Beginning Again…Again
August 14, 2011 by Technominx · Leave a Comment
I’ve been journaling on paper recently. Mainly because I really didn’t want things in the public domain in case they hurt C. But my journal is at home in Norwich and I absolutely have to write or I’ll explode. Hardly anyone read this thing anyway so I think I’m pretty safe!
I am really struggling. I keep going over and over the break-up in my head – and out loud to those I can talk to. How the extended sleep deprivation, odd living hours at the pub, the lack of privacy and C’s own inability to lean on me the way I could see she needed to lean on someone, just whittled the good bits of us away. I was so terrified of being left again, I got more and more jealous of everything in her life, more and more panicked, and although I knew most of it was irrational, the physical state I was in just meant I couldn’t let anything go. Every little thing had a million hidden meanings. So much paranoia!
Basically the toxicity of the circumstances made me ill and my being ill just wore C out and eventually made her unwilling to trust in us.
I know nothing in those circumstances has changed – all the problem and barriers are still there. C is totally exhausted and just hasn’t got it in her to risk trying again. I can see her point, her position, and I can see the validity of my own fears about returning in any way to that toxic environment, to having to deal with her very non-standard bond with E, the lack of sleep. All circumstances were and are against us. We tried and tried and flogged the dead horse desperately trying to get it to run again…knowing that underneath the cruddy scum of the hand we had been dealt was something so rare and beautiful, a real connection that we’d hardly had any time to explore before the hugeness of her life overwhelmed me.
It’s hard. Knowing that under everything are two people that genuinely love each other, that could care and support one another… but somehow it’s just not enough. I would do absolutely anything to take her in my arms, kiss her until I hear her breath catch and tell her how much I love her, how necessary her soul is to mine. That she really is what I want, that I find her beyond beautiful. That her kindness and generosity of spirit makes her the most precious thing I have ever had enter my life. That she taught me what love feels like. But in reality, she knows these things and it doesn’t make a difference. There is nothing we can change of our circumstances, and repeating the same behaviour, expecting a different result is the definition of insanity right? No matter how much love it is borne out of. I am profoundly sad. Every part of me aches for her, but I just have to wait and hope in time it goes away.
As things were spiralling downhill – several months ago now – a friend said to me that there were two men in her life before her husband that she could have married, that she could see a lifelong partnership with – but that circumstances just weren’t right. I remember really believing that that was just wrong. That you can find ways to change circumstances to move and shift the world to accommodate what you really want. If I’m honest there were a couple of times looking back when we could have done that, but I dug my heels in – certain it was unfair to completely uproot her life and move her from her home – that I would and MUST adjust. Except I just couldn’t. I need time alone – I didn’t realise how badly – and a flat above a pub, even though its supposed to be a separate entity to the pub, in reality isn’t. People shout up the stairs – the home office is an extension of the downstairs office. There is never a sense of having private time. You can’t run to the loo in the nude, you have to chuck a T shirt and jeans on in case someone shouts up from the bottom of the stairs and gets a look at your birthday suit. You get the idea?
Every one of the challenges of the life and the space is manageable on it’s own. Together, for me at least, they were just a jumble of the stuff of personal nightmares and demons, and in the end proved insurmountable.
So for now I’m a bit lost. I miss sharing her world and her life. She is constantly in my thoughts, but there is absolutely nothing I can do to change things, to go back, to miraculously make it right. Instead I’ll smoke a cigarette, and sit in a park or on the kerb and wait for time to pass and the hole to get smaller.
Please don’t let it take too long.
