Yesterday, it was anger. But yesterday is gone (just ask Lenny Kravitz), and today, I'm back in the salt (tear) mines, with that same old lump back inside my throat, making it impossible to swallow the slice of toast that was my sorry attempt at making breakfast and poisoning what's left of the slightly elevated mood swing that had me looking forward to a brave new post-"him" reality. If I wanted to think semi-positive, I could blame it on the fact that it's raining where I am, but that would be an easy out, as well as untrue, because I've never really minded rain, especially in the spring, as long as it's not too cold (it isn't) and doesn't last too long (we'll see). No, it's not the rain. If I had to blame anything (without a consciousness or the ability to have an actual agenda), it would be my computer clock and the new "Hello Kitty" watch I got for my birthday last week (also known as one of the worst nights of my life, but I'm still working up to posting the details of that one.)
See, before the break-up that broke my heart, bruised my spirit, and befuddled my sense of self-esteem, the former love of my life and I adhered to a very specific schedule when it came to our personal interactions. On those days when I actually got to see him in person, he would always come to me in the morning, usually around nine-thirty or ten, and always leave by one or one-thirty. I know. It was a pretty tight window of opportunity. But those few hours between late morning and early afternoon just happened to be the ones that fit best with his own work schedule. They were never enough, of course. No matter how well we took advantage of those two or three (sometimes four) hours in which we were free to touch and hold and kiss and make love and look into each other's eyes the way that other couples do, when it was time for him to go, I would feel my stomach sink and have to bite my tongue to keep myself from pleading with him to stay. On those occasions when I did give voice to my frustration, he would respond by telling me, in an equally frustrated tone, that he was doing the best that he could.
I think he really he was, too. He had a whole other life that went on before and after those brief, bittersweet hours that he spent with me. And like a good mistress, I did my best to seem grateful that he was able to fit me into his life at all. He never came to see me without some useful item in tow...an economy pack of paper towels or toilet paper, vodka, a box of unopened spices that he'd come across at a yard sale while scouting out antiques. Sitting at my computer right now and looking around the room, it's impossible not to see something that he either bought for me, gave to me, or handed me the money to buy. I was in such bad financial shape when I met him. I'm not much better off now. But even though I told him that my friends sometimes referred to him as my "sugar daddy" (which I found amusing since he's five years younger than me), I never took his financial help for granted. I appreciated it, I was happy to take advantage of it, but if he had lost all of his money in some unforseen personal catastrophe, it wouldn't have changed my feelings for him. He never came to see me without slipping me some extra cash before he left, but even though I was always able to find a very good use for the money he gave me, it was his time that I wanted more.
Because we spent so little actual time together in a physical sense, I became almost pathological about not wanting to miss out on any of our email conversations. My friends found it extremely annoying when they wanted me to go somewhere with them and had to wait until I had completed my nightly discourse with my absent lover. One of my closest friends, who's particulary adept when it comes to caustic rejoinders, was so irritated at one point by my slavish devotion to my keyboard that she said, "You don't have a boyfriend, you have a pen pal. So, say good-night to your pen pal and let's get the hell out of here." I knew what she meant. But I didn't care. In a normal relationship (i.e. the socially sanctioned kind, like the one he had with his wife), the people involved can talk to each other any damned time they want. But we didn't have a normal relationship (hell, as it turns out, we didn't even have the non-normal relationship that I thought we had), and in the two years that we were together, he and I never once spoke on the phone. He refused to carry a cell phone, and since I could never call him at home or at his shop, there was simply never an opportunity for it to happen. The lack of phone access to the man I loved never really bothered me. But, not surprisingly, it bothered my friends, who told me that I was insane not to insist that he come up with some way for me to reach him without having to rely on email. But I never insisted, and even if I had, it wouldn't have mattered. He was good to me in many different ways, and until that awful night two weeks ago, I honestly believed that he was on the short list of the kindest, most caring men in the world. But he could be stubborn about certain things, and the way in which we communicated was one of them. No cell phones, no Skype, no Chat...no anything but email. I spent so much time writing to that man that we might as well have lived in the freaking 19th century.
In the mornings, whether we had plans to see each other or not, he always sent me an email with "good morning" in the subject line, and at night, even if we had just seen one another, I would check my inbox at restless intervals, holding my breath as I scanned the screen for his first email of the night which usually arrived by six or seven o'clock under the simple heading "hi, greta." As soon as it arrived, I would fire off my reply, and then we'd write back and forth to each other until eight thirty or nine, which was when he usually announced the fact that he was going to bed by sending me an email headed with the single word "nite." At the end of the message, he would expand it to "nitey nite", followed by the little flourishes of endearment that we reserved for our final missives of the evening. It was one of his quirks that he always wrote to me in lowercase letters. In the initial days of our email correspondence, I was aghast, as any former English major would be, at his complete disregard for capital letters. But a few months into the relationship, I had not only made peace with the lack of caps, but had discarded them from my own emails. Of the hundreds of emails he and I exchanged, and which I still have, all but the first twenty or so of mine are typed in our signature
sans caps style, and every time I reread one of them (which I always regret doing because it just make the lack of any news ones more glaring), it's as though I'm actually listening to his voice as he says outloud the things that I'm reading on the screen. Writers tend to write the way that people are supposed to talk, but he wasn't a writer, and so he wrote the way he talked, and I found it comforting...before he left me anyway. Now it just hurts. And the only comfort I get from reading his old emails is the thought that, despite the way he treated me in the end, and the ongoing anguish that is my anti-consolation prize for losing my heart
and the man to whom I gave it, maybe...just possibly...he misses our lowercase communucations as much as I do.
Yes, I'm angry at him for making me believe things that he didn't mean and then discarding me like used Kleenex. Thank God I am, too, because from what I've seen so far, anger might turn out to be the only available ticket out of this heartbroken hell. But I couldn't be this angry if I hadn't loved him so much. That's the Catch-22. You can't love someone the way that I loved him without giving away not only your heart, but parts of your soul and spirit as well. And when you love someone enough to do that, and they leave you in the cruel, cold way that he left me, you can't help but feel anger along with the hurt. But even though the anger that you're feeling might be the thing that carries you past the pain, it's also the thing that keeps you chained to the memory of what he did to cause you all that pain. See what I mean? Catch-22...only nowhere near as funny as the book or the movie.
And the two years I spent tied to his schedule like a puppy to a fence? I never thought it was so bad. My friends hate to hear me say it, but its true. It's not a matter of whether I deserved better or more from a relationship. There's always going to be some kind of schedule hanging over your head, and you always end up making sacrifices for the people you love. I followed his schedule and made the sacrifices I made because I loved him. And if he had loved me in equal measure, I wouldn't have minded at all. But he didn't. And so now all I have is a bunch of old emails filled with lowercase letters, ten to twenty of them for nearly every day for the last two years. That's a lot of emails. A lot of "good mornings." And it's way, way too many "nitey nites" that I never even got to say back to him without typing it on my keyboard.
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