History is the matter that forms the present. There is always chaos, order, soul...and history is the thing that gives it shape. I first learned to love a man I swore I never could, never would, didn't want. We progressed from hate and resentment to mutual respect to cordial cooperation to admiration to friendship and finally the lust and comfort which I thought were love. And lust and comfort worked very well for me for such a time. I developed terrible habits of self-destruction which I didn't even recognize, and long before I knew there was a problem, my body began to demonstrate my unhappiness. I wasn't strong, I wasn't confident. I was a shell of oblivious discontent. At the time, I thought that if a person did everything 'right' that life would progress steadily closer to true happiness. The truth was, I was not happy and I could not be so because I had lost myself in a duty, a relationship, a role which was not suited to my heart. When it ended, I became far better friends with the man...the father of my child. My first. My husband of three and a half years.
Through divorce, I learned a few truths to keep me in balance. First, that I did need a balance and what the elements of it must be, and second that I must never abandon myself for any other cause or person. I entered the dating field again, more confident, more picky. I flirted easily, made friends quickly. I found men who were entertaining and I was content. There was an incident with one I had considered a friend of four years which made me question myself and my will for a time. I saw a counselor, and she helped me to know it was not my fault. And she helped me to realize what traumas I may still be living in memories of my father. I grew a great deal. Next I found a man I could fall hopelessly and rapidly in love with. I worshiped him. I held my balance and stabilized my life and began to seek out my dreams and grasp them. I spoke my mind and heart and lived according to my passions. I was healthy, confident and adored. But it didn't stay that way. After eight months of wonderful love, expiramentation and finally a state of imbalance and distrust, we grew apart. The reasons are not important, the effect was devastating. It wasn't a violent or angry break-up. But it broke my heart, none the less. He had been in so many ways my master, my slave, my confidant, my reflection and my opposite. He was a beautiful man who I sometimes think of when I see a glass flower, hear a Russian word, dive into my own dark imagination. My emotional dependence on him had become unhealthy and unreciprocated, and I think there are parts of me that fear him still, because he knew so well how to manipulate my moods and send me into a world of submission.
After him, I rebounded with a darling southern computer programmer who loved football almost as much as I do and had a five year old child. He re-aligned his priorities and departed my life with very little notice. I played at brutal desire, looking for somebody to love more than somebody to love me, but all I found were men who could get lost in me without any reciprocity on my part. That statement sounds entirely egotistical, but understand that the existence or nonexistence of an emotional chemistry has nothing to do with the worthiness or greatness of a man or woman, but an undefineable, unchangeable natural aura and spirit. I felt no chemistry, even though I tried to force it. A latin obgyn, an asian-mexican cop, a peruvian financial planner and finally a soldier and reporter who worshiped me beyond logic. The first left my life with a backdoor clause that if I ever thought I could open my heart, he was there. The second more or less the same. Both called later to offer a strictly physical relationship and lost my respect. The third became something of a casual friend with whom I spent time when I didn't want to think too much, but knew that would be the eternal extent of it. The soldier departed after my total inattention for some weeks of trying, knowing full well that he could never be my magical match. I think he was heart-broken and it hurt me to hurt him, but I truly believe we are both better off searching out our happiness in other places. He has since found other pursuits and burned his bridges with me. Along the way there have been others less severe... a geologist who parted my company because he realized he coudln't be just friends with me and the confusion was too difficult. He had really fallen in love with my daughter.
The implications are that I have been promiscuous and used these men only to hurt them later. I have been accused of toying with hearts, being a ball-breaker... I don't believe that to be the case. I think I have tried to find my heart in very good places and I have a fondness for memories with most of these men. I have been fucked up in the heart, a feeling which led me to believe for a time that I was incapable of love, and unloveable. I have cared about each soul I have been in contact with. I hate breaking hearts, and I hate growing close to someone only to have them pull away or to be forced to push them away myself. I have gone through this period of intense learning, and some hurting, and some confusion... and rightly so, worried those closest to me because I put myself on the line looking for some sense of contentment, not with a man, but with myself. I have always been one who must make mistakes and feel their impact myself. It is how I have learned. Love and I have a strange, undefineable string between us..and dangling from that string is one man who is imagination and reality in one, a man who does not fear my chaos.
October 1, 2000
Floating seems the wrong word, I think. Hanging onto this roller coaster is more like it. Am I happy? I don't know. I am frustrated. I am worried. I am madly in love with him still. I resent him sometimes, too. I am trying to be patient. I keep hoping that either he is who I fell in love with, just stressed out, or that I can be in love with this man I unknowingly have made a life with. His work drains him completely: physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally... and I feel like the emotional well which gets tapped but never filled. I need to think, and life just keeps spinning around not giving me time. This life is not what I want. But it may be better than any of MY alternatives. He is what I want. But not the shell of him that I am living with now. And I am afraid that my confusion is my own damned fault. I am not neat enough, not efficient enough, not nurturing or patient enough. Not smart enough. So far from pretty enough it's disgusting. I am not what he needs. I don't KNOW what I need, because I thought it was him, but I am so, so lonely.
