theology&geometry

Mere minutes from noon. I’ve finished my breakfast — scrambled eggs (with gouda!) and biscuits and coffee. I only get a few cups a week so I’ve decided to have them at home, where we use a grinder and a French press. I don’t care if it’s pretentious; it tastes infinitely better than the reheated Maxwell House sludge I end up with at work.

Been feeling pretty crummy lately in the head region. Of course the ultrasound business has me skating on a quiet baseline of dread, but other things seem to be nipping at my heels a little more than usual, and I’ve found myself sinking to the floor here and again, having little gulping breakdowns no one ever notices. My family is drama-laden lately: My sister is barely speaking to my parents and there seems to be inexplicable animosity growing for reasons I can only guess at. Seems like this happens every few years and I don’t know why, but it breaks my heart all the same. It made for a tense visit a couple of weeks ago when I had to beg my sister and nephews to come participate in the big news about the baby boy. It was still kind of awkward but we made it. Mom has plenty of bad days and Dad is working all the time, in 12-hour shifts on the night side. Their house is overrun with pissing dogs. Age is taking its toll on everyone and I find myself wishing I’d had a baby years ago before everyone got so worn out.

At home, I’m living on what feels like an emotional island.

So many things just seem broken lately.

:)

I met him on a Friday night in front of the Saucer. He was wearing a muted green polo shirt and his hair had gel in it. He offered a warm smile and a nice, easy hug. I was nervous beyond all reason; I’d never even heard his voice and I am bad, baaaaad at dating. We’d just exchanged a few Facebook messages and then some texts so I honestly had no idea what I was getting into. Somehow I had gotten enough liquid courage in the wee hours of the morning to suggest that we get those drinks we’d talked about when we flirted briefly on some shamefully meat-markety dating site. He took me up on my offer almost immediately and there we were, less than a day later, sizing each other up.

The Saucer had some crappy cover band playing and we didn’t feel like shouting over them. So we walked over to Beale Street and procured a couple of Big-Ass Beers and walked around in circles, chatting awkwardly and trying to sip gracefully while navigating the bricked street (not easy), until we spotted two folding chairs in some shrubs in an alley close to Fourth Street. We sat there and the minutes then hours ticked by as we talked. Our conversation was easy and comfortable. We had the right kinds of things in common and we made each other laugh. He was smart and funny and cute and within that first hour I had developed the kind of breath-sucking big crush that I have only had a few times in my entire life. I couldn’t believe how nice and normal and good looking and charming this guy was.

I knew that night that I had met someone special, someone I hoped would be important in my life. I can’t say he thought the same thing about me, but I think I made a pretty good impression.

He kissed me in one of those well-maintained alleyways off of the Main Street Mall, and I didn’t care who saw.

It didn’t take long after meeting each other for us to become inseparable. Hours spent together turned into days then weeks then months. Our lives stitched together nearly seamlessly until I couldn’t remember what it had felt like before I got to spend every night with him.

I knew I loved him long before I actually had the courage to tell him. He had become my best friend, my bad-joke sounding board, and my verbal sparring partner. He’s as stubborn and hard-headed as I am, and he has that lawyerly way of loving to argue for the sake of arguing. (I have that journalist’s devil’s advocate way of loving to argue. Also I think I’m always right. Aaaand so does he.) His personality has helped me tease out the things about my own that I would like to change, but it’s also helped me learn how to stand fast on the things I believe in, and fight for those things even when pushed so hard it hurts. He’s sweet in a way that is often quiet but that suits me. He attacks me with hugs while I’m oblivious to the world, working on the computer. Some nights I come home from work, flustered, and he has dinner on the table and candles lit everywhere in the living room. He’s passionate about justice. He likes poetry and sports. And he’s so goddamn goofy sometimes that I wish he would let me film and broadcast every thing he does, because the world needs more of his antics. And he’s so easy on the eyes, I would be doing the world a favor.

I never expected to get what I have gotten out of meeting that dude on Beale Street a year ago. Never. And yet here we are, building a life and a family together.

Three hundred sixty-six days ago, I had no idea how quickly so much love could grow in my life. Today, I couldn’t be happier about that surprise.

The man was wearing a bright red shirt — was it red? Lord, my memory is bad — and he was smoking a cigarette outside the chain-link entrance to a parking lot Downtown, a grin creeping across his face as we walked closer.

“I don’t know if y’all are married or not,” he said, “and I didn’t want to say anything, but if you’re not, you better be soon!”

We looked at each other and then down at the ground, laughing and embarrassed. I glanced at my growing belly to see if perhaps it was peeking out more than usual, prompting strangers to contemplate its origin and future.

“I didn’t pay him to say that, I swear,” I said to my companion, loud enough for the stranger to hear.

We passed the man, all three of us chuckling.

“You need to put a ring on her finger,” the man said to our backs. “Don’t let her get away!”

My companion was smiling as we got out of the man’s earshot. “I think people need to mind their own business,” he said, half kidding.

“I dunno. I thought he was nice.”

For Ray.

Is “I’m putting you in charge of cleaning the stove eyes because I am afraid of them” an unreasonable thing to say to one’s partner?

Boyfriend: [leaving the study-oasis couch stacked with books and index cards and hot-pink page tabs and legal paper to come into the office where girlfriend is on computer] I’m going to draw a pink heart on you. [takes back of girlfriend's hand and draws small heart with highlighter]

Girlfriend: Okay. [waits as boyfriend fills in the outline of the heart] Ha! [flips hand over] It looks like balls! [flips hand] Heart! [flips hand] Balls! Hahaha!

Boyfriend: [glare of death]

… that every time someone hurts me, I get to put a little karma coin in the bank, which I can cash out later to go on an emotional holiday.

That makes no sense but it’s the only fucking thing that keeps me in the game sometimes.

I have been laid low a few times in my life. Luckily (or perhaps sadly, depending on your perspective and how much you like to see me suffer), not too terribly many times. Nonetheless, this weekend I found myself on my floor in a heap, a demon of despair escaping from my lungs in great heaves. It was not pretty and it was not cathartic. It just felt like death. The death of all the good things inside me I had gotten cozy with over the past few months. It felt like getting kicked in the spiritual groin by a playground bully who stood over me and laughed at me for having the audacity to be happy. It felt like being spit on by someone you’d thought all along was your good friend. It just wouldn’t stop aching. It pulsed. I wanted to vomit up everything I had ever swallowed. Everything.

It didn’t go away for two days. I drove two hours to my parents’ house in a complete haze. I’d catch my vision blurring and my focus shifting from the road to the white line to the grooves on the side of the highway to the gravel to the grass to the what the fuck wake up you are running off the road. I should not have been driving. But I couldn’t stay in the house in my pajamas, either, loopy on sleeping pills. I had to get out. Get away. Get some space. Get some time. I thought so hard. I could have bored holes in concrete with those thoughts. They wouldn’t relent and when they did, I sobbed at the emptiness in my gut. I envisioned my drafty house, completely quiet, and I was angry. I cussed to the mirages on the road and the dead raccoons I swerved past. I got phone calls and text messages and @ replies and DMs and I could not respond. I did not have the energy or the words and I wanted to disappear.

I suppose I was (am) being a tad melodramatic but heartbreak — good ol’ out-of-left-field heartbreak — is never the time for emotional reservation, the way I’ve got it figured. You’ve got to go ahead and punch a hole and just let that abscess drain or you will be ripe with infection later. I feel a little silly for airing such intimately dirty laundry on the internet but I thought one good shaming deserved another, and whatever came of it, he would at least know that breaking my heart comes with a bit of a price. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but having my friends lob unflattering names at you has to hurt the ego at least a smidge, doesn’t it? And I am not above a strategic Googlebomb if push comes to shove.

When I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I saw my dad standing there, waiting for me. I couldn’t even make it all the way to him before the floodgates opened. He held me as I shuddered and sobbed. My brother put his hand on my shoulder for extra support and I cried in part out of gratitude for them. That evening I moped. Just thinking thinking thinking. What to do, what to do. I snuck out from time to time to be alone and that was, perhaps, not my best move, as sitting out under that inky country sky and those vast country stars has a way of making a person feel even more alone and insignificant than any sort of relationship breakdown. I saw a shooting star. I could not think of a thing to wish for.

Monday my parents took me to Shiloh so we could piddle and I could take pictures, if I wanted, because that’s something that usually cheers me up. We packed a picnic lunch and ate cold hot dogs in the car while we cruised past recently cleaned monuments and I listened as my dad told me the things he would do differently if he ran the park. We parked and walked down a wooded path and I sat in the grass and closed in with my lens on a buckeye moth. I listened to the wind in the trees in the same field where a line of thousands of Confederate troops had surprised Union scouts eons ago. My dad hung back in the distance, swapping stories with some folks from Eastern Kentucky and their big schnauzer, who growled at me upon my return, until I let him get a good long sniff of my hand.

My parents worried about me the whole way home, and did their best to keep conversation light. Except for when mom kept talking about all the things she and dad wanted to bequeath to us kids before they died. “I don’t want to talk about that now,” I said. “Yes, but we have to talk about those things,” she said. “I know, but not right now,” I pleaded. She got it. It was dark before I headed back to Memphis, anxious to get back to the house and the cats and get on with the business of getting on. I had half resolved to do this, this, and this … and yet.

I don’t know where this post is going.

All that thinking and all that anger have left me not quite ready to give up. I am learning some things about my capacity for forgiveness, for understanding, for love in unlikely and painful circumstances. I spent all weekend wallowing in my victimhood and felt no better for it. I realized at some point that I do not want to live as a Wronged Woman and that I have a say in this situation and its direction. I am beginning to understand that people do stupid, hurtful shit to the people they love for no reason, other than because they are fickle, imperfect humans and the human capacity for mistake-making is vastly greater than the human capacity to understand why those mistakes are made. I know some mistakes are worse than others. I am given to the belief that stupid mistakes can be a catalyst for positive things. That awful shit will crystallize what’s important in a life and, if worked on, can raise you up and spur you on.

These are not excuses or rationalizations for what was clearly fucked-up behavior. These are things I have been working to understand so that I can grow from this experience. I do not want to be a bitter person, as is my nature — both born and learned — and I do not want to be a heartbreak waiting to happen. I do not want pity. I do not wish to be complicit in destructive behavior by turning a blind eye to it, but I also refuse to allow this destructive behavior to happen just because of fear or emotional damage that I can’t get at. People do some stupid shit when they are scared. I know I can’t heal old wounds or change natures but I can love fully and clearly and deliberately, with everything I’ve got. If that ends up not being enough, then it will hurt again and it will hurt harder than before, but at least I will know that I did not act rashly or out of pain and spite, and that maybe whatever love I put out there in the world might come back to me in some way.

I don’t know where anything is going.

But for now I intend to see some things through.

I am here, I am a little shaken, but I am okay.

Again, as they always do, my friends and family have gone above and beyond for me. I don’t know how I got so lucky. I’m deeply humbled, endlessly grateful, and I’ve got a lot to think about. It’s not quite time to write about it all yet, but in due time I’ll get it down. Thank you to everyone who gets me by.