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…to more than they are meant

I haven’t yet found a place yet where I know I will survive. I wrote beside my computer so many months ago, “I tell you, Baby, this wound is so heavy.” And it’s true. Carrying it around is my constantly having to live too close to tears. I think I’m feeling better but I’m lying to myself. Summer is falling away from me and it’s all so god damned sad. I’ve lost faith in everything. We’ve lost the golf course. If we do not sell in early October the bank will start forclosure proceedings.

We played our end of the year tournament today and I sit here aching from 27 holes played. Burning from 40 mile an hour gusts of wind and chilled to the bone in exhaustion. When was the last time I slept well? I remember one day, not too long ago, the first day in a really long time where I had finally drove my body to the point where not even me, in my current emotional state, could keep myself from sleeping. It’s been a long time, and it will be a long time more before I truly sleep again. I can smell autumn. It was the last end of the year tournament, the last summer. And I hate myself.

I hate myself because I missed so much time here of the last five years for him. Now it’s all gone. And I can still hear him ranting on how I should have moved down there to help finish the house for him. Help him, like I should have. And, I suppose, married him and had his children. Been that girl, like I should have. How much could he possibly hate me for saying such a thing to me? I ache with the time I missed here. I ache with the hours, the days, the weeks, the months that I will never get back. And he wanted more.

Thank God I never gave him more.

My Grandma told me, “Men never move for women.” How true she was. Imagine if I had given more. I can’t really, not truly, I have felt as though I gave more than I had for so long. So much so that now I feel infinitely thread-bare, desperate for a reprieve (anything, anything at all) and so fucking tired. But if I had given more, whole years for him so he could have been happier, so he could have had more help (never mind that I never got any) I know that he still never would have moved for me. And imagine how much more the fool I would have felt now.

And he still says, “Wish I was there. I miss you so much. I really miss you.” and I wonder if he could possibly know how spiteful that is. How inconsiderate and how unbearably cruel he is being. In the end though, it’s on me, I’m still talking to him, I’m still listening because I simply have nothing else. I’m not holding on to him because I want to. I’m not talking to him still because I want to, God knows he’s burned himself to me, I’m still talking to him because I have nothing else left and no one else left to hang on to.

He said, “Ya know, if you wanted to come down here I wouldn’t mind if you stayed with me.” Oh my God. How can’t he see the knife he’s twisting? He says, “I wish I was there” and I think of how he had destroyed this wonderful place with words, cut me so deep, told me he never wanted to be here. He says, “I miss you.” and I remember him telling me how it’s been four months (like I’m holding on and he’s over it). He says he wouldn’t mind having me around and I remember how he used to tell me he wanted me all of the time. I want to tell him, “Ya know, Fucker, I really think I could find someone who might actually WANT me around that I don’t need to lower myself to sleeping on the couch of someone who would think it would be all right. As if you would allow me to come follow you around. At least I’m not as pathetic as YOU seem to think I am.”

But I’m too tired to fight anymore. All fighting means is how he’s going to give me the schpeal he gives himself every morning so he can move on about how this is for the best. And how we’re moving in different directions. And how I’m going to be better off. And how he’s right. And I can’t bare to hear it again. All I want to say is, “Moving in different directions, huh? As far as I can tell, you’re going nowhere and I’m sprinting with two broken legs at a stand still.”

I say nothing and I try not to cry over all of this. We’ve lost so much. I want to tell you it all. Everything about other people in our lives, people we thought we could trust. People we thought were family who did such awful things until we were alone and shaking and bleeding. My mom keeps telling me that, “This is when our lives begin. We must sell the golf course first, then the divorce and then I’m as free as you. You’re free, Baby.” But I’m not, and she knows it. And I am nothing if I am not free.

I have one thing. The one and only constant in my entire life. My book. Embraced by Darkness remains my only hope. The only thing that still gives me faith in one thing: one very small aspect of myself. I am a writer and I need to learn how to need nothing else if I am ever going to find peace again. Not happiness, I can’t even remember that anymore, just peace. A place in my life where I am capable of sleeping.