Monday, September 24, 2012

Diabolical blow by the EX.

The Ex.  I keep him locked away as that poor unfortunate 7 years of our lives.  I feel guilt for being the crazy person I was.  I felt anger at the lazy unresponsive momma's boy he tended to be.  But all and all, I hoped he was happy, because he really was my first true love.

true love
A feeling where you cannot bare to be apart from a certain person for long, where you can clearly picture their face in your mind, where you know you can tell them anything and they will listen, where you don't need to have sex or alcohol to make a night special and just being in each others company makes you forget your troubles.
True love is when the person you love unconditionally feels the same way about you, where you know you can trust each other and never want to be with anyone else ever again.
It can be instant 'love at first sight' and can also grow over time.
When i first saw you i knew you were special, not i know i have found my true love.
 
Start at the beginning.
 
I was working at a strip club as a waitress/concierge.  Get your mind out of the gutter, it was fairly clean.  Anyway, the EX had worked there before me and was still friends with the bosses.  He taped shows for my manager and came in to hang out a few times.  To me, at 19, he looked old.  I mean to any 19 year old a 24 year old dude looks old.  He would come in, stand as far away from my concierge desk as possible and chit chat.  I was a bit keen for my age and knew what he wanted.  My manager used to watch me on video and make fun of his attempted flirting.  Well, one night he brings me a king sized Snickers with all the innuendo and I just go blunt, as I am less want to be than now.
 
"So, are you going to ask for my number or hang out against the wall all night?"
 
He did, and we got together.  It was sad really.  He didn't know how to date, I wasn't patient enough to teach him.  The only thing we had going was sex after hours, and I was getting really sick of only knowing how to be sexual with a guy.  At that young, stupid age I thought love was possible.  I went back to my Air Force Guy who had that air of being naughty but devotion to who I was, rather than my sexuality.  I wanted connection.  I wanted sustenance.  I was a drowning girl who needed to be loved.
 
Shortly after Air Force Guy demolished my heart (don't feel bad for me, I get revenge later) I reached out to to the EX as friends.  We went down to the new Tempe Town Lakes and there next to the water he told me in the most laid back way possible, that he would be friends with me and that would mean so much...
 
And we were friends for a couple months.  We played the card game War, at which point I lost and showed how much like my lovely mother I can be about losing  I believe at one point I stood on his neck, but definitely pinned him to the ground by both arms with my feet and made him cry mercy.  Whenever it would start to get tense, I would call a friend to pick me up.
 
Eventually I said "what the hell" and started sleeping with him again.  I made it very clear we were not dating.  Then I got him a husky for Christmas.  Fucking dog was awesome, but hell on earth. I might as well have given birth for all the blood and grief she brought us.  But we loved her.  Together.  Before saying we loved each other.  He calmly waited.  Then it got irritating to say he was "the guy I was seeing" so I called him my boyfriend. 
 
And what became a normal January moving forward, I couldn't bare it any more.  I felt like I was settling and getting nowhere.  My life had gone from dancing to college drop out due to panic attack.  Life as a waitress at a strip club
 days a week, working at a Lube Shop during the day, back to college and dance, teaching kids and feeling like I was too fucked up to be a role model.......  It came pouring down on me, 

Air Force Guy was back in town and that definitely made me go crazy.

I dumped the EX. 

I was so exhausted buy my 80hour work week I would come to the crap apartment I shared with pothead who had an affinity for black guys you could pick up at gas stations after dark, and pass into a coma.  I could not open my eyes if the brick shithole had been on fire.  Then, there he was sitting over me.  Shaking my shoulders that we needed to talk.  All the caffeine in heaven could not have made me respond.  He told me he love me.  Wanted more than anything to be with me.

Messed up pattern after messed up pattern we kept getting back together.  He would fuck up, then me.  It was all that youth drama pouring out of us.

Last weekend I went to LA to visit my sis and her hubby for her birthday.  I haven't actually seen Meghan on her birthday in years, maybe decades.  I have been feeling more depressed at my life than I have since I was 19, having panic attacks and driving off roads because I couldn't breath.  It is different but the same dark cloud of uncertainty.  Where am I going?
But being with them always helps.

At Disneyland, I tried not to think about my last two trips there with the Principal, or the one before that with the EX.  Unexpectedly, Meghan asked about the EX.  I told her he moved to Colorado, and joked about my stupid phone call to him a few months earlier.  He adored our dog Cutter, as anyone in their right mind would.  I had been rubbing Cutter's belly and instinctively called the EX.  He responded the next day in an acerbic text, but relented a few days later with questions on how everyone was doing.

Meghan laughed, it was so Ex to be that way.  I recalled how I had wanted him to be more well read when I was 20, so he bought a book of love poems for us to read in bed- completely oblivious to the fact that reading them aloud mortified me.  The one time he had taken me to a restaurant where they had fine diner and dancing, but he couldn't dance to save his life.  How he made dinner at his place and selected the romantic channel so we could dance after desert.  Or how he used to let me climb him like a monkey in my early dancing days so I could show him how a partner had to react on stage.

Or how after the final time we broke and he moved out and hadn't spoken a word in 3 months he stepped out of a busy bar to take my frantic phone call about how my dad had almost died and I was so sorry I had never asked him how it felt when his father had gone through triple bypass when he was 19.  How in the declining months of my father's health, the EX had taken the animals when I needed to focus on work and family hospital visits.  Visited dad at the hospital when he was dying.  Had fed me my favorite Mexican food while I cried in his lap after my dad was given his last rites.  Had made love to me, with no expectations of rekindling, but because I needed it.  Came to see me at the condo where our relationship met its demise, to comfort me by caressing my head and telling me my father loved me.  Coming to the funeral, too hands off for my liking.  For taking walks with me as I tried to exercise more.  For taking me into his arms that last time and kissing me passionately, though I was too far gone, and telling me to take that into consideration.  He said he always pictured, some day, walking down the street we would run into each other and it would happen.  We would be together again.  Then months later, watching my dog and cat and my mother's animals while we went to Iowa, coming to jump my car at the airport when I was hysterical and couldn't cope.  Giving me his car to take to work the next day so he could get mine fixed for me while keeping all the beasts.  For picking me up at a bar some months later with just a call saying I needed him, and holding me all night long without trying for more......\

No, I did not say all of this to my sister and brother in law, but it got my mind thinking.  Meghan said she always thought we would have worked if we had met later in life, after all the crazy days had been worn out of us.  Instead, we had endured that together.  I rather thought we had inflicted it on each other.  I told her I felt like such a shit girlfriend, all the things I did to him.  All the things I took for granted.  But she just laughed, it was meant to be at the time.  Wrong timing.

I told her I hoped he was happy.  I hoped he had found love.  And I really meant it.

For some stupid, unfuckingthinkable reason I looked at his Facebook a week later.  On his timeline it said he had gotten married a week ago.  My whole world shifted.  I was punched in the gut by an invisible gremlin.  I couldn't think beyond texting my sister and Ange.  I was sobbing uncontrollably.  It was mostly disbelief that I had to acknowledge that this very long timeline had come to an end.  He was forever out of my reach.  Guilt at all I had put him through.  Despair that I had not been the one.

But beyond all of that, I was happy that he was not like me.  Not stuck in a pattern, but could find true happiness.  I didn't envy him.  I was thankful he was finally appreciated as he should be.  When you truly love someone, you wish them that even as your heart breaks into 84,000 pieces.

The next day at work one of my guys told me I looked good, like I was tired and didn't care but it worked for me.  I told him what I learned the night before and he hit on me.  I may not care, but I still can shoot you down.

The weeks following this painful revelation have taken its toll on my liver and I am ready to move on. 

One word of caution:
To you who have married my EX.. Make him happy or I will return to my 19 year old persona of going ape-shit crazy.  I am bigger and stronger now.  I am completely capable of ripping every strand of hair from your homely assed head, beating your face and I will make sure your teeth are so broken when you swallow them that your ass will bleed in reminder of the pain you have caused one of the nicest men I have known in my entire life. 

And that is all I have to say about that.

Deaf, Dumb and Blind?

I get it that women are the ones who over-analyze, pick things apart looking for a deeper meaning.  But men can't be completely oblivious.  Can they?

I have explained my situation with Scotty to Chloe, who was dumbfounded by the fact he would invite me to meet his family when I have cooled off considerably.  We haven't discussed any feelings or relationship equators.  By the end of September, when he plans to take me to meet parents, we will have been non-exclusively dating for 5 months.....  It makes no freaking sense.  Here I am, wanting to bring things to an end and he thinks we should plan vacation? 

Chloe shared my head scratching at this puzzle.  There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.  Is he turning a blind eye because he wants someone to hang out with?  Does he just not see the signs?  Can he believe this is really how relationships progress?

Last week when we drove to Payson for the day I was talking about age and feeling like I have come to the realization that it is all ver for me. I have reached the age where there is little to no hope of getting married, having a family...  Those options are fading away.  Scotty scoffed, tried to reassure me that I had plenty of time.  I kept waiting for him to put two and two together- I'm talking about not finding anyone while I'm travelling with you!  Alarm bells!  Talk about the future.

That would have been too easy for me.  I could have segued into my flawless monologue about how we haven't gotten closer.....

With our empty, repetitive texting and run of the mill conversation.... (I talk about the fucking weather!  I hate when people talk about their own weather like they can't just walk outside and figure it the fuck out on their own?  No, I need a male to text me about it?  Should I just say I don't care when weather comes up.  It shouldn't b this hard. Sigh.)

...There aren't any emotions other than friendship developing.  (If he was only my friend I could tell him how much it irritates me when he baby talks to his cat.  Or over-annunciates my cat's name because I corrected him after three months of him not getting it right.  He would text "How is drago?" and I would respond "Draco is an asshole." Yet he would continue to spell it wrong an pronounce it sharply "Dra-Go".  So now, he says Dra-CO very, very pointedly and  I want to choke the living shit out of him right after I rake my eyeballs out.)

But no, Scotty doesn't seem to notice he is bothering me.  He doesn't see we are not swooning over one another.  He doesn't hear my monotone side of the conversation, or understand when I do not laugh at his not funny attempts at humor.  This cannot be beneficial for him in anyway...... Yet, there he is.  Still texting me.  I think the guy just needs something to do.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Another one bites the dust

After much strained communication with Scotty, it is finally over.  A few weeks ago I had strengthened my resolve to throw that fish back in the sea, even role played with Chloe on how to say it right.

"I don't feel like this is working for me.  We shouldn't see each other anymore."  And other such stuff.

I invited him over for dinner, planning to have the talk but he pushed it back to the weekend.  I was irritated that I would have to endure 3 more days of worrying about it, not to mention all the same texts over and over and over again.

Friday night arrived and we went to dinner at Pita Jungle again, because he knows I like that place and was trying to be accommodating.  I talked non-stop about all the documentaries I had been watching, so it wasn't all that awkward....  Back at my house he pinned me against the refrigerator and was trying to passionately kiss me.  I kept pushing him back, but he was forceful.  I shoved at him and said I didn't want to make out.  He insisted that he did.  He didn't understand why I never wanted to kiss him any more.  We sat down on the couch and I started.

"When we would make out before, you would take it as far as you could and I would have to be the one to keep things in check.  It was exhausting and frustrating.  I got to the point that is was much easier not to make out with you than to have to over think it constantly."

"We should have talked about that."

"We did.  It didn't change until I felt I had been mean enough about it."

"Well, I don't want you to feel that way.  You were never mean.  I'm sorry I wasn't doing my part."

"It's ok.  I just don't feel like we're where we should be emotionally for having dated four months."

I kept feeling like it was closing but apparently he felt like we were opening up.  This guy just wants to be with someone. 

Our texts died away over the weekend and after an entire day without any I thought he may have finally realized what I was talking about.  As much as I hated to do it, I texted him.

Me: This isn't working, is it?

Scotty: Doesn't seem that way.  I have just kind of given up.

Me:  I'm sorry it didn't work out.

Scotty: No need to be sorry.

Now all he is concerned with is getting his pressure cooker back.  He offers to come pick it up, I offer to drop it off.  He has to control where the stupid pot is exchanged.  For two weeks the when and where of getting rid of this thing resulted in a text asking me to place it behind my garbage can and he would pick it up after work.  Was it so terribly awkward that he doesn't ever want to see me again?  This was a bit ridiculous.

So I texted him that I understood if he didn't want to see me but this was feeling a little weird.  I would drop it off at his place, and if he wasn't home I would put it in the alcove by his door.  Of course he texted back immediately that it wasn't that he didn't want to see me, was just trying to make things easier.  On who?

Whatever possessed me, I checked Facebook and sure enough he had de-friended me.  Apparently, it was to make things easier on him.