ordered her glass of sparkling wine, fumbling around at the notion that perhaps her father should buy a whole bottle for the table. His response, with quickly eroding patience? "Order for yourself. I'm having a beer."
Then, when it was time to order dinner, each option presented to her was rife with pain. Initially, she wanted a greek salad (which she tried to order when I was taking the drink order). Then, she rambled on about how she'd been thinking about shrimp all day, and did the shrimp skewers come with a vegetable? (All of this said in the most pained, belabored voice one could muster on a Tuesday evening). I informed her that the shrimp skewers were just an appetizer so they did not come with any vegetable, but she could put together shrimp skewers and a vegetable from the build your own section of the menu. So she ordered a salmon filet with spinach. (!?)
As their dinner wound down and her sparkling wine took hold (it really seemed she deteriorated exponentially from a single glass of the stuff), and I passed by the table as she was crying, about something related to her son getting a room but grandma being willing to let him come over or something, I heard him utter, "Mom, you've been crowding me for a long time now..."
I scurried out of the room right quick after that. Christ.
Later, after I'd said something to my boss about this being The Most Miserable Woman In The World with his response being that I had no heart, she walked by him cussing on her way to the bathroom and said loudly to him, "Oh, I'm just mad at my dad, he's breaking every promise he ever made to me."
Which might make you think she's maybe just batshit crazy or something. But I didn't get that impression either. Maybe in the sense of being super pathological, like borderline personality, but no genuine loss of sanity. Just bone-deep insistance on being The Most Miserable Woman In The World. Forever. No matter how embarassing or uncomfortable or energy draining she is to everyone around her. I felt sapped spending less than ten minutes directly interacting with her. A lifetime? Being the child raised by that? This is why I think parents should be able to kill off defective young... (after a lengthy process, of course).
The super amazing final straw, which I missed, but was relayed to me by my coworkers (she had the wherewithal to alienate each of us in turn which was nice) went as follows:
Woman looking at floor, which is a mix of tile and cement, trying to talk to my boss, who is on the phone--"What kind of art is this? I'm an artist! Do you call it post-modern? Modern trash? Modern ghetto?"
OMFG.
Most Miserable Woman In The World, I salute you.
When I am depressed, or freaking out, and I can't sleep, I fantacise about facets of suicide. (Let's not blow a gasket thinking I might be contemplating a move towards worm food--as much as there are some moments when these fantacies seem a solution, those moments pass and I've experienced enough of life to be wholly aware that things get better. And worse. And better again.) I was pondering, the other night, a theoretical machine that could replicate the physical feelings of various methods of suicide without the actual act. For instance, I think it would be quite soothing to go through the process of loosing the blood from my wrists. Or to ingest a million sleeping pills. There would be a problem, though, and that is for it to work fully, the brain would have to believe it were happening; be tricked into the pain, seeing the blood, etc. This could cause some pretty serious psychological trauma, I'm sure. And some Flatliners shit would probably go down. I do not want to have to face any of my demons in that manner, no thank you.
Last night I dreamt (that somebody loved me [titter]), in that lucid almost dreaming phase where you still have full control but you're so on the cusp of sleep it feels like it's actually happening, that Andy was in bed with me. That he died, for no obvious reason, in his sleep. I woke to his cooling, stiffening body, and had the clearest of mind about it. Got up, went to several stores where I purchased otc sleeping pills, came home, took a shower, wrote a blog that doubled as my will (which I think I'm actually going to do cuz it super freaks me out that there's nothing written down that indicates my wishes and I definitely don't want my mother taking the reins on that; she's already stated if I go before her she's gonna put me in a pink frilly dress and curl my hair, and I know for damn sure she isn't interested in who I am as a person or what would be a meaningful funeral/burial/wake for the people closest to me--it would all be ceremony for HER), then took a shit ton of pills and curled up next to Andy. Of course, this would turn into some kind of Sylvia Plath debacle, waking up moaning, covered in spiders in some god forsaken root cellar (are there god forsaken root cellars?), or I'd wake up in the emergency room with a giant fucking tube down my throat.
My idea of the perfect suicide involves months, even years with no sign of remains. A disappearing act. Crawling into a cave in the Arizona desert with a .38. Pills on an uninhabited island, somewhere. Or maybe no suicide at all, just the disappearing act.
I wouldn't want to kill myself because there's not a single person who would understand the motivation. My mother would take it incredibly personally. It would absolutely break my father's heart. I would be called horribly selfish, and that would be true. It's just not viable without upsetting everyone you love who loves you, and even a few who loathe you too (Christ, the people who loathe me, feeling guilty, like they had some hand in my demise [would that happen, or would they just nod and say they always expected it?], that would be disgusting). It's the escape that's tantalising. The freedom. But then there's the nagging, "What if there's an afterlife?" problem. God damn it.
Well, I guess I just won't be offing myself today.
My preferred way of dying involves being 85, in bed with my husband of fifty years and a carbon monoxide leak, btw. No one can get upset about that. Grandkids knew gran and pap pap well, we saw them through college, they've got kids of their own and we even kissed the foreheads of a few of 'em. A full life.
But then, it's times like this I wonder if that will ever be my life. And boy, that's a downer.
On Wednesday, I went to the airport to pick up Chad. I don't talk about Chad enough. I don't give Chad enough credit. Every now and again, I mention Chad to people, and they look back blankly. "Who's Chad?" Who's Chad. hm.Chad will be my Dude of Honour if I ever get married, and this is why: On Wednesday, in the first five minutes riding to my place from the airport, Chad boiled down the Andy situation in a manner that pulled me back from the ledge, soothed me, and gave me hope all at once. When Chad and I have conversations, I always feel that my heart has opened up and positivity, energy and love have crawled into spaces that had previously been dark. And maybe most tellingly, despite Chad and I being very attractive, interesting, exciting, sexually potent people, we've never been interested in one another. After fifteen years, unlike a single other male in my life that meets that criteria, we remain, simply, 100% friends.After detailing the nutshell version of the Sarah Andy saga, Chad put a spin on it no one else has. My friends, lovely people that they are, can be jaded, bitter, and distrustful of those around them, and often do not take what a person has to say at face value, looking for the lie in everything. Some of the people I've looked to for comfort and support the past year have in fact done the opposite by inspiring fear and paranoia in me, by tearing down the person I love in the hopes that it will make me feel better. It doesn't. Chad, on the other hand, immediately identified with Andy's struggle, and felt, emotionally, that Andy must be quite like him. I was terrifically amused by this because on my first date with Andy, I commented (or maybe just made note to myself, I'm hazy on that) on how Andy's hand gestures reminded me of my friend Chad, and then once I came to know Andy, I found his emotional spikes and fluttery way of panicking and letting things get out of control to be reminiscent of a young Chad as well. And while that emotional opera still exists within Chad, he's harnessed it, and he's settled into a beautiful life in Portland with his wife Junie and their two gorgeous children Ariana and Jarvi.What Chad had to say about Andy's actions took all of my anger away. Instantly. As I rambled about how angry this all makes me, how it's unfair and how it's unecessary, Chad stilled me by saying, "Sarah, be angry if you want, but I think what Andy's doing is brave. He sees what he has to do, and knows he has to do it without your needs or influence getting in the way, knowing that in the process, he might lose you." This, and a few other well-put observations just took the piss right out of me.So now it's been six days, almost, since I've had any contact with Andy. I want to text him, to say I miss him. But I don't want to disturb whatever bubble he's made for himself the past few days and I don't want to do that to myself either; no response would be upsetting, but a reply of "I'm sorry, but I don't feel the same way" would bring immeasurable ruin to the current state of my mind palace. No, best to just let things alone. I don't see myself contacting him at all, frankly. Even a month from now, any rejection would set back my emotional progress by weeks. I'm now in the position of pointedly avoiding bars or events he might be at. I hate this phase.God, is it really the end? Please, no. I've done terrible things to people over the years, and I believe in karma, and I believe my romantic troubles the past five years are an atonement for all of the wrong I did before. But I'm not that girl anymore. I'm not. A little peace, in a time of war, Universe. Please.Chad and I sat by the river in Montevideo and chatted whilst drinking chai tea. He says I've taught him more about the female mind than anyone else has. It makes me chuckle to hear this, since he's been with me for the bulk of the development of my female mind. He has born witness to nearly all the phases of me which were important as a woman coming of age. He's been through the giddiness and love and heartache brought on by probably one hundred boys over these years. Which made it particularly telling when he said this:"You talk about Andy differently than anyone else."I know Chad. I know.
This is the time of day I miss him most. About two hours after sundown, until about midnight. The time, if things were not as they are, that we'd likely be making dinner, drinking tea, having kisses, embraces, flopped on a couch, lazing on a bed, listening to music, reading books, gabbing about music and books and pop culture and the lives we live and want to live and the people we love and have loved. It would be nice. It would be cozy. It would be the life I want to live. But, this is not the life I am living. Well, I am, but it is without him. Without Andy.
It has been five days, two hours and eight minutes since I last contacted him. Obviously, since I know this to the minute, it has not been easy, and the time has moved with something of the quality of sludge. But he asked this of me, and it's necessary. The level of drama was driving him insane and he couldn't sustain it any longer. I don't blame him, nor do I disagree with him. After this request and the subsequent indignation/fear of losing him that completely sent me into a fever pitch/tailspin/feedback loop of my own--while at work which actually makes it much easier to manage as I've got something physical to focus on and thus cannot curl into the fetal position and give into the feeling as I would likely do were I not at work--a very clear voice in my brainpan gave me what I recognised as my only two options, of which only one was viable: 1.) Continue falling apart, letting the beams holding me together and all the work I've done the past year to be better at this than this just crumble to nothing, refuse to stop contacting him, allow sheer panic to make me behave like an idiot, driving him further and further away, or 2.) Calm the fuck down and just let the boy go because I HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE.
I chose number 2.
And my lord, I'm a good decision maker. Seems I couldn't sustain the drama any longer either. The nausea is gone. I can drink coffee again without the caffeine making my heart thump directly out of my chest. Hell, my heart isn't even trying a little bit to thump out of my chest, it actually appears to be in a resting state! I mean, there are little spikes of fear, but mostly, I feel good, I'm no longer feeling like a crazy person, and logic has found a roost once again.
Other realisations come to based on my fruit loop actions the past two weeks: 1.) I don't give a fuck about either of the residual crushes/loves that were doing a bit of haunting me while with Andy. The first showed up at the bar the night of my previous blog. He started texting me at 4 a.m. about how we should talk. The next day, we "talked" via text, as that's really the only way he knows how to communicate with any profusion and even at that he's terrifically poor as nearly every emotion he manifests is somewhere along the rage-fear continuum. He wanted to apologise for accusing me of raping him, isn't that nice? You see, he'd felt "trapped" before, and that seemed a truly logical way of pushing me out of his life and so he's sorry! It was just a whoopsie. He also made horrifically disparaging remarks about the girl he was supposedly in love with while he and I were "friends", and claimed that she'd made him a misogynist. Of course, he always was. But... turns out I didn't really give a shit about any of this. Sure, I appreciate the apology, however weak it is, but mostly I didn't care to engage him in my life, felt no pangs of anything other than knowledge of the past and indifference. Huh. And here I thought I'd be stuck with that one for another five years before I muddled through it completely.
The other one, the Mexican Who Don't Want Me, well, he popped back up on my facebook friends last week. After I'd deleted him a month ago. How this internet chicanery went down I do not know, but it was as if the Universe had decided to say, "Hey, are you sure? You think maybe you wanna write him a 'Are you sure you don't wanna fuck me?' letter? Or perhaps something brief and witty about how you'd deleted him but hey, there he was again, what an amusing thing!?!? I mean, we have the same birthday, so probably there's some kind of cosmic alliance, right?" Nope. There was confusion and mild revulsion. Delete button pressed again, this time, hopefully, for good.
2.) In the same vein as the Mexican Who Don't Want Me, the Universe also put a tiny, baby crush dating back to August in my path again. I, shitfaced Drunk, Slutty Sarah, smooched on him and it was lovely and all and he and I made plans to canoodle and fuck about in the near future. Except the next day I just felt like puking (a combination of the act and the liquor, but psychologically, the act). And I went over to Andy's that night to drop off some things I had for him, distraught, not wanting to see him as I knew my then-tenuous equilibrium would be smashed, but he insinuated we should talk, so we did, and lo, equilibrium decimation, with a mother fucking boulder, anvil, Mack truck, a dumpster and a small handful of metaphorical coffee beans.
Andy misses me! Andy's uncertain about his decision!
FUCK.
My brain does some serious spiraling out of control and by the next night, I'm texting him about how he's robbed me, how he's shitting on love, and mostly, how it was completely fucking UNFAIR of him to say that to me without having any intention of acting on it. My panicked rage via text, email and phone call onslaught led to last Tuesday's request that I just leave him alone. Which, as previously stated, I have done, and it's been good.
Anyway. This brings me to 3.) I have zero interest in being Drunk, Slutty Sarah anymore. I reverted to her last week, and despite being greeted with applause by everyone who has been lonely without me during the past couple dating Andy months, I find she really fucking sucks. She has to sleep 'til 2 to get over the bulk of the drunk, and then she feels like shit the whole god damned day. She acts without thinking, she speaks without thinking, she is a lot of fun to be around, but she is not who I want to be. Not anymore.
Which, while with Andy, I lamented her passing. Was uncertain I was ready to throw in the towel on her. Felt a little trapped not being her.
Turns out she's quite the bore to be anymore. Not interested.
All of this information just comes back to the same spot.
I'm in love with Andy. I am comfortable with Andy.
I hope like hell his path brings him to the conclusion of the same toward me. And if he doesn't, then I've made some solid progress on myself that I will continue to build upon. I'm starting therapy again. Something has rattled loose these past couple weeks, and while I could parse it out myself, I'm certain an impartial party can only be beneficial.
It's all good, it's all growth. And little of it would have happened if Andy and I had remained together, awkwardly dealing with separate but equal panics.
/end blog
As the day trucks on into night I become more and more unstable. I've had a shit fucking day. I've found myself despondent, staring at the floor for half an hour at a time, literally having to tell myself to blink. I'm so FUCKING MAD at him.
The Leonid meteor shower starts in about an hour. It'll be at it's peak around one a.m. If all were right with the world, I'd be in my lover's arms then, parked on some country side road, awaiting the great black sky's meteoric spray.
But no.
I had a pretty good weekend, considering. Spent most of my time in my room. Worked on various projects including, but not limited to: completing the window pane piece, cleaning the kitchen, making a sadly cobbled beans and rice concoction which is surprisingly winning, and beginning a short story mystically related to all that is currently happening.
No tears all weekend. Not a single one. Not really a tear since Wednesday really. I told him I'd leave him alone all weekend, and I did, save the email I doubt he read til today about him learning to combat panic attacks. But this afternoon has been a mess on my psyche; I went from Saturday night lying in bed, feeling nothing was likely to be recaptured and that I wasn't sure I wanted it to be, to missing him terribly last night, which has only degraded emotionally since. Not as many tears as Wednesday, but those were filled with shock and panic. Today's tears are made of pure depression.
At 8:11 tonight, I sent him the following melodramatic text:
"In a world where our romance flourished instead of being trod upon like so many dying leaves, I believe we'd likely be readying ourselves for meteors."
I immediately went downstairs and polished off my remaining whiskey (approximately an ounce and a half) while talking out my drama with Russ and Kat (housemate and housemate's girlfriend/my friend). I'm feeling less prone to burst into tears now.
I think listening to Luna Sea's first album is helping. Silly butt rock glam punk.
My dreams the past few days are really giving me quite a show. There is a school I often dream of which has parts of Sioux Valley (a building that is elementary, jr. high and high school in one, and where I attended sixth through ninth grade), parts of my elementary school Henry Neill (which has been torn down and now the lot is occupied by an Arby's and a video store; gross), and nothing of my high school in Montevideo. Mostly, though, it is not like these places I know at all. Great arbors of trees, long perfectly angled sidewalks, impeccable green grass. In other words, the school is far more well-to-do than any place of education I've ever attended.
Of course, I was thinking about matters of learning and inferiority yesterday; I come from such a working class family (my father's side of the tree is significantly more middle class, but I was not raised with their artful, intellectual pursuits, I was raised on fart jokes, mockery and bigotry; well-mocked for my own, independently artful and intellectual pursuits [I remembered the other day how I read The Age of Innocence and a biographical book on Anton Mesmer when I was fourteen and felt I deserved a metorphorical pat on the back for that]), that recently, with my accumulation of a small cadre of friends who come from a far more leisure class existence, I think it's bothering me significantly. I was raised on Velveeta in the spaghetti sauce (sauce made from a packet and home-canned tomato sauce), Cool Whip or pistachio pudding made up the bulk of desserts at holidays, and I didn't have butter until I went to college. I used to be amused by this, but lately I feel sick. But then that thought makes me sick. My childhood, my upbringing, with it's glorified white trash dichotomy of love and fucked-up-ed-ness, made me who I am. And I love who I am. I am comfortable with me. I suppose I'm just engaging in some useless, fruitless, frustrating "what if" thinking. I think I'm just angry that I keep hearing about the tween-aged versions of people I know galavanting about Paris with their only marginally older siblings and no adult supervision, getting drunk on rooftops eating McDonald's (yes, in the last month, I've heard this tween-run-free scenario TWICE).
The idea of meeting Andy's family fills me with a powerful dread; my ex, Dan, came from similar background and his mother absolutely HATED me and let me know exactly how inferior I was to her son every time she saw me. I get the impression Andy's family is wonderfully warm and lovely so I'm not sure why I'm wrapped up in this right now, especially since it's highly unlikely it'll ever happen that I meet them. And then there's the idea of Andy meeting my family; it makes me feel like it would be like stepping into an episode of Roseanne for him, which also fills me with dread. My family has done increasingly well financially over the last ten years, but I'm sure they're still eating Velveeta. We do have butter now at holidays, though.
The dream I started to speak of, well my intent was to simply describe how there was a taco bar on the lawn in it. And that one of the girls I used to date was there, and when I undressed her, her breasts were impossibly long, flat, pointy pancakes that tasted like sweat. I had to apply some decorum to the situation and not gag.
Because really, I came here to write about another dream. Which now seems less important.
Suffice to say I was a man wearing an oil cloth duster and I had a collection of various sizes of crucifixes under this coat, one of which was a silver-plated filigree shotgun that I'd "rented" and showed up to a college lecture with it in tow. There was murder on my mind. But I was a little dorky. Probably wasn't gonna murder nobody.
(post-posting editorial note: obvious as all get out, but everything in the crucifix and gun dream is an item of protection. I'm a man--strong, theoretically impervious; I'm dressed basically as a cowboy; I'm covered in crucifixes, and I have a fucking GUN that's a crucifix too. I know Andy was in this dream, I can't remember where or why. It wasn't him I was aiming to kill. I knew I wasn't going to kill anyone.)
I miss you Andy. I think you're in a place now which means we can never return to the place that was ours.
In my dreams last night there was a submarine, sinking to depths right in front of the window at our former cabin on White Iron Lake outside of Ely. The water was clear, but black. The submarine was hematite in tone. The second it was completely under water, there was something like a sonic boom, and the cabin rocketed into the air and spun around (curiously, it was as if it were attached to the earth with rubber, so it never fully separated, and the whole structure bent like bubble gum), landing back on it's moorings shakily and with the foundation far from intact. My grandfather and father were there, and women that must have been my mother and grandmother. My grandfather, in his always calm, rational manner, plainly stated the the submarines were not to submerge so close to shore (in the dream, the cabin was directly on the water line, however, and there was no shore; to the right out the window were large, craggy cliffs, and the water lapped at the pane directly in front of me) and repairs to the structural damage must be attended to immediately. That was when I noticed the crack under the window before me, which I nudged with my toe as water began to seep in.
And there were airplanes that I missed, happily, as panic set in the second I realised I was supposed to get on a plane (something I will not be doing for a good long while). There was also a boat, made of corrugated plastic, like the bins the Postal Service uses for mail, that I rowed over to the craggy cliffs, where David and Brad were living some variety of sad, crazy Peter Pan life.
Though I can't quite make sense of it all, I've thought about it all day and I think it accurately portrays almost every facet of my life. But, as dreams are wont to be, this fact is not possible to articulate. Curious, though, that a dream which details my current love situation offers no appearance of the love in question.
I do adore me some dreamings.
