Yesterday, I realized that I often start my posts with something like “I don’t know if I have enough time to write today…” and that’s kind of annoying, but useful feedback. Thanks, self. This exercise is supposed to be a description of my internal state, so I’m not judging the words. But why do I so often feel so pressed for time, to the point where I feel like it’s noteworthy to start out with that? Do I mean the words as an apology, to myself, for rushing? Do I really owe myself that apology?
If so, it’s an empty apology, as I don’t seem to have ever done anything about it, and just come back and issue the same apology the very next day.
However, if that’s the way I so often feel, then this is my cue to fix it. I will relax, can I relax? I notice the posture of my writing position, I have to fix it.
I saw an apartment listing for one of the apartments in my building… asking almost twice what I pay. I guess I’ll have to look at moving again. How do I do that? I love my town, and I love my apartment, even though I have not really been getting the mileage out of this place that I should have been. I should be going out in town, at the bars, walking and enjoying the gardens, all that. This summer, I did none of that.
Maybe it won’t be so bad to move out of town. I’ll miss some parts of it, but not others.
My ex is being a fuckwad again, btw. Trying to cheat me out of pennies. Pennies. What a loser. Should I take the bait, again, for the last time, and fight him, or should I just cave in and call it the last time on that as well? Seeing him try to cheat me, how did I ever feel like he was a good man? My stomach turns, and I exhale.
He literally is repulsive to me. I have spent so long trying to rationalize his actions, I have romanticized him beyond recognition. The man I am in love with is steadily looking less and less like him. I guess I have to get rid of him no matter what the cost… my mind finds an ember in the corner of my mind, covering it in hopes that it can be kept hot and saved for a future fire – maybe it’s his lawyer that’s making him do it, maybe he’s not that bad.
But I know that’s a lie.
If I move out of town, I will lose all of my friends. The boy is not like my ex, he is not social. As a matter of fact, quite antisocial.
I paused, lost in thought, in a sick twisted thought scenario, leaning forward into my screen with my head in my hand. I have not introduced the boy to any of my friends, as I feel like so much would go wrong. He might try to sleep with some of them, for one. I take a deep breath and retreat from the thought. My stomach turns, and I exhale.
Why am I feeling so sick today, that I manufacture these disgusting thoughts? I know enough, I know my liver causes nightmares.
I remember my dog, her liver failure, and her nightmares. Scared whimpers, tucked tail… what was she running from?
And I think of the last joint accounts that I share with my ex. What a fucker.
The boy.
I wonder what he meant by that, I wonder if he knew what he meant by that. I feel like he meant something different than I understood the first time, but he probably didn’t have the introspection to say it like I hear it now, as I fold it into all of my thoughts.
I’m holding back, and I don’t know why. At the beginning, where I say that I don’t have time for this, I then frame my thoughts with that as the excuse for glossing over things, for rushing through things, and leaving the stones unturned along my path to whatever scrap of meaning that I scrape together out of my sleep dust. All that’s well and good, but I see that I’m still here, more than a year later, with the same problems, the same ex, the same boy, and the same headache. If I skip over the stones, if I turn over the stones, the same time was taken. There is no use rushing through this. This space, it’s not a path to somewhere, it’s a racing track. Everything that I run past, I’ll be running past it again on the next lap.
I can slow down if I want.
The boy is antisocial, whereas my ex was always the center of my social scene. In order to be a better partner to the boy, I have to anchor him in the community. However, there’s a problem (I skipped over a bunch of things to get to this point) and that as I am a woman, I am viewed as a sexual object for the most part, and for some reason men thrive on jealousy. I know that the boy does. And rightfully so, as I honestly have been fucking a good part of my other social contacts, or they know who I have been fucking.
And they don’t know my current boyfriend, at all.
How, with all that he has going for himself, is he so insecure? Were it me, and it has been, and yes it sucked, and yes it hurt, and yes I irrevocably scarred my ex over it… but were it me, and it has been, I would walk into a room full of my significant other’s sexual partners dressed to the nines (what does that mean) with graduate degrees in a long alienating word of a discipline with a 6 figure job and followed by a throng of much more attractive and significantly more famous partners and look with tired “tolerance” at my ex and his cheap ass dime store strippers drinking legenkeughal beers and make comments about how I settled down so young and that he was obviously my fate, but I didn’t know that my fate was also to travel to exotic places that they only see on instagram and wake up with A list celebrities and dash out the back door, late for lunch with fortune 500 CEOs. Oh, and maybe they could use the extra Prada bag that my last suitor gave me, I don’t like it that much it’s far too pretentious and gaudy but I bet you’d like it. I mean I just have to clear out my suitcase so that I can leave for Paris in the morning, and I’m not going to kiss my husband goodbye because he probably hasn’t brushed his teeth for days after doing coke with you.
Were it me, and yes it has been, and yes it sucked. That’s what I did, and that’s what I’d do.
The boy
But why do I still treat him like that? I am prepared, anticipating even, his eventual disrespect. I have my escape plan, my escape man, all set up.