It is the simplest things, the ones others might see as insignificant, that I shall miss the most.
I will miss sitting in our living room with my wife, watching Whose Line Is It Anyway.
I will miss long car trips, driving along with her hand resting lightly in mine, reminding me that she’s there and we’re together.
I miss the phone calls during the day, not the usual ones about mundane things but the ones when she called just because she was thinking of me.
I will miss the feeling of coming to bed very late at night, trying to be quiet as I tiptoe through the dark room, and slipping in beside her, feeling her warmth and knowing that even though she’s not noticed me, that she’s there beside me.
I will miss having coffee together.
I will miss those quiet mornings when Tony, our big tomcat, would sneak into the bedroom and climb up between us in bed, and then purr and cuddle up as though he were the happiest cat that ever lived, because he loved being near both of us.
I will miss grocery shopping together.
I will miss singing to her. In the last few weeks, she had complained that I never sang to her anymore, and she’s right, I hadn’t felt very musical for a long time. The night that my life changed, the night it all ended, the irony is that I had been in my office until about 2 AM, with a makeshift recording rig connected to my Macintosh, recording two songs that were meant to be a late anniversary present. I burned them to a CD, went home, and found no one there. I woke the next morning and she was still gone … that was the last night I spent in our home. It was that weekend that we parted.
How does anyone ever get through this? I can’t walk down the street, get in my car, sit at my desk, eat lunch, sleep, or even breathe without being reminded of her, the way she smelled, her smile, her eyes, her touch, her voice. I saw something in the window of a shop last night, thught, “Yvette would like that…” and then had to duck into the nearest rest room as I fell completely to pieces. Today I had to fill out paperwork for a new insurance plan at work and just writing her name was enough to make me crumble.
We both did things to drive each other away. I don’t think either of us is any more to blame than the other … what she did was what she felt forced to do, and what I did is what I felt forced to do, and we gradually put up walls that shut each other out.
There was an old movie starring Natalie Wood called “Brainstorm”, about a machine that could record people’s thoughts and memories and experiences. In it, the two lead characters are going through a divorce. He puts on the helmet and records a tape of all his thoughts, and gives it to her, saying, “It’s me.” She plays it, and instantly understands … understands everything … and they live happily ever after, eventually.
If only she could somehow see into my thoughts! Words don’t work … every time we talk, the question is, “Well, if you love me as much as you say you do, then how could you <do one of a dozen things I’ve done that created distance between us>?”. The answer is inevitably, “I felt pushed away because you did <one of a dozen things she did that created distance between us>.” The problem is that none of those things was meant to distance us, they just … resulted, just as the ones she did resulted from mine. In the end we were so far apart that we didn’t even remotely understand each other’s needs. She says she opened up to me … I think I tried too … but here we are, and apparently we both failed to do enough. If we could have somehow seen what each other needed, if we could somehow have experienced each other’s feelings, in a way that words and arguments and discussions can’t hope to provide, it might have resolved everything.
If we could see into each other’s minds and hearts, I’d be calling her right now to discuss dinner and tell her how much I love her, instead of sitting here at my desk wishing I could stop weeping.
My close and perhaps oldest friend, Kirk, who lives in Boston and has studied Psychology, feels I should stop sharing feelings like this publicly, that I should keep my verbal catharses private. My friend Omally recommends continuing to share, calling it “Blog therapy”. I’m not sure what to think, so if anyone has further advice I’m listening.
Disclaimer: What follows might be depressing. It might be boring, and it will definitely be long. I’m disabling comments too. This is something I need to write, and need to make sure has been said. It is going to hurt me to write it, but it is also going to help me because I will have let it out. If you want to keep reading with this in mind, that’s fine. If you don’t, I’ll completely understand.
We met in Orlando. I lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment that suited me all right in the situation I was in. I was working as the chief technical engineer of what was at the time the largest and most prestigious recording school in the country, which was also a working recording studio complex and post-production facility. My work defined me, then. I had been alone, utterly and completely alone for more than ten years. My first marriage, to my high school sweetheart when I was but 20 years old, didn’t work out because we were both too young; her understanding of commitment was that it was OK to sleep with other people as long as no one told me. The betrayal nearly destroyed me, and kept me very detached for a long time.
When I met Yvette I wasn’t looking for Ms. Right. I wasn’t looking for anything other than a good time, nor was she. The first time we met, though, something happened that made us both start thinking of each other a lot of the time. She was involved in a marriage where her husband abused her, and before I knew it I was involved in a rescue of sorts.
This was a hard spot for me to be in. I was falling in love with a married woman, and she with me, and helping her through a divorce was killing me because I felt like the same outsider who’d ruined my own marriage 10 years before. She had the same problem I guess, because she pulled away from me and moved with her husband to New Hampshire to start over. I cried, I fell apart, and then I started to recover. Slowly, I started to realize that I’d never belonged with her in the first place, and I should forget it and move on. I buried myself in my work again.
A few weeks later, the phone rang. Guess who. Her husband had started cheating on her practically the minute they arrived up there, so she’d left him, she was on her way back to Orlando, and wanted to come stay with me. With her 15 year old son and 6 year old daughter. And their dog and cat. For 10 years it had been just me and my siamese cat, dB, living on our own. I couldn’t say no, because no matter how much I’d been hurt and no matter how much I denied it, I did love her. In they came … three people, a dog, and two cats in a one bedroom apartment. It was not easy, but somehow we made a life out of it, and we’ve been together ever since.
Until now.
In the last two or three months, we’ve spent more time apart than together. We can’t seem to agree on anything, we argue, we hurt each other emotionally, we make each other sad. Finally, last Friday, we came to the conclusion, unfortunately, that I guess we’re better apart than together. I have not seen Yvette, Alexis, the cats, the birds, the house, or anything else that was part of my live since last Friday, ten days ago. Apparently, she came to that conclusion before I did … there was a final indignity that I will not describe in detail out of respect for her privacy and mine, but it broke my heart.
Today, for the first time in four days, my wife called me on the phone. It was only about paying bills, and I just fell apart all over again.
Yvette and I were together for 10 years. Before that, it was just me and my beloved siamese cat. Now, everything that had meaning in my life, everything that really mattered, is gone. Yvette blames it all on me … it’s all my fault, it all started with me, I am the one who created the whole problem. I wish that were true, because then I could just change it all back. Fact is we both grew apart, we both made changes that the other couldn’t handle.
I come to work every morning, and I sit here at my desk trying to force back the tears … talk to friends in the chat room to pass the time … try to concentrate and work and make something productive happen. I make it through until lunchtime, and I go out to my car, and I fall apart. I get my act together in time to come back in the afternoon, try really hard to get something productive done but I can’t think. I hold it in until quitting time, do whatever I can to keep the grief and the anguish at bay, and then I drive to my seedy little weekly room, drink myself to sleep, and start over again. I am not living, I am dying.
I love my wife. I will always love her because she is the only thing in my life that ever made sense, the only person who ever looked at me and saw anything that I really am, the only person who ever made me feel like I was home. I don’t know how to live without that. Half of me is gone, and the other half is just dying, just withering away to nothing because I have no soul without my soulmate.
The way things are now, I don’t think we’ll ever resolve things, and I don’t think she wants to. Alexis, who is 15 and rebellious, has always hated me, and I know she’s happier with me gone. Yvette has at least got relief from the arguing and the conflict. I have nothing. It’s been made clear I’m not welcome in the house. The only computer I have that isn’t in this office is there. The internet router there is broken, and I can’t fix it from here, so probably she will bring in someone else who will not understand the network I have spent so much time building and tweaking and perfecting, and it will probably get butchered.
Tony, probably the sweetest and most affectionate cat that ever lived, would normally be my comfort at times like this. Now he’s there and I’m here. My big bird, Sammy, and our little birds Phoenix and Big Bird, are also gone from my life now.
Our life together wasn’t perfect. It was pretty awful sometimes, but it was also really good, sometimes. I wasn’t ready to give up the things that were working, just because I was indignant over a few things that weren’t, but now there’s no choice. I have spent so much time and devoted so much of my energy to making this marriage work that now, when I turn around and take stock of what’s left in my life, I don’t have a single friend who’s close enough and knows me well enough to understand what I’m going through. I do have two or three old, dear friends, but they live in other states. Atlanta is a place where I have had only one true friend, and now I have zero.
There is a picture of my wife in the office. You can’t see it because it sits on a shelf right underneath the video webcam. There’s a picture of Alexis right beside it. It is still there, but I don’t really need a picture. I have loved Yvette for so long that I know every line, every dimple, every freckle. Her face is burned into my mind and will always be there, and it is a face I thought I would spend life with … I wanted us to grow old together, I wanted us to experience everything life had to offer from now until the end. So many dreams, so many visions, so many things I wanted to happen. The birthmark below her right eye, the shape of her hands, the way her shape took my breath away … I just can’t forget, I can’t get away from the visions, the memories, the pain is unbearable, I wish somehow everything could be fixed and we could be together again and I know it won’t happen. I wish I could just erase all the memories. The weekend at St. Augustine. The week we spent in Gulf Shores, when she wrote our names on the wall at the Flora-Bama. The trip to Virginia Beach. The long drives. The afternoon at a picnic table at a rest area along I-95. It all keeps flashing through my head. Our first kiss. Nights walking along the lake at Sun Key, the apartment complex where I used to live. A chinese dinner in Boston. The dinner at the little Mexican restaurant when I proposed. A week in New York, walking around Times Square. Shopping. Nights when we stayed up until ridiculous hours, just talking. Intimate times.
Life, my life as I know it, has ended. Whatever happens from this day forward is just what came later. It will just fill the time between the day my life ended and the day I stopped breathing. This relationship, this love between my wife and I was all I had, my sole reason for everything I’ve done in the last ten years. It has been my only validation, the only thing that has made me feel a purpose in my life.
Yes, this all sounds like wallowing. Yes, it’s all emotional drivel, and yes, I’m a crybaby. If the loss of the love of one’s life is not a good enough excuse to fall apart then I don’t know of a better one. The usual thing people say to a man at a time like this is that it gets better, that the pain will fade, that I will forget, and that life will go on, and I know those things are not true. No one who understood how strong my love is would offer that. My wife may not have been happy with me, and I may not have done everything she might have wanted, but at the very least, I was a man who loved her … she will never find anyone who will love her as much as I do, of that I can be sure.
Thanksgiving is this week. What have I to be thankful for? I wish I could just forget the day exists. Christmas is coming too … I have always had a hard time at Christmas, missing my father and now my mother, and this year I will have no family at all. Can’t I just skip into January? This is all just too much for me.
I am rambling. This is what I guess they call a stream of consciousness, and if I’m incoherent I apologize. There are some things I needed to say when I started out and I have no idea if I’ve said them, and if I try to read all this back, by the end I won’t be able to see again, so let me just try this … for the record, for the world, for anyone who cares to know.
1) I love my wife, and Alexis who hates me, and my pets more than life itself.
2) No matter how it may have seemed, everything I have ever done has been with my wife and family in mind.
3) I have never meant any of the things I’ve said in arguments, they just came out of pain and anger.
4) I have never had an affair or been unfaithful, nor could I ever do that to anyone I’m committed to.
5) The good and the bad, the last ten years, I would not trade for anything in the universe.
6) I remember all the good times, and I would gladly sell my soul for one more good day together.