Monday at 2:37am
Crusifer,
No words can begin to express the complexities of the apparent discord between us, nor the resulting emotions. I’d just as soon not wake up tomorrow, and yet I scream at myself for thinking or writing anything of the sort.
Imagery instead of description:
I see myself standing at an alter in a lacy black dress more grand than queen Elizabeth’s style. I’m smiling at first, and then slowly I start to frown and realize you’re not coming. I call you and there is no answer. I throw the phone onto the hard polished wood and it shatters. I scream but nobody can hear me and the church is empty. I use a pay phone to call you again, but there is no answer. I leave a heart-felt message and later discover you deleted it without listening to it.
I cry all day long and late into the night you finally come home. You don’t greet me and I’m lost as to why I’m not important enough to get greeted first. You don’t speak to me. I stand up and bash my head into the wall but you don’t notice. I slit my wrists and you tell me I’m being cute. I finally leap through the window and the glass shatters around my body and I scream as I land on the roof which caves under me.
I break my leg. In the hospital you ask me to have sex with you and I complain that I can’t. Brooding you leave, and I cry in your wake. You don’t answer my calls the next day and don’t visit me in the hospital and when you come back again you’re drunk but make promises to be good to me, then ask for sex again. Desperate for affection I give in, but it hurts, and you stop, dissatisfied and angry and then leave.
I discover I’m pregnant, but still you never show up at the alter, still you never quit drinking, still you never greet me when you get home, never call me and never answer the phone. I’m torn between abortion and keeping the growth inside me...
These are things I imagine everyday in vivid detail but have no guts to really act upon any of these thoughts. Like wakeful nightmares that clog my through and clench my stomach... I couldn’t give a damn if I was at home or on the street or at a job, either way I’d be dysfunctional and depressed. I can never understand why you don’t feel the same way... How can you function knowing I’m upset when I can’t even function when I feel so abandoned?
All or nothing Crusifer. You’re at nothing right now and if that doesn’t become all very soon then I’ll crack... I’m going to split open... My spirit will wail but I have no idea what I’ll do face to face. I feel broken already but I can’t bring myself to say it’s over... My stomach lurches at the thought every time. Every time I imagine packing your stuff up I feel sick to my stomach... Every time I imagine being home alone without you I clutch my stomach and curl up from the pain... Then my chest starts to ache again, and I cry again and then the headache starts... If I wasn’t such a sentimental, clingy, emotional, weak, stupid, naive, trusting, forgiving fuck then I probably would just declare it over and be done with it all... But my heart screams out about possibilities, plans, goals, dreams... Screams that I can’t just give up....
I said I would give up only if you gave up... I feel like you already have. There was no attempt worthy of note in the entire last eight days of creating a lasting love between us... Perhaps there were attempts at placating me for sex, or ensuring that we don’t break up the following morning... But no attempts towards a future, towards a marriage. I was ready to say it’s over when you were choking me. I was ready... And now I’m not anymore. I’m just ready to bury myself and never come out... Why did you have to break me like this? Why? Why? Why?
Monday at 6:47pm
Crusifer,
You know that I believe you’re truly beautiful?
If I was constantly accused of lying when telling the truth then eventually I may give up telling the truth and just say what everyone expects me to say so that I don’t have to deal with being thought a liar. Therefor, I would turn into what I was called. “I am whatever you say I am,” says Eminem, which is just another reason to respect him.
If you tell me that I’m going to leave you and that you had better keep your friends around so that you’re not alone when that happens then I’m going to feel like it is inevitable because you believe it’s inevitable. The presence of people in your life who you shouldn’t need or want when you have me only shows that you’re not completely invested in this relationship which would make it wise for me not to be completely invested in this relationship. Eventually this can lead to break-up, therefor causing your exact prediction.
I admit, I accused you of not being able to keep to your word and said I expect you home at 5am last Sunday, so it’s no wonder you arrived at 1:00am, thirteen hours after you left. Though I find it unfair that I’m withholding against your prophesies and trying not to be spiteful and trusting when you seem to find me unworthy of your sympathy, trust or courtesy. Not that I’m saying that is how you feel, but it’s how I feel like you feel.
“The ball is in your court now,” I said to you a long time ago when I decided I had lost my power to say no to you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given in so soon but I couldn’t help myself. You didn’t understand what I meant, and when you did understand you didn’t believe it. I gave you full reign over me and never took it back and I don’t understand why that’s never been enough.
Do I not ask your opinion enough? Is it just simply lack of time spent together? Do you feel like I’m inadequate? Do you feel like there is nothing I can offer that makes a fair trade for the things I want you to sacrifice? Are you honestly that forgetful? Do you really believe you’re better off as a carouser than as a family man?
I’m not sure what you believe will come of all of this. What do you believe is going to happen? You should consider your answer carefully, and not because you need to tell me that answer, but because you need to consider why you believe what you believe. Not “what do you hope” is going to happen, and not “what do you want” to happen, but rather what do you believe is going to happen... In your career, with your friends, with you family, with me, with your art, with your finances, in the next month, in the next year, in the next five years, in ten years, in twenty... If you believe things will go well in one area or another, why do you believe that? If you believe things won’t go well for one reason or another, why do you believe that? (We could go on to define things “going well” and “not going well” but lets just leave it at your opinion of well and not well.)
If you believe things will not go well in a certain area of your life then I ask you to contemplate why it won’t go well and what you can do about it. You should also note if you’re right or wrong over the next week, month and year about what went as expected and what didn’t, and if you did try to change something and it didn’t change or rather made something worse, then I invite you to consider that too.
It’s not that I don’t feel like you understand the importance of thinking ahead, because I know you do. I just think that your life currently is keeping you from thinking about your life as a whole and from looking deeper into what the future holds... I want to help you, and right now I don’t believe that I can because you’ve expressed to me that you don’t need help and that no one ever has helped and that no one can help. If you believe these things then there is no help for you, whether you need help in any aspect or not, and in my opinion we all need help on one level or another.
I’m a total ruin when we argue. I don’t desire to quarrel with you ever again. If you have a passionate opinion about a touchy subject, perhaps you should write me a letter about it and choose your words carefully as I have done so here. I feel like my talking is just running us in circles and I hate running in circles. I love you too much withhold my thoughts and feelings, so here is just a sample.
With love, Atara
I guess... Sometimes lack of writing is not because I’m happy. I can’t seem to give reason to my lack of writing. I’m...
I can seem to do nothing but sigh. Every dream and hope is continually dashed and every project rendered pointless...
It’s all I can manage sometimes just to keep up with my hygiene and health and put on some semblance of sanity...
I started another novel. This is likely just another false-start, but the basis has held my interest enough that I think about possible places for the story to go throughout my days.
I’ve been getting up at a reasonable hour (between 11am and noon) and then napping from 7pm to 11pm and then staying up until around six in the morning for three or four days, until today, when Crusifer decided not to wake me up and I didn’t get up until nearly five o’clock.
All my ambition comes from love and nothing else and it seems this has been so since birth. As a toddler and young child it was for the love and admiration of my parents. As thoughts took over instincts I sought friends, but that failed me on every front. So then I sought sex, which in itself didn’t help much, but the relationships that developed around it gave birth to a new self; a self that understood what I wanted better and better with each month and year.
Now that I understand myself enough to know what drives me... I find myself in the greatest despair of them all. I realize that the things I want are...
I feel like my head is so heavy to hold up. My chest is constantly aching, especially around Crusifer. I find sex to be desperate and drug-like with a heavy kick-back to reality afterwards. No amount of salad seems to be helping and I’m not about to believe that this condition is food-related. I’m quite certain this is a disease of the mind and soul. (No need to include “heart” since the concept is included in the mind and soul.)
Catch 22...
Let’s say that I break up with Crusifer... (This thought makes me physically sick to my stomach... But for writing I’ll hold on a few minutes to think about it...) Say I get over my heart-break and lethargy after a few months or a year or however long it takes... Whenever I fully recover the only thing I’m going to want is to be back in love again. Hopefully I won’t be desperate or stupid enough to take the first thing that falls into my lap, but chances are that I would be stupid and desperate enough to do just that.
What good would it do?
Let’s say I stay with Crusifer... Say nothing changes. He continues drinking, he continues to excel as a tattoo artist... He continues to believe I’m trying to “enslave” him and that I’m a manipulative, lying, typical woman who can’t be trusted... I continue to feel trapped and lonely and miserable and unable to feel like he is mine....
What good would that do?
Yes, it was the right thing to do to break up with Tre, but that was so different. Tre was stealing and Crusifer is providing. Tre was messy and unkept whereas Crusifer is neat and often practical. Tre was violent where Crusifer is more brood-ish. Tre smoked five to ten times a day (weed) whereas Crusifer smokes every other day... And yeah, Crusifer has a bunch of faults of his own that I’ve already documented but none of them are so bad as to make me outright hate him the way I came to feel towards Tre in the end... (Right before the near-apathy set in.)
It was even the right decision for Tre’s sake. He went to college, and he’s doing well from all that I know and can tell, and he’s married to a woman who is better suited to him. All of that worked out for the best... And I knew when I left Tre that everything would work out for the best... But it’s just not the same with Crusifer at all...
If I were to leave him now... He’d turn away from the part of himself that I love so dearly and almost unquestionably turn into a “player” and party himself to death. I don’t believe he’d ever go on to having a family and if he did, not a particularly loving one. As for myself... I’m not sure I’d be able to forgive myself... If this feeling in the pit of my stomach is a taste of the resulting emotion... Then I’m not sure how I’d survive...
But I can’t go on with these antics about marriage and children with Crusifer. These romantical notions I have in my head won’t fly and that’s that. No matter how much I cry over it, denial will do no good. Crusifer won’t make me his first priority in life. He won’t quit drinking for me. He won’t give me the courtesy of a phone call to let me know what is going on...
I say these things so harshly and outright for me to believe them, not for anyone else really. I need to believe it so that I can get past it somehow.
I find it so hard to cry these days... It’s like I can’t let myself go. I’m afraid if I let go enough to really cry that I’ll never resurface... So I do this sort of silent leaking of the eyes and pitiful moaning, and sometimes I just find myself frowning until I have a headache, dry-eyed and quiet. None of it helps.
I run all sorts of advice through my head... Like that nice lady at the psychic meet-up group who told me I needed to find a mentor. I liked her a lot and she made me warm up to the group when I would have been much more withdrawn. And then from there I think about C’s offer to be a mentor to me (my ex-boss when I was a web-design intern) when I met with him for advice. But a mentor to what? I want a life-mentor and I’m not sure I can just delve into the problems that concern me most with him... Or anyone.
That’s why I have this blog after all... I guess I’m hoping to find my mentor online or something... It’s a lot easier when they can see you crying... I cry through so many of my entries. I can’t talk while I’m crying, but I can type. I can type almost coherently while crying, but I’d never get out two sensible words trying to talk and cry... Crusifer says all my tears make him feel bad. I’m sure he feels guilty and I’m sure he wants to change, but I don’t think any of his emotions towards me are strong enough to make him really do what it takes to be a good husband and father... I used to think it was possible, and hang on to that hope... But lately that hope is drifting away as night after night is just another heart-break...
Hm... Angel hasn’t written me back yet. I feel desolate... I’m not even tempted to bother posting this...
It’s difficult to grow accustomed to recognizing the possibility of permanence not being the direction this is all headed, but it’s becoming a part of reality to me. This is only still holding together as much as it is on his insistence that he wants this to work and that it will work. Time will tell.
In completely unrelated news, I’m trying to learn to mod games, starting with my all-time favorite, Civilization. I’m trying to start by using other people’s mods and the mods that came with the original and the expansion and combining them, so far without much luck. I’ve joined an online community of mod-makers to see what I can learn from them.
An another unrelated aspect of my life, my Aunt Mary was not able to move out due to paperwork technicalities in getting the house she wanted and through the whole ordeal has not been able to pay rent for something like four months now, putting the entire finances of the house under more strain than they already were. Also, a good friend of hers died of cancer very abruptly just a few days ago so she’s in a really tough time right now. I’m not sure what to say to her when I see her so I don’t say much of anything.
Post to Civilization Fanatics Forum:
I'm so sad to find that someone IS having the same problem as me, but that no one knows WHY.
I've spent about 10 hours total trying to get Fall from Heaven to work... Oddly, it doesn't seem to work on EITHER of my computers, which are totally different models. One is a desktop; dell, about three years old running on XP with decent stats only just now starting to go out of date, and the other is a laptop; only six months old, running on Vista with high-gaming stats.
I have the same issue on both computers which led me to think I was the one doing something wrong. But I've tried fresh installations following the exact directions and only switched from getting one error to another.
I'm going batty over it. Nothing is fulfilling when you know people out there are playing a fantasy-mod Civilization IV. I don't think anyone gets how serious this is to me. I played Test of Time (just because it was fantasy and in the Civ world) for four freaking years without really playing any other games at all.
And despite my distaste for the general way Age of Empires Engine runs, I also played Saga (online) and Age of Mythology (offline) for a great deal of time because so few games contain trading and building and strategy and fantasy all in one game. Fantasy is not just for RPG folks! ANYWAY, I digress.
Point is, what can be done about this error? There must be more than two of us!
Was it the weed? Perhaps. Nothing like weed to give you a full night’s sleep, even if I was a bit twitchy at first. It brought back memories of Tre saying, “will you please stop moving!” Crusifer of course, can sleep through anything, so it wasn’t his saying anything that reminded me, but rather my own annoyance at my twitching.
I think I’ve smoked about four times in the last year since I quit, and I have not drank at all since I proclaimed myself done with drinking last April. The only reason I really smoked at all in the intervening time since I said I was done with it is because... Well, there isn’t any real excuse. I can’t say, “oh, well, it’s medicinal when used at the appropriate time and in moderation,” and call that a real excuse when there are plenty of other things like hot baths, warm tea, standing in the rain, a long bike ride, a walk in a well-flowered area, a thoughtful entry, fruit, organic chocolate (though I no longer indulge in it because I don’t find that even worth the cane sugar in it, organic or not), a conversation with an old acquittance or my mom... Etc.
Nevertheless, my “excuses” or “reasons” are valid to some small degree. In each case I was with Crusifer and him and I alone. I’ve never accepted weed in company since I quit. For one thing, I don’t like looking like a hypocrite in public, (or much in private either) and for another thing, it’s really bad to talk a lot of shit about health and then do any type of drug casually with a bunch of people as if that’s just okay or something.
So why then, even when I’m alone? Pretty much to ease the stress I’ve been having with Crusifer. One of the three or four times was during a nasty argument. I was on the edge of losing my control, on the edge of doing something stupid and I could find no rest in my thoughts, no rest in any activity, and every action and word between us was just making things worse. He wanted to escape into his weed, and at that time, I concurred. We smoked, and then once the calm had set in I lambasted him calmly, reasonably, logically and with a straight face. I needed no emotion in my face or words, only the calm, true words, to express themselves. I spoke the way I write an entry, with few pauses and many good points. I found release, and at that time, I counted it worth it, and I still do.
I have not gotten “high” like I did that night since I quit. I was really blasted that night, but last night I only took in enough to participate in the activity with Crusifer. Enough to put me to sleep at a decent hour. The truth about weed? It’s benefits: increased relaxation, increased appetite, increased inclination to laugh or cry, increased inclination to rest and sleep fully and soundly. It’s side effects: slow mechanical ability, forgetfulness, laziness, mood-swings, and intense cravings for food. Basically, it’s side effects are it’s benefits, all except for the lung damage, teeth damage and possibility of a receding gum-line. But, I do believe (especially in a primitive culture where a hot bath is not readily available) it has medicinal properties worthy of note.
So was it the weed? I woke up this morning feeling great, but no, it was not just the weed. Crusifer brought me tea. We had excellent morning sex. I took a shower. I ran up and down the stairs to get to and from the bathroom. I have energy. I feel good. I suspect a good night’s sleep, some good morning sex, and Crusifer’s company all have something to do with it. I also suspect that getting Civilization IV’s mod: Fall from Heaven to work last night (after hours of struggle) may have helped. It feels good to be back!
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