Fell in love with a girl back in the day…coming to grips with the past
Another one I’m not sure I should write, especially not while I’m upset, but I walked out to Most Favored Tree tonight looking for wisdom and all I got was: don’t be silent.
My apologies, this walks closer than I like to screwing around with other people’s secrets and I might have to talk in circles around things. Please don’t play guessing games with this; if you already know, well, you know. Please don’t drag her into this; it’s not really about her anymore.
But I’m not okay, I feel ugly and awful and full up to bursting, it feels like I have to not bottle this up if I’m going to get over it–and maybe there’s a point where other people’s secrets aren’t worth trading your own mental health for, and I seem to have hit mine.
When I was younger, I fell in love with a girl. I told her I loved her but not that I was in love with her. I didn’t really understand that was a thing I could do for myself. I thought she was straight. She was messed up. She had a past full of stuff that could mess anybody up.
She told me I was wonderful. She also told me in a thousand ways that I could never do anything right. She pushed me away. She pulled me close. She was offended when I drew boundaries. I felt like she could read my mind and I could read hers. I couldn’t.
I kissed her a couple of times but we were never together. I was just there for her when she needed me, although I’m sure she’d be the first to say I wasn’t.
By the time she decided she wasn’t straight, I had let go of it. Or so I thought. She’d lashed out at me so many times, made me walk on eggshells for so long, abandoned me as a friend only to reel me back in again, that I felt like she didn’t want me and never would. I let it go. She told me she’d never sleep with me after she came out as gay. It sounded pretty final. She probably has no memory of saying this. Maybe it was her idea of a joke.
But I wanted to be with her, forever somehow if possible, and there’s a part of me that never let go of that, even though I didn’t consciously remember it until like yesterday. I’d forgotten about all this stuff, or rather made myself swerve away from the thought so often that it no longer really occurred to me.
Looking back, everything makes more sense.
She’s creative and brilliant and wonderful, but she also lashed out at me when she was in pain and expected me not just to forgive her for it, but to love her *because* she lashed out at me. Her behavior, no matter what it was, was supposed to be a natural part of her and I had to love it. If not, it meant I didn’t really love her. I was always going, “If only she could be at peace with herself, if only she would stop tearing me to pieces, I would lay myself down and die for her.” She’s a lot like my mom, in retrospect not surprising.
I feel like I’ve become the noir detective who fell in love with a complicated dame who will never settle down and stay with him, and she keeps doing these fly-bys that tear him to pieces, only now he has to finally acknowledge that it’s no good and he has to learn how to let go.–Maybe I feel like that because it’s a nice story, one that feels better than the truth, which is just that I’m lame and divorced and I can’t be bothered to find ways to get along with her as a Real Live Grownup. I don’t know. I just know that it usually helps to poke fun at myself. It’s not really helping.
I finally drew a hard boundary with her and told her no. I already wrote about that; I won’t rehash it here. But it must be over-over finally now; I’ve been unfriended on Facebook.
I keep going: this is dumb. Why am I so torn up? Isn’t the perspective where I finally told off an old friend who I really wasn’t close to anymore the right one? I fell out of love with her a long time ago, after honestly not that long of a period of being in love with her, and we weren’t even all that close for decades, really only connecting again because of social media.
On the other hand I keep going: I’ve never really acknowledged, even to myself, how much it killed me back then that we weren’t together.
I keep joking around with my daughter that I’m going to marry an ornery woman who wants to keep a house and raise goats and make cheese, and we’re going to live in France somewhere along the sea, and I’m going to be a famous writer and my wife will be sarcastic and black-humored and kind of short and stocky and old and grizzled and she’ll complain about her feet, and I’ll be radiant with pleasure as I rub them and she tells me about the daily adventures of the goats. I’ve been nursing that image for years, not realizing whose face I was casually imagining, more or less.
In the back of my head, there are Katchoo and Francine from Strangers in Paradise, eventually growing up and working shit out and moving to New Mexico to paint in the desert.–A much better story than the one I’m in right now, all around. I think a lot of my current big work in progress draws from SiP, the romance and the violence both. Yes. I’m sure it does.
I *knew* things would never get better between us. I’m almost fifty. This has been going on for a long time, where I have less and less rope before I lose my patience with the current fly-by, and finally I had none left. She crossed a line and I let her know immediately that it wasn’t okay. Now she’s gone, no further discussion necessary.
And yet.
It broke my heart then that we couldn’t manage to be together. It breaks my heart now to admit that we never will, to admit that I really did feel that way back then, and to understand that there would never have been anything but unpleasant drama between us if we had gotten together.
There were no negotiations, no trials and failures and trials of something different, no laughing through tears together about being idiots, no moments of just stopping to appreciate each other. No teasing, no real play together. No casual insults; no pun contests. (Can you imagine it? Me? Wanting to be with someone who didn’t love puns?) Nothing was shared; I was just supposed to receive everything uncritically, like a mother.
She was *not* like my ex. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But she wasn’t good for me, either. I didn’t get what I needed; I wasn’t able to give what was needed. And now, finally, the end.
And it hurts and I’m mad and sad and feel like I’m bad and it’s all stuff that I should have been honest about with myself twenty years ago, before I met my ex, when it maybe could have done me some good.
…
Feeling like an idiot, I took a bunch of pictures of myself crying, because I just felt ugly. Fortunately there was also a voice that said, “Take pictures of this now, so that you can look at them later and see that the ugliness is just your emotion, now, coloring things.” This turned out to be true.
I made a bunch of posts that included “grief is weird” as part of the prompt. This one’s my favorite.