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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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Birthday Demons
Max's Birthday Is Tomorrow I was trying to find the online diary entry from last year at this time, just to see what I was doing on Max's birthday, but my online diary jumps from June to September with nary a word of my doings through that time. I do remember though what was going on then. I was wrangling the Aka Demon through all those days and had gone to the paper diary exclusively to hide the fact that I was a married woman in love with a younger man. I think it was on Max's birthday that I told him that I was in love with the Aka Demon. Max and I had been married for just under eleven months--and had been together for almost seventeen years. I wanted out--I had wanted out of the marriage from day one (actually from the time I agreed to get married), and, reading over my journals from when Max and I first started living together, I realized that I was trying even then, at sixteen, to find a way out. It took fourteen years to think of how to do it, and oddly, the solution necessarily included getting married. (Or, as Elizabeth the Astrologer put it: "You had to formalize the relationship in order to end it.") I may be being melodramatic when I say that I told Max on his birthday that I loved another man, but I truly do remember it that way. I think we came home from a dinner with friends and I told him and cried. Max is my best friend and I had just about killed myself going through all those days without being able to talk to my best friend about the major changes that were going on in my life at the time. My heart then was raw and aching, and I had no one to talk to. I wrote and wrote and wrote in the paper diary about the Aka Demon, and could make no sense of any of it. And Max knew. He pretty much already knew. And it's been a year. And tomorrow, my darling Max turns a year older--and, perhaps for once, is a year wiser. (Though that is almost a bad thing to say, isn't it? All I mean is that he's put a year's worth of time into this last year, and that alone is enough to have taught him a few important lessons.) His birthday is going to be a good one. I'll make sure of it this year. If only to make up for having perhaps ruined the last one. Walk It Down A long walk around campus tonight with Max. How is it, I thought, that I'm fortunate enough to have such a wonderful best friend? I certainly have done nothing to deserve it. I probably should thank some former manifestation for her or his (or its) good deeds, because this particular manifestation is the three steps back in the "one step forward, three steps back" equation.
More lies:
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