The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Denial into acceptance

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I am still covered in dust, these many years later.

When it was over, it wasn’t over. He called me, I called him. He yelled at me, I screamed at him. We had been apart for nine months, but still held on, somehow. I lived in our house, with its wooden floors and red walls, and I fed our dog Murphy, who desperately missed the other human who had reared him. I bought my own groceries, and I ate cereal or scrambled eggs for dinner and I’d wait for my eleven o’clock phone call from my new love. Sometimes, while I’d be chatting happily to the man I thought represented my future, the man from my past would ring through. I’d see his name on the phone, and I’d ignore it. Then, when I’d bid goodnight to my sweet, I’d dial the number for the one who went sour. It was an odd time.

My family had a very hard time adjusting to this turn of events. Though they had no idea that I was still in daily contact with R., they liked to make me think they knew more about him than I did. They were furious with me for ‘losing’ him, for giving up on the one man on the planet who was better than all rest. I was told repeatedly that I’d never find another man like him, that I was lucky he’d ever looked my way. All of them, except for my dad, thought I was cruel and stupid for turning my back on someone who worshipped me, and I have to admit that more than once, I had to wonder if they were right.

The reluctance to give him up entirely was denial. I was denying that it was over, still holding on by a thread, as he was doing on his end. I didn’t want him anymore, but I didn’t want him to go, either. It was selfish of me, and needlessly mean, but it was what felt right at the time. If I didn’t hear from him for a couple days, my mind went into the dark places, imagining him in the arms of another woman, or spitting out my name and telling anyone who would listen what a waste of time I had been. Thirteen years that went nowhere, he’d say. All the money, all the time, all the love: spent.

I lived a dual life, planning for a future that terrified and enchanted me, and desperately clutching the last of the life I had let go. I could not accept that R. would be a part of my history. I knew his baby pictures inside out. I had carried flowers at his grandmother’s funeral. I nursed him twice when he had pneumonia. I knew he hated eggs and kidney beans, and that he cried like an infant when his pet rabbit was savaged by a raccoon. I knew the grooves in his fingertips and the taste of his skin. How do you move away from those things without looking back?

Occasionally, I gave pause to wonder why it all happened.

Eventually, I let him go, but I think he let me go first, which is a bit wounding. I moved far away and started a new life, and he returned to our hometown where he began a bachelor’s existence (something he’d always been afraid of doing, never wanting to be single). I became pregnant with my new love’s child and through that time, I agonized over whether I should call the old love and tell him. I wondered if it would be better coming from me, given that he’d wanted a child so badly when we were together and I’d always refused him. I called, under the guise of a financial issue, and left a message for him to call back. He never did. Instead, I had a beautiful, uneventful pregnancy which gave me a daughter I cherish, and a deeper connection to the new man in my life, who I still adore to this day. It gave me a bit of clarity, and some much-needed distance, to see just how wrong my old relationship had been. The idea of becoming pregnant with R. terrified me, but when I discovered I was pregnant with M’s baby I was overjoyed. That meant something.

I had a million reasons why the relationship hadn’t worked, starting with the fact that R. had never bothered to propose to me. I blamed it all on him, because that’s what I believed at the time. He was primitive in his thinking, at times, and he spent his money on ridiculous things, like snowmobiles and concert tickets. He could not just drink one beer, on those occasions when he drank, and he’d nod off on the couch with an half-drunk bottle teetering on his chest. He didn’t read, couldn’t actually, and though his dyslexia was not an issue for me, his refusal to work at it was. He made offensive, racist jokes, though he didn’t consider himself intolerant, but he was openly homophobic, and proud to be so. His temper was scalding, with broken glass in doors, gouges in walls from thrown knick-knacks, but he never laid a finger on me. He began to dabble in drugs after we split, and I saw this as the epitome of weakness, making me wonder if he’d always been so weak and I was only seeing it now. He was stubborn, and obtuse, and he wouldn’t eat my chili because I’d tried to sneak the kidney beans in.

One day, as I sat in my house, content and likely smiling, the phone rang. On the other end was my sister, but I don’t remember which one. She said that he was going to be a father, that he was going to marry the mother, and I made pleasant exclamations before falling into a dark silence. She wanted to know if it bothered me, to which I could only make a wounded, animal sound before the tears began to roll. I couldn’t find the reasons for this anywhere, and she seemed annoyed at my response. You were the one who left him, remember?, she kindly pointed out. If only she’d left the acid out of her voice.

I had to come to terms with it all. We had officially started two separate lives, two distinct existences independent from what we’d always known. It was over, and I would have to accept it, finally.

We were different, it occurred to me one day. It was never going to be a lasting relationship, it was always going in the direction it did. It hurts because I had wanted it to be different, but we were who we were, and continue to be. I believed in true love, and I think it was that, but a relationship which thrives tends to have a little more in it. There are moments of complete understanding, of tethered thinking, and that was always missing from our life together. I think there were reasons for our pairing, but they haven’t been revealed to me, yet. In the meantime, I hold on to the belief that it went the way it should have, that all of the messiness before and after, and all the pain and suffering, were leading us both to a place where we could breathe freely.

I miss him, though, and always will, despite feeling more myself now than ever before. He owns a little bit of what’s inside me, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, even if I choose to give what’s left to someone else.