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Dissolution of a Faux Marriage Thanks to F*cking Meth

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Kintsugi

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I am so overwhelmed by this saga I struggle to even touch it with words. Language is my frame in all things, but capturing these events is like trying to snap a photo of a pyramid made entirely of 30ft tall cards that tumble in perpetuity as I stand directly at its base, my lens unable to properly focus on a single detail and far too close for the fuzziest panorama.

I told my friend what I think I wrote here first, back when I earnestly thought he was going mad.

“It’s the shittiest murder mystery ever.”

She laughed. “Yeah, you got to the end, ripped off the mask, and he’s just smoking meth.”

The fatigue I have accumulated these many months feels unbearable.

I thought last August was the worst month I’d have for a few years. It was pretty f*cking shitastic, no joke. I was having all of these prophetic dreams. I stopped taking prazosin to preclude the possibility the pills would erase an important message after one dream that still haunts and shakes me with its ever increasing accuracy. The prophetic dreams continued until at least a month ago. But the one that made me stop taking prazosin—never ending nightmares be damned—was a dream where my mother, always a villain in dreamland, counseled me. I had been worried I was sleeping too much after quitting my kitchen job. I was so tired. I had so little sleep for so long. But I always tell myself, always, should I fall inert for a moment within the pyre of struggle that is my life, “Simon, get up. Get the f*ck up. Simon. You need to get up now.”

In my dream, my mother said, “You must sleep for three weeks, or you will not survive what’s coming.”

Three weeks later, my life burst into flames spectacularly. Or this is how I felt.

In retrospect, as the months wore on and things kept going from bad to worse and worse again ad nauseum, I figured out my life didn’t quite combust the way I thought that day.

No.

That day was the sulfur exploding from the match that would light a tiny flame that would catch the gasoline in the breeze that would ignite the air that would catch flame in the leaves that would burn the forest floor to a range of charcoal.

Giving blood. Keeping faith.

הנני
 
capturing these events is like trying to snap a photo of a pyramid made entirely of 30ft tall cards that tumble in perpetuity as I stand directly at its base, my lens unable to properly focus on a single detail and far too close for the fuzziest panorama.

i love, love, LOVE this allegory of the joys of codependence. i more often use fog bank metaphors, but by whatever analogy, codependency bites almost as hard as addiction. i believe the addiction remains rougher than the codependency because at least i can put a social distance between myself and the addict. my addictions follow me wherever i go, however i go. wherever i go, there i am.

however, my own journey through codependency has made me question the divorce solution. i had brutally estranged (divorced) myself from the many addicts in my birth family several years before i got married, and that was enough to keep me from marrying an addict, but i still managed to attract addicts like a magnet and even managed to raise an addict (now 42 and still living the addict life). i may be finally starting to understand the principle of detaching with love rather than sending still more troubled souls to the toxic people landfill. healing hopes for all. no exceptions.
 
When the illusion breaks, there is no means of reassembling it.

I had a coworker for years who was in this insane abusive marriage, and many of my other coworkers would try to pry her eyes open. Her rationale for putting up with everything never made any actual sense. They tried to reason with her. Delineate the multitude of fault lines just beneath the cracker-thin glaze of her beliefs as if pointing to them would be enough to rouse a quake.

Whenever someone spoke to me about it either in frustration or—and I hate to say I know how common this is among the bystanders of such brutality—mockery regarding her apparently willful blindness, I always told them the same thing.

Once the illusion breaks, it is broken. But nobody can break it for you.

I had him out. I did. He was out. For two glimmering weeks, he was gone.

I blame myself too often and too viciously for letting him come back. I knew it was a mistake. There was nothing left to salvage.

I knew, but I didn’t.

I knew from my past experience I am a sucker for a romantic relapse. I knew logically there was nothing left between us, but when I saw my dear cousin, she did what always happens. She makes me privy, in just bearable doses, to the pieces of my life I would otherwise never know. Like completing an IKEA project only to have someone bring a litany of pieces I didn’t know were supposed to be included in the structure, everything must be taken apart again and rebuilt. It’s a laborious process that makes me want to smash everything to splinters. It feels like the project will never be whole.

When I feel weak, I have a habit of scrambling to grasp for old connections with people I know love me. Exes are prime candidates, of course. This is what catalyzed my decision to allow him back in.

But I tried to be smart this time. I relapsed with my last ex for 18 months after leaving him for over 6. I knew I would relapse with J. I just wanted to get it over with. I gave him six weeks. I knew immediately there was nothing left between us, but six weeks seems to have worked like a charm to cure me of my doubts.

Two more weeks. And I am already past hatred, grief, and pity. I inhabit indifference like a sweater that is familiar and worn.

I feel ready. The illusion is broken. It cannot be remade again.
 
But I tried to be smart this time. I relapsed with my last ex for 18 months after leaving him for over 6. I knew I would relapse with J. I just wanted to get it over with. I gave him six weeks. I knew immediately there was nothing left between us, but six weeks seems to have worked like a charm to cure me of my doubts.

Two more weeks. And I am already past hatred, grief, and pity. I inhabit indifference like a sweater that is familiar and worn.
Every time I try to be smart about shit, it backfires in spectacular fashion.

But you appear to have thread the needle; You know what you want, what you need, and you managed it.

Well done, you.

In so many ways.
 
I realized I have a postscript.

The hard part is finally over.

It’s the part where I keep going back to find something I think will still be there for me, but it never is, and I realize it never was.

Some grand Maya shit, really.

Like dreaming I found treasure in my garden.

I claw around in the dirt for the edges of the chest that holds what I most desire, but I find nothing as I sift and dig. All I get are dirty fingernails and a catch in my throat that chills me to my belly.

As we speak, shit is so hostile we can’t share a roll of toilet paper.

I have a job as a waitress I started purely to watch him and ensure he wasn’t doing meth, so I cannot feel properly appreciative of the absurdity of my life right now. It’s all just off the chain absurd.

I laugh in crazed bouts.

This shit is broke.
 
Boxes of his stuff are being moved.

I feel like Giles Corey in reverse.

Which is good, because I always feel like Richard Cory.
 
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