I’m not sure how to tell this story. I suppose it makes me look pathetic to more jaundiced eyes, but at the same time, it is one of my proudest moments.
I found myself thinking of this story from my life recently, with a bit of awe. Who was I to make such decisions about a stranger? What kind of backbone did I have to tolerate such anxiety? For the greater good? – I think of this story as the “tsk tsk tsk” story and I am struggling right now with what form to put it in. It started many many years ago … and I had put it into a little box, with a meaning neatly attached … and then a couple of years ago I had a conversation with the man this story revolved around, and I brought it up, in a “hahaha member the ‘tsk tsk tsk’ moment??” … and he had no memory of it. He was horrified at his own behavior. But I rushed into that void and told him what I had thought it meant at the time … and what I still feel that it meant. Talking with him about the “tsk tsk tsk story” was one of those moments where continuity spans space and decades – a bridge connecting one era to the next … and I saw that my interpretation was just that: an interpretation – nothing more, nothing less – but it had felt like truth to me, and I lived as though it were true, and all kinds of incredible things happened because of the interpretation I chose to put on this one particularly awful moment. I CHOSE to interpret it the way I did. I see that now. I am not sure that I would have that capacity now. Something has been lost in the transfer. But maybe that’s not true either. Maybe that’s just an interpretation as well. We live by our interpretations. It is how we see the world. It is how we react to our fellow man. And it all feels quite real … we think: that guy is an ASSHOLE, that woman is a BITCH … but what we are really experiencing is our interpretation of them, based on other memories, dreams, reflections, past experiences with similar types of people (you know: you meet a blonde skinny perky woman who reminds you of the cheerleading bitch who made fun of you in high school, and so you assume that this new woman will be a bitch, too). And sure, sometimes an asshole is just an asshole … but 9 times out of 10 … what we are reacting to is our own interpretation. We can choose an interpretation that empowers us, or we can choose an interpretation that keeps us bitter, stuck, pissed. In the “tsk tsk tsk” moment, I chose an interpretation that empowered me. HOWEVER: when I told the story to my friends, they all reacted with horror and outrage … not seeing it as empowerment at all. They saw it as me being weak and putting up with nonsense from a total douchebag. That’s okay. I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even know that I knew what I was doing. It is only in looking back on it that I realize just how wise (and how brave) I really was.
Yes, yes. Something has been lost in the transfer.
As usual I have top-ended with my story with intimations of the end, but I can’t seem to see a way around it right now.
The man in question is the man I refer to as M, on this here blog. The dude who used to crawl through my window at 3 in the morning. I find I am only able to write about him in small segments where I limit myself to what happened, as opposed to going on about my feelings for him … My feelings resist classification, and at times he’s just too big to try to pin down … and frankly his stature grows in my memory as the years pass. This would embarrass him completely and make him cranky (or, more cranky than he normally is, I mean) – but it’s the truth. Our relationship (off and on as it was) lasted 11 years. In that time, lots of things happened, of course – there were fights, and haiku fits that lasted 40 days, there were late-night shenanigans involving dangerous driving, there were failed attempts at strip poker, there were sleepless nights when he would drive me to work the next morning, and of course I was in the same clothes as the day before since I never went home (I worked at a switchboard at an international software company, and my co-switchboard operator would always laugh right in my face when I walked in wearing the same outfit as the day before … because we all know what THAT means). There were weekends when we never left his apartment and just watched the Sci-Fi channel, or Skinemax or Nickelodeon, wrapped up in a blanket on his couch, and barely speaking. Maybe we would say to each other, “Wanna order some food?” Then another 6 hours would go by, with no talking. Or, we would talk about what we were watching on TV, but not, like, relationship talk. We never ever did that. We never said, “Here’s what I’m feeling …” It seemed irrelevant. To this day, I can’t explain it. We communicated through silence, kissing, and random hour-long conversations about, oh, the behavior of penguins, or something … and it worked very well for us. We could have given Master Classes in makeout sessions. He reduced me to a small puddle just by walking into a room. That was there for us from the start. I mean, obviously. There were moments, brief, when something came up that needed to be handled, and so we awkwardly made our way through it … but for the most part, there was none of that chatter. I am not sure who set the tone for this dynamic. I can’t parse it out. It seems to me that he set the tone (which is really the point of the “tsk tsk tsk story”) but then, on deeper reflection, I think it might have been how I interpreted the “tsk tsk tsk story” that helped set the tone. I know that when I met him, I was damaged, wild, and rather fierce. I don’t mean “fierce” like Christian Siriano uses it – I mean it like I was a trapped animal, I had been trapped for years, now I was free, and I was damned if I would be pulled back into anything like THAT again. I was hell on wheels, and not all that nice to a couple of rather nice guys – but whatever, they met me at the wrong time. I never played games with anyone. I was always upfront about where I was at. And until I met M., nobody took me at my word. The men I met assumed I would get over it, or change, or … once I dated THEM for a while, I would obviously see the light and realize that I WANTED to be domestic and part of a couple! Even though I was adamantly against it.
I guess I don’t want to write about this after all.
