Complete bewilderment, shock, even awe is what I felt when I sat there listening to her utter that sentence. Built up from words that had an effective scrabble value of nothing uttered in her usual ‘oh woe is mine’ fashion that I suppose was meant to somehow keep me from just beating her to death with the TV remote loosely hanging from my hand.
14 years of relationship, an empire of albeit modest proportions that I had grafted through my own sweat, tears and endless hours of working tirelessly 60+ hours a week evaporated before my very eyes.
I always knew it could end but I never figured it would end with her saying that she always throughout the entire length of our relationship had loved and wanted someone else. I had been reduced to a doormat, a function of sheer utility that could be used for material gain, as an emotional tampon and nothing more than a placeholder for some other guy. No… not just some other guy, a hapless, jobless, unmotivated asshole with nothing going for him except a bit of family money sloshing around slowly being wasted away to fuel that dickhead’s existence.
I couldn’t believe my ears… “I want to see if something is there”… whatever else she said was lost in that crumbling cracking implosion of a life one only feels but never hears. It’s amazing that I was too stupid, too deluded, too whatever to even see it coming.
It was going so well, planning on buying a house, even figuring that this one might be worth marrying and then like a cold fish to the face a whole bunch of crap that came from who knows where started streaming out of her mouth.
For a brief moment it flashed before me that she had spent a good 11 of those 14 years doing absolutely nothing, 2 of which I supported here with oodles of money in an LTR while she was taking care of her dying mother in her home country. I thought it was admirable, but in the end it was more likely she was just reconnecting with the love of her life while I financed their little get together.
“He’s hypnotized me!” She had been talking for what must’ve been 30 minutes. I literally had heard nothing up until that… she was crying, pawing at me like I was just supposed to understand and hold her and support her.
And as I contemplated all that was in the process of crumbling the entire s~~~ty tundra of what was left of the mental image I had built just froze over in a cold black sheet of ice.
“Call your dad, I want you out by next week”. I dropped the remote on the floor, noted it was the first time the damn thing didn’t fall apart into 4 separate pieces like it normally did when it fell, walked over to the landline and flung the wireless set onto the couch. With a pivot I was gone, stomping up the stairs, slamming the door shut behind me and barred myself in the office too upset to do anything but stare at the wall.
The next few days I don’t really remember. Maybe I repressed them… more likely I just started pouring myself even more into my work to distract myself. She had made the call, her dad had made the arrangements. We didn’t talk much… I slept on the couch. I remember her whining about all the stuff she would have to leave behind if she only could take two bags back home. Was I supposed to care about that? really?
I told her I would send her some stuff to shut her up, to my (dis-)credit I actually ended up doing just that.
The drive to the airport was the first drive I ever had with her where she was quiet not even complaining about the music like she would normally do. There was traffic, causing a bit of a delay but we arrived just in time to check her in with her finding time to lament the fact that her bags could’ve been a bit heavier.
She wanted a ‘last kiss’, I declined and sent her through security, leaving me with nothing but a house filled with useless crap and the ashes of her dead mother she left behind.
That was 2.5 years ago almost exactly. I spent the next year and a half doing nothing but work, eat, sleep, repeat; going through the pieces of a broken empire trying to figure out what was still useful and what wasn’t. Then when I started to see some light at the end of the tunnel my dog died… drowned… with his last gasp of breath coming from his body in the middle of a goddamn muddy, stinking canal while being clutched in my arms. A story for another time…
And I suppose that is why I am here. I am all those things that ‘polite company’ won’t permit me to be. I am angry. I am bitter. I hate myself for not being able to do what comes so easily in my work ‘fixing it’, I am angry that I couldn’t see women for what they actually are, p~~~ed off beyond belief that they deny vehemently who they are in spite of the evidence.
So I went to look for a place where I can at least say what needs to be said and hear what needs to be heard rather than ‘not all women are like that’ or ‘it was just a dog’ or any of those other ‘soft-touch’ tired old cliche’s that people fling at you because they can’t face the realities of their own life.
In a way this intro was more of an outro to a previous life but as it turns out: all good things start in the middle.
"Listen to all, Follow none"
Keymaster 3 years, 3 months ago.
