In which I feel like I’m falling apart.

After band practice last night, I stopped for a drink. I sat and read Egan’s Axiomatic for awhile, and then I picked up my cocktail and the glass slipped because it was wet and I put the whole thing directly in my lap. Then I got another, drank that, and went to AmmZon’s and crashed.

I woke up from a bad dream around one o’clock. Didn’t remember the dream, only that it had been bad. Couldn’t get back to sleep until after four. I stared at the ceiling and thought about ways to feel better. Sleeping, drinking, partying, and chain smoking don’t seem to be working. Maybe I need to step it up and stick my head in a meat grinder, or just get it over with and fuck the grossest person I can find and then tell the whole town about it before abandoning my animals at a shelter and driving off into the sunset like a coward.

Bread woke my ass up this morning. He just let himself into AmmZon’s house and walked up the stairs and threw open the bedroom door and started talking to me. He was pissed because I’d blown him off last night, and he threw the mail at me: a $0.01 check from what I fear is my IRA company (which might mean that some creditor has siezed my IRA as well as my checking account), a notice from the sherriff’s department that they’d tried to serve papers, and two NSF notices from the bank. A couple of credit card bills. One piece of personal mail: an invitation to a party on my birthday.

I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON. PLEASE DO NOT WAKE ME UP WITH A BAD VIBE AND EVEN WORSE MAIL. I GENERALLY WAKE UP WITH LESS THAN A QUARTER OF MY NATIVE INTELLIGENCE AND IT SOMETIMES TAKES UP TO SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE I AM OPERATING ON ALL CYLINDERS.

Bread made the comment that it “must be nice to just sleep all day,” and that he had things to do.

*Ahem.*

We started to talk again. He wants an answer. Now. I told him that if he gave me an ultimatum, I’d choose not to try to salvage our relationship because I don’t appreciate being backed into a corner. He said he wasn’t giving me an ultimatum, but I need to either come home or get my stuff out of the house. I said the world is not quite that black and white and that there are a thousand shades of grey between totally severing all ties between us and me moving back out to the farm. He again offered me a choice: come home or get my shit out of the house immediately. We went around and around; I said I need more time and space. I’ll get a job, an apartment, we could date. Start over. Maybe try to find some common ground, some sweetness, some romance. He rejected the idea as “going backward, rather than forward.” He contends that we’re married and that not living together is the antithesis of marriage and therefore not something he’s willing to consider. Okay, well, I can see that point of view, but I’d already bitten the bullet and left, I’d already broken both of our hearts, I’d already done the hardest thing ever, and I’d already replied time after time after time that yes, leaving was the best choice I could make. He’s the one coming to me again, asking to try. I said I couldn’t come home yet; I still need space and time. I need my own schedule and my own life and my own goddamned bed. I am very fucked up lately — my marriage is a ruin, I’m broke, and I don’t have a job or a home — and I’ll be the first to tell you I ain’t got shit to give anyone right now. I don’t want to fight about sex or about crashing on the office futon so I can rock in my sleep without getting smacked in the shoulder or hip and woken up every time I do it. I have several years of shit to process here, and I can’t do it with him breathing down my neck. I left because we were fighting too much and because I just didn’t have anything nice to say to him; I was so angry… I can’t just move back into that house with his assurance that it’s all gonna be okay now just because he wants it to be.

He said some things to me today that were nearly impossible for me to parse. One, that he’ll do whatever it takes to make it work, but that he can’t give me any concrete examples of what those things might be. Two, that he’s astonished that I’m willing to give up our whole marriage over “stupid shit.” Three, that he’s not giving me an ultimatum but I have to either come home right away or get my shit out of his house. I, groggy and still in my morning fog, suggested that we were speaking at cross purposes. “We’re having two entirely different conversations,” I said.

It’s horrific. The whole thing. It’s awful. He honestly does not know what the fucking hell I’m talking about. He asked me if I was leaving him over money (no), or because of our miscarriages (no), or if it was just because sometimes he didn’t put his socks in the laundry basket. (Sometimes?!) I said, “The thing that shocked me the most was how shocked you were when I left. No one else who found out we were seperated even blinked; no one was surprized at all but you. Where the hell were you all those years?“

I tried to explain again that I have been telling him — and the entire goddamned Internet — the whole time that his lack of respect for me was a deal breaker. I know he says he respects me, but he doesn’t behave as if he does. He couldn’t or wouldn’t understand when I went to him time and time again and said he had to treat our house and my time with respect, that he could not promise to take me out one more time and then sleep through it, that he could not refuse to do all the little things one’s partner asks of him and continue to get away with it.

I did everything I knew how to do: I ran his house for him, maintained a good attitude, sucked it up when he was being a dick. I treated him with respect, I treated his time and his things with respect, I turned the other cheek and bit my tongue thousands of times thinking that relationships were work and everybody makes mistakes and that I didn’t want to sweat the small stuff. I tried to be responsible for meeting my own needs, thinking it was absurd to expect a single person to fulfil my every facet. When his laziness and tunnel vision were totally out of line, I went to him in every way I could, from calm and collected to bitching to weeping, to explain where I needed adjustments from him, and even though he listened well and said the right things and made the appropriate noises, he did not provide me with the minimums I require. And then, after a few fights so bad I can’t even quote what he said here I left, and it shocked him. He’d had no idea that I’d been that unhappy.

Where the hell was he?

I’ve avoided writing about these things because I didn’t want to be disrespectful, but now I’ve reached a place where I think I have to declare him nuts in order to be able to function. It used to infuriate me when I’d see a man blithely declare an ex-girlfriend “crazy,” because I thought it was horribly dismissive, but now I’m seeing it might very well be a valid coping method. When it turns out that the person you’re breaking up with has had a completely different relationship than the one you were just in, saying “he’s nuts” really helps a lot. It means I no longer have to give myself vertigo trying to parse his sentences. It means it’s not my failure to communicate but his failure to listen or pay attention. It makes the whole thing much easier.

When he left this morning I was physically ill. I had a headache and I was nauseous and I felt sore everywhere. I was shaking. No matter what I do I can’t get through to him, he just can’t hear me. He wants what he wants, and he wants it his way, and he can’t even see that doing everything his way is what got us here in the first place. And considering how many times he told me I was “twisting his words,” he must be feeling that I’m incapable of hearing him as well. There’s a chasm between the two of us so dense with gravity that meaning just can’t get across it.

I’m not afraid to take responsibility for my half; hell, I’ll take more that half. Yes, I could have beat him over the head with a 2×4, I could have tried harder than I did to communicate that some of his behaviors were unacceptable. But I will be damned if I’ll take all the blame. That’s how we got here in the first place: I was willing to do more than half the work of a relationship but I wasn’t willing to do it all. I know no one ever said the world was fair, but I’m not gonna do all the sacrificing and think that’s a good exchange for loneliness.

I love him, I do. I really do. I’d love to see him happy. But I can’t do it with him any more. I’ve tried. I need a partner who is much more flexible, more observant, more communicative, more proactive. Less stubborn. More able, perhaps, to see more than just his way.

I told him I’d get ahold of him tonight. He’ll ask me again if I’m going to come home, or “just” throw away nearly eight years over nothing. And I will have to say I’m not coming home, and he’ll ask me again and again until he gets me to say out loud that yes, I’m the one who’s just walking away, just throwing it all away, that I’m the one who is leaving, that I’m the bitch, and no matter how hard I try I will not be able to get through to him that I’m not his enemy, but simply someone who loves him but needs something else, and he will decide that I’m the crazy bitch who broke his heart for no real reason, and he will convince himself that I’m petty and shallow and that I left him for nothing more than six years of bad aim with dirty laundry, and he will not own up to his own selfishness, laziness, judgement, or inflexibility.

And that is a goddamned shame.