A Week.

It was a week ago, almost to the minute, when M told me -- reluctantly, but unequivocally -- that he didn't want to be together any more, "like we were."

I’m avoiding people (except for a few very close friends I feel comfortable crying in front of). I don’t feel at all stable, and I don’t want to do some cliché breakup ritual where my friends take me out to get drunk and badmouth M. I don’t want anyone to be angry with him on my account. I still love him. I still think he’s amazing. How could I not still love him? He was so sweet and loving and generous to me. I’m not angry. I can’t let go of this irrational notion that we just had a misunderstanding that we can clear up. None of this is rational, so why not? Okay, so maybe that’s not likely, but at the very least I hold out hope that we’ll be close again in some way. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen out of love.

A few friends, either because J has talked to them or because they’ve read my blog, have sent me notes of sympathy and support. I keep repeating the refrain, “I have nothing, I have nothing,” but what I do have is very sweet friends.

What I hate most is that I regret the last 7 months. I wish it had never happened. I wish I had never met M. I wish I could erase it. Nothing is worth feeling as awful as I feel right now. But what that means is going back to a time when I sincerely believed I would never fall in love again. And that makes me crazy with grief.

*

What it comes down to, and M even said so though not in so many words, is that he lost interest in me because I’m basically a loser whose life has ground to a halt at 49. Okay, that's not fair, he didn't say that; he said that it made him panic to see that I didn't have anything else in my life but him. I had nothing to offer him. I grabbed onto him like a life jacket because he’s young and ambitious, talented, successful, etc. He has lots of friends and interests and confidence and promise. What would he need with me? What would he need with a washed-up artist who fell short of every dream he had, whose every frame of reference is in the past, who can no longer envision his own future? You’d run too.

*

Tonight I took out a piece of scrap paper and wrote “Wednesday” across the top, then “1. buy groceries,” and “2. edit HSD script.” HDS refers to the video I’m making based on my high school diary, which I've barely touched in the last week. And I haven’t wanted to do any cooking to speak of, so there’s nothing fresh in the house. I can’t keep eating chips and beer and takeout. I have $300 left on my food stamps card. I’ll buy a bunch of stuff to make salads -- M didn’t care much for salads, so making them and eating them won’t remind me too much of him, and it’s so hot now already that even turning the stove on makes the house uncomfortably warm.

If I can accomplish these two small tasks tomorrow, it’ll be some small step forward.

After I made the list, I cried harder than I’ve cried in the last week, realizing that it’s inevitable that I must leave my life with M behind. That I can't be with the man who brought me such joy, that all the wonderful things I looked forward to, the life that I was so sure was about to happen, will never happen.

Did I Fucking Dream This?

I keep thinking that if I misunderstood M’s intentions or his feelings about our relationship in such a fundamental way, I must have missed many clues all along, and that somehow it was fucked up from the beginning, that I must have been missing something or misinterpreting what was happening all along. All that time I thought I had my eyes wide open I was blind.

My memory of our trip to Mexico City turns from a sweet, wonderful reminiscence into a kind of Gaslight nightmare when I think about it. It was in Mexico that M started to talk about the future. And he encouraged me to think of us being together for at least a couple years when he discussed possibilities that could allow him to work there but not until at least the fall of 2011. It was all very tentative and contingent, but I didn’t ever think of it as contingent on anything that was happening between us, only contingent on the availability of opportunities to make a living there. I don’t think it was just the romance of being in a beautiful, exotic place on vacation because we continued to talk about it for weeks afterwards. He would bring it up. I wasn’t pushing the idea, I swear to fucking god I wasn’t. As recently as a couple weeks ago, he mentioned wanting to take another trip to Mexico City together this summer.

I’m going insane trying to figure out what happened, and being well aware that I might never know makes me even crazier. If I was so wrong about this, how can I trust my perception of anything.

*

It's a big perfect storm,this breakup, exacerbating all my fears about money and success and aging and home and love and family, blah blah blah, and I can see it and know what's happening but that doesn't make it any easier. God damn, it hurts!

Once again, I have to create some kind of life for myself from scratch. I'm tired. I'm tired of going back to nothing and starting over.

When Things Fall Apart.

I went to Bookpeople tonight and bought a new copy of When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. This is the book that I read -- or I should say that R read to J and me -- when things got so tough for us on the road, and the ideas in it -- which come from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, through Pema Chodron, who was his student – got me through that difficult time and profoundly changed the way I live my life. Though my meditation practice has lapsed the last couple years, I still refer to those teachings and ideas daily.

I looked for this book on my shelf last week -- I must have given it to someone, because it wasn’t there. But the more I thought about it, the more hesitant I was to read it again. I have begun to worry that this notion of detachment from desired outcomes -- a central idea in these teachings and one I’ve strongly believed (I have “Abandon any hope of fruition” tattooed on my arm) -- is somehow behind all this chaos in my life the last 5 years. Is my success at letting go of any expectation of getting anywhere the reason that I can’t seem to get anywhere? It seems to me that what I need right now is to get my shit together, not to be cultivating contentment with the fact that I can’t get my shit together. I don’t want to be content with living in a homeless shelter and panhandling on the access road.

On the other hand, the source of this pain I feel now is my inability to let go of the future I had envisioned with M. I’m scared to let go of that vision because it feels like letting go of the very possibility of an enduring bond, a lasting partnership based on love and affection. I didn’t believe that it was possible, not for me, before I met M, but I let myself believe in it with him because I thought I was witnessing it happen. It felt miraculous. And, like most miracles, it was just a lie somebody wanted badly to believe. How will I ever let myself be that vulnerable again?

Monday.

I realize now, because it's all rushing back, that being with M alleviated a lot of my fear of aging. That I was interesting to a man 15 years younger than me was very, very reassuring. So, him losing interest had an extra punch.

I'm sort of wondering now how long it's normal to be so intensely sad. I'm still -- it's been what, like, well over a week? -- crying uncontrollably several times every day and avoiding the company of anyone but J because anything can set me off. I'm basically sitting in my room most of the day watching movies and maybe reading a bit. I don't want to pathologize what might be just a run-of-the-mill broken heart. On the other hand, I feel like I might need help.

I've thought about suicide a lot the last few days. I can't say I've contemplated killing myself, but I've ... pondered it. I've found some relief in googling “clean painless suicide” and reading all about the pros and cons of hanging and decapitation by train and various poisons. I don’t have the guts to kill myself, but it’s a way of imagining an end to this pain. I can’t imagine how else it will stop. The idea of living without love is too bleak to imagine, but the idea of ever being open to it again is terrifying.

I've been thinking about moving back to New York. The argument against it was always that I didn't know how I would make a living there, but lately I can't make a living anywhere, so New York isn't any more intimidating than any place else. There is no place that feels more like home to me than New York, and it's been so long since I've felt like I was home.

Why Not?

It must seem weird and maybe a bit icky to some, the fact that I’m writing about this intense shit while it’s happening. I was apprehensive at first, but I couldn’t think of any good reason not to. I think my hesitation was just a vestige of Midwestern reticence about anything emotional. It’s distasteful to show strong emotion, even to your family.

Most of my work has been, in some way, autobiographical. The real-time aspect of blogging heightens the effect, but I can’t see how it’s any different sharing this experience now as it’s happening or sharing it 2 years from now in a book or something.

And, anyway, while I’m sitting here composing sentences and paragraphs I feel sane and focused, and I will do just about anything right now that will make me feel that way. Because I’m going a little crazy.

Expectations.

I, we, talked so much about my expectations. I expected too much. I depended for my well-being on a certain outcome. As if there’s something wrong with the expectation that our connection would endure and deepen, when we both explicitly expressed that desire. But it's you who became apprehensive. It seems to me that this moment is about how the relationship didn’t meet your expectations. What did you think I was that I turned out not to be?

Another Day.

I picked up my friend P at the airport today -- she’d been to Indiana for a family wedding -- and she treated me to brunch at Blue Star Cafeteria. It was crowded and we ate at the counter. I cried, she listened and cried and gave me good advice. P is a social worker, she works with the families of people who are dying, and I don’t know if she ended up doing that work because of a natural talent for maintaining equanimity in the presence of other people’s pain, or if she cultivated that talent by doing that work. But she’s good and very wise, and I felt and still feel a little better after spending time with her.

When I got home, I had a lovely, heartfelt email from someone I met briefly last year through some old friends who came to see Lizzie Borden in New York. She’s been reading this chronicle and felt compelled to send words of encouragement and support, for which I’m grateful. It helps.

I watched Palindromes last night on Netflix streaming. It’s beautiful and brilliant and a few times while watching I felt a little brightness, a little optimism about art and being an artist. I also felt sad because it’s the kind of film that M and I would have enjoyed together. I think Todd Solondz’s sensibility is one of the places where our tastes coincide: that mix of deep emotion and fucked-up weirdness. Hilarious, freaky, painful, and deeply true all at the same time. But maybe not. Maybe we both like that kind of thing but see it in completely different ways.

By the time the film was over, I was pretty drunk, but I started watching The Puffy Chair. I enjoyed it for a while, but when I saw that it was going to be all about the couple -- at some point, they were in bed and the woman said to the man that they needed to talk about the relationship -- I turned it off and went to bed. I couldn't do it.

I’m neglecting my other blogs: The Austin Chronicle and Bilerico. I don’t know what to write about. Nothing is very interesting to me right now but my own suffering. I read a little bit. I spend hours doing nothing in front of my computer: checking the hits on this blog, wondering if M is reading it, scrolling through tumblr blogs of pictures of sexy men, avoiding photos of redheads, waiting for another day to be over.