July 5, 2020

I feel like I already wrote this.

There is a part one and I haven’t looked at it. I will. But in my continuing stubbornness of doing everything backwards, after I post this.

Today might end up being a two-fer.

Nope, it’s just really long. 1979. My usual is 1000 to 1500.

I promised my therapist I would write 1000 words a day. Fell a little short yesterday if you don’t include emails. And I would bet the farm that is not what she meant. Even if I do some of my better writings in there.

I managed to tap out 900 words in the new book. The 2 main characters have finally gotten together in the same room and I am struggling to make them struggle. They can’t just fall in love and live happily ever after on page 46. In my post-apocalyptic world marriage doesn’t exist, happily ever after sure. But ever after what?

Fucking minutiae and misunderstandings. I wrote a post way back when about that too. Novel Romance. Wherein my early ideas about love were tainted by pages and pages of struggle just to have it all work out at the end. I still do that a bit I guess.

As with rom-coms and romance novels and life in general, there is always some yuck to get through. And I have about 350 pages to go. They will get there.

I am doing this newish thing in real life, wherein I don’t skip over the yuck and just see what I want to see.

I have said ad nauseum to all the women in my life (and in here), when they come to me with man troubles, asking me ‘well what did he mean by that?’
My first query is always “Well what words did he say?”
And my unwavering response is “He meant the words he said, no subtext. Just the words.”

Most women are lucky, we have our own language and a chosen few friends with whom we can be ridiculous, emotional, illogical and just spin like whirling dervishes until we come to rest. We are privy to the luxury of not knowing how we are feeling about something and working through it in a safe place with our friends.

Men, not so much. They are expected to get from problem A to solution B with no stopovers.

And I know, I know, broad generalizations and gender specificity. But for the purpose of this post let’s just say there is an allowance made for women to be emotional and an expectation for men to be logical.

I have also said, repeatedly, if you have a problem and want to vent, find a girlfriend. If you want it solved, start planting logic trees with men. I have a deep-rooted respect for the fundamental differences between the sexes and I genuinely believe we are designed to work harmoniously, but modern society got in the way. We can have this discussion at great length until the end of time some other day.

It would be nice if women decided en mass to be safe spaces for men to explore the emotional illogical sides of themselves. That would be a lovely new normal.

Oh, I just rambled there.

What was I talking about?

Oh ya. Men say what they mean. Most of the time. Boys lie to get you in bed, sure; but men tend to speak true. It is less about gender and more about maturity.

I have gotten into a lot of trouble skipping over the blatantly obvious statements made to me by men because I didn’t want to hear them. And believing the lies of boys because I wanted to.
Sometimes they are both in one body.

Perfect example.

After 11 months or so, I slipped and said the word love to Lumberjack.

His response?

“You aren’t allowed to do that.”

It took about 6 weeks after that statement and an Instagram message from his actual girlfriend to fully disengage from that shell of a relationship. But that simple declaration he made that day made it so easy for me to cease and desist a month and a half later. I already had one foot out the door.

He was a lying boy but that one crystal clear assertion was him acting as an honest man, if that makes sense.

And same as with every other situation ever, it is one thing to kinda already know and another to hear it/read it in its full unadulterated truth.

I have this fun game I play with myself wherein after a relationship dissolves, I decide to make it ‘easier’ on myself and I decide I made the gravity of it up in my head. Like they really weren’t that into me, I just misread the situation.

Have…had. I am trying not to do this anymore. And I will tell you why.

Because, invariably without fucking fail, on some sunny day months or years later, I will be sitting somewhere, minding my own business, rifling through the archives for looking for this thing or that completely unrelated thing and I will stumble on some fucking message from one of my exes and instead of the lump of coal I fooled myself into thinking it was, it’s a fucking diamond.

And then I get to go through the trauma of ‘well I guess I am not crazy after all’. And this flimsy excuse I made for the end of things, falls apart in my hands, and I along with it.

I have to deal with the confrontation of the reality wherein they did actually love me, and they left anyways, and I wasn’t crazy I was just stupid because I didn’t see it coming.

I believed the good and ignored the bad. Then I focused solely on the bad and negated the good.

So, moving forward, I am trying not to do that.

Trying not to bend and fold myself into another person. Trying to take things at face value. Listen to all of the words, not just what I want to hear.

And it’s working.

Besides, I was never the little girl who dreamed of my wedding day.

I find weddings to be a colossal waste of money. Thousands of dollars for what? One day of revelry that never quite goes as planned even with the months of stress and planning expended beforehand, and a 50/50 shot of making it?

And what does ‘making it’ constitute? Forced monogamy? The division of shit if you do opt out?

Is it a financial agreement? The giving up or amalgamation of your last names? I have had my last name for 46 years as of tomorrow, no one can pronounce it and it’s fine. It’s weird, it’s mine and I love it.
What is so exciting and important about marriage?

Back in the caves when women were pregnant or had babies to look after, they needed a provider. Genetics took care of that and traditionally speaking, the firstborn usually favors the father’s looks. Makes them more emotionally compelled to take care of their offspring and the mother of said offspring.
Then women became property, something to be owned, so marriage made sense.
But all of this is outdated.
We don’t need that now. We good. Well, 77 cents to the dollar good. But still.

Monogamy has never been a natural human attribute. We aren’t designed for it. So forcing it is a recipe for disaster. Then there’s the governmental and financial aspects. I don’t need the government in my relationship thanks, nor the bank.

I have had a few men propose to me.

And I can now see it for what it was. They wanted to keep me. One was in love with me, but we were young and dumb, and he was drunk most of the time including when he proposed. One was afraid of being alone, one ran out of other ways to make me stay.

I shudder to think of what my life would be like if I had stayed with any of them. I am no longer the girl they knew and bent a knee for.

And therein lies another reason not to get married, or why marriage kinda sucks.

I am not who I was at 24. I am not who I was at 29 and I am really not who I was when ex hubby proposed 3 times.

Marriage is the only contract we are expected to enter into with no fixed term reassessment period. How can the version of myself I am now, know what I want 10 years from now, or forever?

There needs to be an escape clause written in. Every 7 years one or both are allowed to opt out without consequences.

I know people exist who refuse to evolve, grow and change. Carousel people, round and round and they are happy with that.

Do you boo.

They probably see my life as a curse; or would if they bothered to look at it.
I don’t.
I am happy changing. I get excited about it now. What can I learn today?

Well, what I learned is that love to me, is not paper handcuffs or betting half my shit that I will want to be with someone a decade from now. It never was.

I also accidentally stumbled on the idea that we don’t have enough words in our language to define love and relationships.

I use the words dated, boyfriend and even marriage with boatloads of salt.

I was common law married twice, but I just say ex hubby. The last 6 years I say I ‘dated’ so and so, but there were no technically definable relationships in there, maybe one or two. The rest of the time it was just sex and suppers and some decent conversations. And even then, I might have been ‘theirs’ for a time, but they were never mine, I stopped asking remember?

I never dreamed of being married.

I might someday, decide to change my mind about that.

There will be no paperwork involved and that is a blessing in itself. Handcuffs? Oh yes. Paper ones, no thanks.

Love, to me, is choosing someone over and over. Not out of obligation but freewill.

Not because of who you thought they were or who you want them to be but because of who they are in the here and now.

Apparently, I had opened a document and forgotten what I was going to say.

It’s been an interesting few days and after a brief brain cramp, I do know what I was going to write. The Giant, Mandy and the quarry trip that didn’t happen.

But I don’t want to talk about that right now.

I don’t want to talk about what I am about to talk about either.

I make jokes about the writers for this season of ‘earth’ and how they are grasping for audience retention with increasingly absurd plotlines. I think I went numb from it.

The Sirius portal opened last night and I just wanted to go home. I just wanted the plane to crash too. But I don’t think there is an easy way out of this.

Kanye just announced he is running for president. The murder hornet thing, SOS from space that no one seems to be talking about. People fighting over pancake syrup and burning masks while the body counts climb and no real progress is made. I had to step away from the internet. It isn’t safe for me right now. I am not even running my page. I gave it to a girl I met while traveling this last time. I knew her for 2 days, but she seems to be a really good fit. I don’t know if I am passing the torch for good or just taking a rest.

I used to be the girl who drank and knew things. Well, sometimes I was Jon Snow and knew nothing, but there was some balance. Not anymore. I don’t drink and I feel like a ghost passing through. I am not sure if I even exist.

Nothing has felt real in a long time to be perfectly honest.
I left Newfoundland on November 21^st 2019 and got on a plane. I didn’t sleep in the same bed for more than 11 days until lockdown happened. After literally living the same night and day over and over with slightly different faces for 2 years in that bar, the sudden leap to constantly changing scenery and pure joy and excitement when my phone would bing instead of being filled with existential dread seemed amazingly surreal. 
I had never had back to back adventures before, I got really good at packing and getting on planes and navigating strange cities, then all the sudden…the nothing. In Arabic, this is the haboob. I wrote about it before.

Considering we are mid apocalypse with no end in sight, I haven’t really cried much.

I haven’t felt the soul crushing anguish one would expect. I was mildly concerned about myself to be perfectly honest. I had a conversation with the new page runner the other day about crying when Trump was elected, and I do recall sobbing, heavily and often. I cried a lot in 2016 and looking back now, that year felt kinda like a cake walk, even with the gorilla and the creepy clowns everywhere, including in the white house.

I think the last soul sob I had was leaving the fucking Starbucks in March. The pandemic was just starting and the air was thick with panic. I cried the second I got into the uber and I didn’t stop until my 18-hour travel day had come to a close and I was climbing into bed in my attic. It really felt like the end of the world. And in a way, it was. I just didn’t know it yet.

I must have cried since. I hit and 8.6 on the period pain scale a few times. But I honestly cannot remember. Everything is kinda bleeding together. I know I was so messed up at one point I called my therapist from 8 years ago and we picked up where we left off. She was so instrumental in prying me loose from my terrible marriage we never got to the why I got myself into that in the first place. I was slipping and I reached for support. It worked.

My normally weepy, panicking self has been dry eyed and able to accomplish tasks.

To the point that I received a congratulatory message from someone telling me he was proud I didn’t meltdown right before shark week this month. Truth be told, I was proud too.

This too shall pass. All things must end.

I have spent the bulk of this week crying. And as much as I don’t want to talk about it, this is my therapy for now.

My baby cousin passed away. I found out a week ago today as I was antique shopping with my girlfriend. An unsaved number rang, and I thought it was my mom, but her voice sounded young somehow and very far away.

“Sarah? It’s your mother.”

We don’t talk a lot, and she usually calls me from her cell. For some reason their house phone number didn’t transfer to this phone when I got it. And honestly? She didn’t sound like herself, she sounded small. But it was her.

She made a bitter joke about only calling with bad news, and as I heard the following words coming through the phone, I was confused.
“Cousin Emily died last night.”

I have 2 cousins named Emily, one first cousin, one second cousin. Doesn’t matter, either would have been a tragedy. I haven’t seen my second cousin since we were kids. It was my first cousin. I remember her being in my aunt’s belly and feeling her kick 31 years ago. I haven’t seen her since her wedding two years ago wherein she made a huge effort to make sure I was there and felt included and welcome. Even though her birth heralded the beginning of my estrangement from my family. I was 15 and I left home shortly thereafter.

I wasn’t there as she grew up. But she insisted I be there for her wedding and I am grateful.

She was a beautiful wonderful woman. And I remember finally feeling like I got to go home, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Holding their babies I had never met and meeting the cousins anew, as the adults they had become. I remember feeling so happy and included. Like I got let back into a house I had been locked out of for decades.

I had a long moment where I just decided this wasn’t happening, I was having a really vivid dream or hallucination. I forgot where I was and how I had gotten there. I forgot everything except for my mother’s strained voice coming through the phone. She was trying not to cry, so was I.
But as the reality that this was actually happening and I wasn’t having a weird dream, I sat down hard in a random dining room chair in the antique market I was in, clutching the pillow cases I had found tightly in my hand and I just kept saying no over and over. This isn’t real. I know the responsibility of having to be the bearer of bad news. It always fills me with angst and more sadness, having to relive your own trauma over the event and then spread it to others. I tried so hard not to make it harder on my mom, but seriously no, this can’t be happening. She just got married to her absolute soulmate, they weren’t a couple, they were two incarnations of one entity. They were in love and happy beyond happy. She turned 31 a few days ago.

I will always remember her birthday; she was born the day after our grandmother died. In the same hospital. The first time I saw her was at the funeral.

I spoke to my mom again today and we surmised that there are different kinds of grieving over different kinds of death. My maternal aunt passed away in May, other side of the family. I loved her so much. I have nothing but good memories of her. She was 88 and had a wonderful life. I think because of the numbness and lack of closure I hadn’t grieved her really either. I haven’t seen her since my sister’s wedding 3 years ago.

I’ve been so estranged from my family, both blood and otherwise for so long. I feel like an asteroid or a comet cutting through their solar systems and orbits. I’m only ever around for weddings and funerals.
I think I had left home a year before a family friend of ours passed away, almost 30 years ago and I am feeling now what I felt then. She was 9 years old, I was 16.
I don’t know how to grieve for them or with them, like I am outside of the house looking in, and I hurt but my hurt and loss are less than everyone else’s because I haven’t been around for decades now…and I have to tread lightly. But it still hurts.
I can’t explain it better than that. My Aunt passed away and I feel like I was lucky in a way because the last time I saw her she was happy and healthy, and I get to remember her like that. But then I feel like a selfish outsider and interloper. I haven’t been able to process her being gone and everything is hitting all at once.

Now my mind keeps refreshing hourly, I keep remembering they are gone. I keep thinking about my cousin’s new husband, they were soulmates, I saw it and my heart breaks fresh every time. And even that is a selfish hurt, because I am scared that I will die alone, unloved. I don’t belong anywhere to anyone. And my heart breaks for my uncle who only ever loved my aunt with his whole heart for his whole life and now he has to keep going without her. They both do these men that were happy, loving and loved. And I just think that is so fucking unfair.

I am in this orbit of my own, at the far reaches of the cosmos. Sending out distress signals that go unheard because I don’t speak the language and I have no one to send them to.