Reading this all that time without my knowledge wasn't kind. It was the opposite of kind. He should never have shared this with you.
Thankfully I met someone who never would have.
. . . . .
640 days to go.
~*~
top entry most recent, bottom is oldest
day60,sun.oct.7,2001
we only dropped 37 thousand rations of humanitarian aid? for god's sake let's drop more.
beyond that thought i have no thoughts. just watching.
~*~
he left me a message the next morning (yesterday) saying several things. (i had left
him several angry, drunken messages in addition to the conversation.)
he said, 'we will have to stay completely away from each other, because no matter how
nice it is, it always ends like this. with you in a rage.'
well, which comes first? me in a rage, or him in another woman's arms?
for four years, he's basically teased me with love: now you see it, now you don't. i
didn't ask for him to come on to me at the radio station: why would he do that? why would he
torture me like that? here's a little affection.......now, i'm whisking it away again......for four years!!!!
is it pure narcissism on his part? does he not get how, if a person truly loves him, it could drive that
person literally mad?!
when there wasn't another woman in his life, he would spend time with platonic woman
friends, leaving me by the wayside for his saturday nights or other prime-time social engagements. so
it wasn't always a case of deserting me for another girlfriend.
but in essence, it's been the same dance over and over again. 'look, here's some love.
i'll dangle it in front of your face. now, i'll whisk it away!!!!'
and the underlying, consistent reason he always gave was: 'you're too young for me. i need
someone older, more seasoned by experience. i have dated too many young women, and it doesn't work
out. would you be able to contemplate a serious relationship with someone who was, say, 22?' (i'm 33, he
is 63.)
well, okay then. then why keep coming back and torturing me like this, by giving a little,
only to rip it out from under me?
because, he says, he is conflicted. he has very strong feelings for me.
i don't doubt this. in fact i believe him. but is he a liar? yes, he is. has he lied
to me repeatedly in the past? yes, he has.
another thing he said in the message was, 'when you asked me when i was seeing her
again, i said, 'well, i may call her up tomorrow' because you were pissing me off so much with the
things you were saying.'
i don't remember it quite being that way, but maybe he's right; i was drunk.
he stressed that he had been very unhappy with the way things were going, with
the woman he had been seeing.
well, ditto for the actress, when he was seeing her. numerous times he told me it was
over between them (true at that split second) and then would go back. i don't trust him, i don't believe
him anymore, period.
but even if i did believe it was over with this woman, there's still no excuse for his giving
me false hope.
not if he really means goodbye. ....(cont. next page.)
day59,sat.oct.6,2001
~*~
i'm stunned.
first things first. i blew it on two counts. one, i drank last night. and two, (you guessed
it) i called him.
so, in a way, i brought it on myself. let me just try to tell what happened.
yesterday, when i sat down at this computer and wrote that frustrated, tender
missive about him, and his shading of truth, i was only talking about a couple of instances.
in other instances he's been honest. and, when he blurted out, unasked, the other day, that
he was not seeing anyone, for a split second i believed him. i talked about this in yesterday's
entry: that i thought back to when he was dating the actress, and remembered that he lied
to me many times throughout the course of that affair.
but even as i wrote that, yesterday, even as i remembered the untruths and
unsaid qualifications and omissions that make up outright lies, even as i wrote that, i had this
little glow, this little tarnished light that wouldn't go out, somewhere under all that black
muck of bad feeling. this little glow of hope, that maybe he was telling the truth, maybe
in fact his saturday nights were unoccupied by lovemaking, that maybe he wasn't
kissing and holding someone else now.
it was such a nice feeling. hope.
i don't remember a lot of the conversation. i was loaded enough to be slurring.
but i do remember saying, 'so you said you're not seeing this woman now. is that true?'
he hesitated. 'well,' he said, 'i haven't seen her.'
'since when?' i pressed.
'oh, come on---' he protested.
'no, you come on,' i insisted. 'when was the last time you saw her?'
'monday,' he admitted.
'monday,' i repeated.
'so,' i continued. 'when do you think you'll see her again?'
i don't remember if he said anything here-----then-----he said:
'tomorrow.'
'tomorrow,' i repeated. 'saturday. so. you saw her monday, and you're going
to see her tomorrow.......but you're not seeing her anymore.'
i do remember that part of the conversation clearly. i was sitting on the floor. at
that point in the conversation i was stretched out on my stomach. when he said he had seen
her monday, i sat up.
there are other bits and pieces of the conversation that stand out clearly. one is,
'you called me,' he said. meaning: 'look, i didn't ask for any of this.'
well, i didn't ask for him to blurt out to me that he's not seeing anyone. i didn't
ask for him to come up to me and say that out of the blue (which is exactly what he did, with
absolutely no invitation from me).
how dare you give me hope. how dare you tell such a bald-faced lie to someone
you KNOW is trying to get over you. how the fuck can a person be so cruel? .......how......
..the........fuck?!!!!!
so, now i know what he'll be doing tonight. he'll be seeing the 51-year-old woman
from calabasas that he's described repeatedly as 'a very nice woman.' so from here forward,
if i have to refer to her, she'll be the Very Nice Woman. i asked him what her name was,
last night, and he refused to tell me.
i wonder if the Very Nice Woman is aware that she's dating a not-so-nice guy. who
said to me last night, and this i also remember clearly,
'i can't get you out of my mind. i can't forget you. when i see you,
i almost pass out. that night you came and sat on my doorstep, i kept looking at you, you
were driving me crazy. your robe was falling open, i could see your legs, your nightie, your...'
~*~
~*~
day 58,fri.oct.5,2001
so to sum it up: i guess you can miss a person, don't miss the saturday blues. so being single isn't bad. the world is my oyster. the other night we did an on-air ticket
giveaway to an l.a. philharmonic performance. one of the winners, a woman, exclaimed, (i'm not making this up) 'wait a minute, did you say they were performing beethoven and schoenberg? forget it!'
yeah, really. couple of hacks, those two.
kim --ever the admirer of women--writes of a female board operator: 'she radiates incredible tit warmth. seriously, from 2-3 feet away, I
can feel 2 strong sources of heat.' he also said, 'i live a confused life...blindly driving from the
backseat.' amen, brotha.
....now, if rachel weisz were holding the oyster.....pass the tabasco.
<
they launched the.....this is the phrase for the day. it would be a good name
for something: ...secret satellite. ~*~
so i didn't entirely come clean about yesterday. i did have a conversation with my
ex-lover. he told me i look wonderful, and he told me he's not seeing that woman.
against my better judgement, i felt soothed by the idea that he's not seeing
anyone. but reality only took a few seconds to kick in.
when he was seeing the actress, i would see him at the university and he
would tell me ( ---as the relationship was ending, because i wasn't speaking to him at all
when it began)--he would tell me 'i'm not seeing her anymore.' which would be technically
true at that moment, as they broke up and reunited time and time again (just like
he and i did, over the years).
(although: to be technically correct here: we didn't 'break up' or 'get
back together' in the normal sense, because he never even acknowledged me as a "real
relationship." i was the secret source of affection; kept hidden from the world; the liason,
the mistress. so our reuniting, intimate and intense though it was, time and time again, could
not be called 'getting back together.')
once he even said---when i reaq his column about her and was upset---'that column
is fiction. there is no relationship there, i am not in a relationship.'
later, he didn't remember saying that. he said: 'i was in such emotional turmoil,
......i just don't remember...i don't know why i would have
said that, but i was in such a state of emotional distress, i may have said things
....i don't know..'
another thing he said was, 'you're misinterpreting what she means to me, in
relation to what you mean to me.' he didn't remember saying that, either. but he explained
it by saying, 'my feelings about her fluctuated, and what i said may very well have been true
at that moment.'
so you see, there's no truth or emotional security to be had.
sure, maybe he's not seeing that woman today. but he got naked
with her, and he's emotionally engaged, usually, if he gets naked with someone; so, there
is bound to be some kind of attachment there that will play out over time.
fuck him anyway. it's not comforting that he doesn't see anyone, if he doesn't.
but i don't believe it anyway. and it doesn't matter anyway. it's over over over.
so i had a moment of comfort at thinking, he's not holding someone. he's
not kissing someone. but that evaporated with reality: he may have broken up with her
earlier this week, to rejoin her by saturday.
truth be told, that makes it easier for me. his lips look less delicious, for having
kissed another woman. his eyes don't go quite to the bottom of my soul, because they've been
fishing in another soul's depths. his skin looks less delicious; someone else's tongue has found
secret places on it; his arms don't look as much like home, because they were holding someone
else. and will again. hers, someone else's, it doesn't matter and i don't want to know.
one more item of interest. he has the url of this website. early on in our
breaking-off conversations he asked for it; i demurred; then later, maybe against my better
judgement, let him have it.
on one level, i liked the idea of him checking in late at night, sitting at the computer
looking into the starry skies bordering my thoughts. rather than put his head next to mine,
hearing my voice and absorbing my thoughts as we held each other--and i absorbing
his, a true two-way give-and-take-- he could at least sit
in front of the cold computer seeing the daily fluctuations as my life makes its way away from
him. odd?
maybe.
his grey cat, skippy, will jump up on the desk, sit twitching his tail and watching as
he stares into cyberspace.
so he'll get some thoughts; but the thoughts aren't me. i'm somewhere else, alone,
missing him. my thoughts change moment to moment. range from the mundane to the
sublime.....why are you reading my thoughts if you don't want me? why would you want
the shadow of a woman and not the real, imperfect flesh and blood? why did you want
to gaze at me through glass, and make love to me in the dark, but not want to know me in
real life, meet my four year old nephew james who wants to beat you up for making me cry, meet my sister who
is my best friend on earth?
did you just want the sensations of love, did you just want to
glut your senses with the deliciousness of our touch, our chemistry, the reaction of our
minds to each other? because it was not mindless. we made contact on many levels----layers
deep. layers i never knew existed.
distance, loneliness, slow seductions, rejoinings full of comfort and laughter
and life. and then rejection and distance again. that is how it's been with him for four years.
his eyes behind the glass of the studio window, looking for me.
now his eyes are looking into a computer screen across town: looking for me.
i'm here, darling, i'm not somewhere in the ether.
i'm here. i was always here. i've loved the seductions, they were exciting.
there's a romance and a power in what we shared because so much of us was hidden to the
other. but i'm here, beyond the poetic words; i'm here, sitting on the floor in the morning
reading the newspaper and eating toast while little spanky walks around chattering, pecking
at floor-grit; i'm here,
reading myself to sleep at night now that i don't drink; i'm here, with all my defects and
neuroses and imperfections, i'm here, and you are not, in the rhythm of my days. there's
nothing extraordinary about my life, but so what? everything extraordinary goes to dust anyway;
we have these wonderful paintings from van gogh, but he's dead; his life was full of misery;
and, they'll be returned to dust in 10 thousand years anyway. we'll all be gone; and everything
we create will be, too.
i'm here, i wish you were.
he looked old. older than i remembered. i thought, looking at him, about how
we all go that way. our skin changes, our faces change. our minds....? he talked a lot about
age and how there was a chasm i couldn't see. i thought a lot about age, but in another way:
i thought: oh please, just be with me while we have time: because of my mother i'm so
aware that time ticks away. and as he stood there in the hall talking to me, i thought again,
how much time do you have, and my dear, darling, my beloved liar, i wish you would just spend
it with me.
~*~
~*~
~*~
~*~
day57,thu.oct.4,2001
this song going through my head, can't remember the artist, someone not
very successful, a really happy tune:
'i've got a dog that doesn't bark, he's dying of a broken heart; this morning,
my friend carolyn asked me why i didn't call her back last night, and i told
her i went to bed early. throat bug still hangin on, still hacking a little, but it's not terrible.
so when i told her i went to bed early because i still wasn't feeling all that great, she said, cutie pie, incidentally, recently acquired a parakeet, and suggested he bring
it over so it could 'play with spanky.'
(really.)(yeah, you do that, spanky'll whip your bird's ass)
so, this all led me to think about *him* again. these conversations in which people
presumed to know what i was feeling or why.
and it brought me to remembering how he complained once that i was 'projecting'---assuming
i knew how he felt or what he needed or what he was thinking. for example, i would say, 'i really
think you love me....i see it in your eyes.' or, 'you need someone
younger, to keep your energy up.' and he would say, 'how do you know what you're seeing
in my eyes? don't tell me how i feel. and don't tell me what i need. let me tell you.'
now i think i know what he means, and i think: my god. it is annoying.
as hell.
all of this is not a big deal. but now i think i get it. so frustrating to have the other
person just assume they know what's good for you, what you're feeling, what you need, what
you want, where you're at, what your
potentialities are......to make assumptions, rather than asking. it's intrusive, in a way; i'm going to try to
not ever do that again.
i've also said to him, 'but look at your past....' ---- but is that fair? i don't want to be judged by my past mistakes; why should i judge
him --or anyone--that way?
~*~
spoke too soon. ...thought i was beating the bug into retreat.....maybe not. now holly's coughing,
and matt's coughing, too.
'that sounds really great,' mike just said, sarcastically, when i coughed.
wrap me up in warm soft blankets and put a hot water bottle on my throat.
let me lean back and hold a cup of hot tea up to my lips. let me keep my hands under the covers
where it's warm, read to me while my poor old aching body fights off this nastiness.....when
i fall asleep tuck the covers round and tiptoe out...peek in once in a while and check....uck,
uck, uck, bleeeeeccch. cutie pie, would you come
over tonight and just be my mommy? make some
soup for me? i won't be able to kiss you...don't want
to pass on this infection *sigh*
say a prayer for heather and dayna
silly little baylor girls who genuinely wanted to
do good.....oh yikes...and didn't know what they were
getting into.
he was there today at the university.
and it's a mystery. seeing him makes me long for him so strongly, no matter what
he did, whether he used me, what the real truth is. i miss him, i miss him, i miss his
light-beige sweatshirt and his green tee shirts, his baggy pants, his voice, his mind. besides
being ---emotionally polygamous, he was a person who went deeply into my heart. a real,
live, person, who i miss. a friend in some ways.
a user in others. but, ultimately, someone who
wanted to pass some time on this earth with me.......
someone who wanted to stand and talk to me in the
hallways, lie in bed with me in his arms, exchange funny
emails consisting of just 'x' or 'o'. someone to
share this imperfect .....
we made cautious small talk in the hallway,
i felt i was seeing someone who means home to me; someone whose presence seems
essential to my world; he's so familiar in some way. it seems awful i can't put my arms around
him. i looked at him, at his greenish-brown eyes, and thought: he goes to bed with someone
else---holds someone else---kisses someone else. seemed impossible to fathom, but it's true. and
even if they've broken off by now, he WANTS to find
someone else. kiss other lips. hold another woman's warm body.
say you don't mean it. say ........say you don't mean it. say you won't hurt me like this again.
i was pleasant, but ....he was naked, in another woman's arms.
the day i spent crying, on the phone to my sister,
my four-year-old nephew in the background said, 'i will
beat him up.'
i don't want you. you go to one woman then another then another and say i'm not 'it.'
i don't want your arms, your eyes, your presence, your voice. none of it matters. i don't
want this war, i don't want this fight. i don't want anyone. right now. i want for there not
to be a fight. a thousand days of lonliness, a lifetime, is better than the loneliness i felt
in your arms, knowing you would ultimately go to another.....i don't want it, i don't want you if that
is what it is to be with you...i don't care...i don't miss it....i don't miss it.
----5:30pm, every now and then i look over or
he looks over and one of us catches the other's eye.
i could look at him more; just sit and look. it's hard
not to just stand and look over there. but what i'm
seeing---impossible to believe--is a man who wants to
find someone else. i have to remember that.
you selfish man, you unempathetic lover, with my
heart in your pants pocket along with crumpled receipts
and spare change, pennies you'll toss into the trash.....you don't even know it's there...you'll just
throw it in the laundry again....
i miss you, my eyes and my arms miss you, if asked to say who
it is i miss i would have to say you.
the other side of the other side of this love affair....this crazy little whacky little....
lovely little awful little......stay, little valentine, stay..... this is just my side..... 'blessed be the covenant of love between that which is hidden and that which is
revealed.' --leonard cohen
~*~
~*~
more oct.3,2001
the stark hollow country/almost devoid of water/has a memorable brittleness to it/
nothing is simple. there are only facts: his naked skin against another woman's. and very precious memories of a few nights in the dark.
i don't understand and won't. for a long time, i think.
how many of the millions of refugees is that going to help?
but not the situation. simple as that.
not at all.
not one bit.
~*~
but what if i don't want an oyster?
secret satellite.
so i'm curious who are the secret satellites buzzing this page. where are these hits coming from?
something like 10 people have the url, and that's it. identify yourselves!!! no, not really. i'd
rather be mystified. but if you're a stranger who's stumbled across, dropping a line is always welcome.
my best friend, he ain't too smart
my life's falling apart.
i'm moving on, my lover
i'm sailing on and i'm sinking
i've got two dollars and some guy wants me to feed him.
i'm moving on, my lover
i'm sailing on and i'm sinking
i've got two dollars, where's bob dylan when you need him?'
'oh. yeah, i know. it's all mental. i get that too.'
and i felt kind of irritated, and said, 'no, it's not mental. i have an actual bug'. (which
i had told her earlier in the week.)
because, thing is, despite all the emotional exercises on these pages, i'm actually FINE.
.....really just kind of..you know....alright. so anyway.
i thought back to another time when she had said to me, 'we're such a couple of losers.' and
i thought, .....speak for yourself!!
so then, i thought of a guy i've been seeing a little..here and there...but haven't felt that
'ping' &so haven't really done more than kiss him, and even that's been a pretty lame affair;
i'll call him cutie pie in the interest of anonymity. so, cutie pie has been fond of saying
to me, 'you're just uptight. you have something holding back that flood of passion. i know
it's there in you, you just need to....let go of your inhibitions.' and i thought to myself, how
do youknow what i'm feeling? i'm only inhibited with you because ...something's
just not right.
to be fair i'll try to see his side of the truth and present it..in coming days.....
it won't forget.
.....somewhere in the dry grass is a memory/
neither do you forget/neither do you
--andy thornton
i won't analyze the memories
the wrongs or the rights or the fair or unfair or who loved whom more or less
longing and confusion; and a really quiet sadness.
and, maybe i don't want to?