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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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part X: having become, in the absence of vigilance
dear heart, the victorians used to have these vials, little vials that they'd fill with tears and present to loved ones as tokens of love. and this week, i should have something like this as all my tears seem to be going to waste, and they should really be put to some use, i think. if not as tokens of love, then as some saltwater habitat for displaced cretaceous creatures. and there are many. and there have been many. tears, i mean. i hear all that you are saying about max and my relationship. and i needed to hear all of it. thank you, i am trying to say. i suppose i have become adept, over the past fifteen or so years, at making the outside look pretty when it comes to my relationship with max. in fact, it hasn't been bad really. i truly wish, and have wished for a long time, that things would be different. i spent many, many years trying to make myself into many, many things, all to please him, to please some part of him that could never be pleased with me. and it has been like living inside a slow motion nightmare in this way, where i have over time traded little important pieces of myself for some dream that i knew would never see the light of day. i have done this willingly, lovingly, and also willfully ignorantly and knowledgably about my chances of success. and none of this is to say that i don't love max and won't continue to love him until i draw my last breath and that i won't continue to wish that everything had had the potential to be...what both he and i have wanted it to be. when we got married, i was very consciously doing something that i knew was wrong. and it wasn't just some flippant "it ain't broke, so don't fix it" kind of wrong. it was very deeply wrong. it took away the freedom i felt in my head, the little bit of freedom that allowed me to think that i truly was free, the lie that i could tell myself that meant that i could keep myself in a relationship with a man whose rejection of me was, though truly unmeant, elemental in nature. (i don't know how else to say that, i guess, having never heard anyone else say it, there has been no model for it in my life, no model for how other women handle this kind of situation, what they say and do, and how it all works out in the end.) i'm really trying to say that i love max, but what has kept me with him has been a mixture of that love and of fear--fear of being alone, the fear that i will be alone for the rest of my life, the fear that people would learn that what had become the central secret of my life, the central failure of my life. i don't know. i'm trying to think of how all this might sound to you. it sounds self-centered and perhaps a little bitter even though i've fought against bitterness over this and have only come to realize, in the past year or so, that i don't have to be bitter (even though bitter has been such a habit that getting rid of it has been problematic at best and near impossible at worst and which manifests itself often in biting remarks directed at max), and that i don't have to be resentful towards max for doing what he has seemingly been wanting me to do for so long, that is, compromising myself to be with him. and i say this knowing that i have done all this willingly. and, at the same time, if i want to move on, to start moving toward the kind of person i want to be, then it seems so sadly and stupidly inevitable that someone besides me has to be hurt. i say sadly and stupidly, because it seems unfair that anyone but me should be hurt by my decision and i would willingly bear all the brunt of the hurt in this, not just as the price of freedom, but to spare someone i have loved for so long from having to feel hurt or unloved or neglected or any number of a hundred things that i know are moving through max's heart these days, that i know are moving through his heart because they are also moving through mine. i also hear what you are saying about neo, and i think that the catalyst metaphor is apt in many, many ways. i think that perhaps you are right in thinking that he is nowhere near capable at this point of engendering the kind of emotional maturity that it would take to engage in a relationship. i don't even know that he would be willing to try. but when i look into his eyes i feel the force of an incredible kind of passion that has never been a part of my life. never. not from max, not from anyone. and i'm aware that this kind of passion may never truly be part of my life. and i'm not thinking that neo is going to somehow save me. (i'm thinking mostly about how if i leave msx that there is still going to be a long period of having to feel loss and loneliness and hurt even if neo did step seamlessly into the picture, which he's not going to, which i don't want to happen.) i don't want neo to try to save me even. it's mostly at this point that, from knowing him, i can see for the first time in my life that there is the possibility for a kind of love that has been missing from my life. whether that ultimately comes from neo or whether it means that i spend the rest of my life searching, it is still something that i'm finding that i desperately need. perhaps i've given you the wrong impression about neo in my descriptions of my own foolish behavior in regards to him. it's not the drunkenhandonthigh thing that i'm trying to get more of. (in fact i'm quite embarrassed about that and feel pretty goddamn stupid over it.) but for the last two months, neo and i have spent more time together than max and me, and it has been over the course of this time--not the two times that we have gotten drunk together--that i have come to see who he is. i don't know that it matters to say what and who i'm finding, but it's only scratching the surface to say that he's well read and familiar with the ideas of others. i'm not holding back information--for any other reason than that i'm feeling a bit battered at the moment, a bit heartsick, and i don't think i can begin a list that sings praises when it is more appropriate at this moment to mourn. later: i don't know what else to say about the whole mess at the moment. i suppose you brought up the whole self-sabotaging aspect of my behavior, my seeming addiction to failure, my self-defeating behavior. it's related in so many ways to the core belief that i hold (and would like to be free of) that i don't deserve to have anything worth having. i'm always choosing to have the second best something so that i don't deprive someone more deserving of first best. and that's okay in a lot of instances. it's saved me, i think, from being a grabby princess type who selfishly snatches up everything good and screw everyone else. but it's also meant that i've entered into a relationship with someone who loves me, but loves me as though he might love a treasured aunt. i've never been at the heart of max's love. i would never criticize him for this--i've actively agreed to this--but it has hurt. and too it has played into all my beliefs about myself. of course, these beliefs manifest themselves in many other ways--my failure to move forward with my education is the big way that i think you've witnessed. but that too is partly related to devoting all my energy to being second best in max 's heart--if i spend all my efforts trying to be something to him that i never can be, then i can ignore all the other places where i am not being who i can be. (am i making any sense?) and i feel as though i should say that when you speak of max's sexuality, you are forgetting that what he feels is related to love too. he will never love a woman the way he would a man. i say this after fifteen years of trying, and not as someone who saw it on some talk show. i say this with a deep sadness that is only a function of experience. i don't know how to explain this, have never tried to put it into words even. it's just a thing that is, that exists, wordlessly, at the center of my life with him. maybe it will make some of the above make sense, make more sense. i will say finally, that when we got married that i told myself that i would give it a year. it was about committment, but it was about a committment that i was not willing to make. max wanted stability, but in my head the cost of his stability was my independence, my sense of freedom, and i had to betray my own heart to marry. i am loathe now, despite this, to go back on my word. it's turned into a mess that i perhaps could have avoided then by being truthful--and which i did avoid for a long time by doing so--but he needed me then and i stepped up. (the "bad patch" excuse will not be invoked here.) and every day has been this renewal of self-betrayal and not love and committment as it was before we were married and as i feel marriage should truly be. and i've been able to bear a year of this, but i can't continue to do it without continuing to destroy what i am and what i dream of becoming. i've tried not to make this a litany of excuses, but rather some explanation. i don't think you require an explanation, but it has been good for me to write this out. i found when i was in creative writing classes that my mouth could lie all it wanted to about how i felt (my mouth will tell you that everything is fine, that i'm fine, that it's all okay), but when the words went through my hands, lies about feelings were all but impossible. it's good to bypass my mouth now and see what my hands say. that's always been truth to me.
that's it for the moment, i guess. sublingua
More lies:
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