My estranged husband has been at the bar on the corner for a couple of hours. This is the 28th time I’ve casually passed by my bedroom window for a glimpse at the smoking area out back. The tree in front of my apartment building is partly blocking the view but I can still see his bike parked there and every once in a while I can see him standing there too, fiendishly carrying a cigarette from his hip to his lips. As I’m watching him I see one of the others pulling up alongside and emerging from her vehicle in a tight, short, trashy blue dress. This is why I pace the window. This is what I have been waiting for. This one is familiar as she teeters over to him on high heels and topples into his outstretched arms. I know her. Everyone knows her. She’s been on the outskirts of our marriage for the last 3 years. They used to have sex but now they’re “just friends.” I suspect, based on recent surveillance, that this might be the truth but there’s no way of actually knowing. Neither one of them can be trusted, her with her short spiked platinum blond hair, huge fake tits, dark fake tan, and shockingly long and tacky fake nails, and he of course with his lungs that still fill with air. I reckon that the only time he’ll really have nothing to hide is when he descends upon the grave. They greet each other and disappear inside the bar. I haven’t seen her for a while. He’s been showing up mostly alone ever since the restraining order, then a few times with a plain-looking biker bitch, and yesterday with a naive looking tomboyish type. But here this one is again and it’s oddly comforting for me. No logical threat from any of these women, but usual is better and I’m glad she’s back.
I’ve been praying for someone to replace me. So he can fill his days with absurdity and unearned confidence. So he will self-indulge and leave me alone. So I can be less obligated, and maybe so I will feel a little gut-wrenching, knife-twisting agony. I simply adore justifying and then rushing toward my pain. There is something so lovely and inviting about an ignitable fear which sits in your bones and could travel at any moment to your flesh in a fiery sprint. But I have always allowed my white hot suffering to melt me before I could create anything meaningful from it and so it has been habitually wasted until now. I am a body of wounds, sullen and stubborn, not yet sensible enough for scars. Kinda devastating. Until now. I surrender.
I want to dislike her, blame her, be mad at her, judge her, slap some sense into her. I’ve struggled to understand why she experiences him so differently than I have. I don’t know if she has set her standards impossibly low so that she can accept his savage behavior, or appropriately high so that he will abide by her intolerance of it. I don’t know, and it’s maddening. I imagine that she is witness to the less intense version of my husband’s viciousness and that she has not ever been his target. What I suppose is that she thinks racist jokes are funny, and that women are meant to be seen looking fake and not heard speaking truths. It doesn’t matter. Standing in this window is saving my soul. It’s not a crutch, it’s a window. To my jail cell. And I’m standing on the other side of it. Free.
I have a disease of perception. I know what’s right and still, I want what’s wrong… until the exact moment when I get the wrong thing and then I desperately want what’s right again. I’m angry at myself for being so human. So hopeful and vulnerable, so blatantly escapist and stunningly stupid, so addicted. Life scares the fuck out of me because it hurts and I can’t control it. But I needed to keep my mouth closed about that and just find something that made it easier to wear my skin. I needed to craft a way to survive.
I started by pleasing everyone. But don’t dare let anyone in. Learn the hard way. Always smile and agree. Spin your wheels proving that you’re good, or right, or alive. Hold your breath. Eat your shit. Drink your poison. Open your body. Fill it with black magic. Plaster the cracks so the light stays hidden in you. It’s your only provision. Evil is a master predator. The beasts are pedaling their wares. Dark spirited days are offering salvation. The mentally obsessed will consume you.
But certainly not me. I win the contest. I’m in my palace on the third floor. I’m watching the moat with hyper-vigilance. I’m not over there tripping into the arms of my husband. I’m not like the others. I mean, okay, he and I go together, ya, but in the way that cigarette butts go in the bottom of beer cans. It’s convenient and cool but dirty and gross and, ultimately, it ends up fucking up someone’s day if they’re not paying attention.
It must have been a glitch in the universe… The planning department made a mistake when they crossed our paths. Our journeys feel so remotely connected, powerful but sizzling, like a sparkler. We’re obviously on the same trail but he is stopping at every creek to smoke weed and fuck a bunch of other hikers and I’m focused on the grand views and getting some ground behind me before the sun sets. And I’m super pissed at him for that, but I’m also easily and happily sidetracked by the weed, and the beers under the stars do bring joy into my life… so I get it. It took a crazy amount of time but I finally understand that we are lost in translation. The navigation which brought us together was extreme and we couldn’t rally. But we weren’t supposed to. Our sparkler fizzled out but I know what this journey was and how radical it is that I got what I needed. I’m grateful that we hiked together for so long. He started all my fires and without those I don’t think I would have had as much warmth or light.
Sometimes those fires burned buildings but sometimes we cherished the soft peaceful glow of candlelight. The grit of his flint rubbed me the wrong way but the soulfulness of his bonfires soothed me. Without him I wouldn’t be who or where I am today. I surrendered and I survived, because of the bad shit and because of the beautiful white light. Because of, and in spite of him, I am an estate that can not be dismantled.
Nobody’s wrong anymore. Everything is for our learning. And I accept that now as the purveyor of this window. I am not like the others but that’s not what gives me victory. The fire in my bones, that is my blessed gift, but the spark that he gave me is the potential for everything else. What I choose to do with it is fare well.
Nighty night Bluebird 