Personal Journal

Once more

For two days, I have felt the growing sickness inside of myself that my relationship with Jean is dead in my heart. We fought like we do on Saturday, and I said things I regret, and that hurt. She said things that were surprisingly hurtful to me, and I’ve replayed them for the past couple of days in dismay at the gall of her to have said what she did.
She said she was leaving and again I talked her out of it, as I do, the healer archtype trying always to console without reflection. Later, I reflected. It was awful, these thoughts, so much like the end of my marriage a couple years ago. The knowledge that the status quo is unacceptable, producing so much pain that it is unbearable. And I looked back on how similar it was to the dying days of my marriage, comparing, trying to sift through the last time for something I was missing this time. What lesson was I forgetting?
I was on the verge of tears all day long. I shouted down a coworker who annoyed me with idiotic attempts at humor once too often (he kept asking me why I wasn’t smiling, which was a bad thing to do today).
I was ready to be dead, wished I had never existed, ready to drive into the Chesapeake or off into the Appalachians somewhere to never be heard from again.
I came “home” and slept for 20 minutes, waking from a sudden nightmare that I was being arrested for a crime, but the moment of waking was itself terrifying. My body wouldn’t move. I could not open my eyes. I struggled to send signals from my brain to my body in hopes I could escape the terror of the ending dream.
Those 20 minutes served their purpose, I was refreshed. I worked. I thought about things.

The lesson that I had forgotten was that ending a bad relationship is less painful than continuing on in the bad relationship.
I realize that I fear the tumult of the transition so terribly (at heart, I’m such a coward that I’m ashamed of myself) that I decide to persist, and to try, and accept known misery over anything unknown at all, bad or good.

Even having said that, even having written what I wrote two nights ago, I’m going to try again to make Jean and I fit. I don’t know if I have any hope for us, though. I don’t know whether I’m doing this because it’s Christmas time, or because I don’t want to end the relationship while I’m on the road (when she could clean me out literally) or whether I believe there is a chance we could make it right.

There’s an archetype asking me “Do you think you can make it right?”
No. I really don’t. But sometimes I’m wrong.
When I rationalized out this decision to continue once more, I found myself making a safety net out of the phrase “One more vicious fight, and it’s over.”
But I think it would take much less than that. I think it would take one more evening where I felt uneasy around her for no apparent reason. Or one more gross mold growing openly on food she shoved to the back of the refrigerator. Or maybe just one more sunrise and I decide to say fuck it.

I don’t see it happening for us, and I’m going to give it another try, with very little enthusiasm, perhaps none, I just can’t say. We are supposed to see a therapist for couples when I go back in December. Maybe that will help. Maybe it won’t.
I don’t want to talk to Jean right now, though. I don’t want to have to be someone that I’m not right now – to have to fake that I miss her or that I love her. I feel her absence with relief, and I recognize only the memory of love for her some week or so ago.
That memory corrupted itself on the memories of our last fight. I accept apologies. I grant forgiveness because I believe it’s mandatory (sometimes difficult for me, never yet impossible, well, anyhow…). I can forgive her for having said those hurtful things, because I know that my saying of hurtful things caused her to need to defend herself. But forgiveness does not equate forgetting, and I can’t forget. Indeed, it’s so unusual for me because I had instantly forgotten, and for a couple of days had been content with the forgotten status until that night when I wrote my last entry, it awakened in me, a schizm of sorts.

I’m falling asleep again. Confronting my own emotions and my own most vulnerable thoughts wears me so thin. It might mean something, but I’m too tired to think about it any longer.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn