Letter to a Lost Woman

I don’t understand. I wish I could nail this to your wall like I wanted to when I still lived with you. To take a heavy iron nail and hammer it into the fucking wall. How? How could it come to this? Was it you or me that birthed this abomination-farce of a relationship? I’ll never forget but I lost whom I thought I loved.

            Karl Ove wrote “How can we fight over housework? Over such inconsequential matter as housework?” And I understand why he writes that, even with a wife who suffers from bipolar disorder I understand that he still cares. You care about nothing. Money, things, base emotions and experiences. I read my journals again and in them I repeat how you chose material comfort over richness of life again and again. It takes two to make an accident and I lied when I said I loved you, because you changed so much. By the end the person I was living with wasn’t the same I met, whom I spent time with, who slept breathed the same air as I did.

            I felt so betrayed when I learned you only humored my friends when you met us. You lied to them and to me by smiling and going places with us. Insidious as it was, when I learned that I had not a single connection with you I saw we had no common friends. I was only linked to you tenuously. You didn’t like a single person I spent time with and the same became true for me when you got friends. By the end I questioned how you could meet a person in your class, dislike them immediately and then reverse your decision weeks later. Even the people we lived with! What did you do to them? You retreated into yourself and in a second decided to hide everything true, everything integral to yourself. So you could please them. I wish you could have told them and me form the beginning that you breathed a lie between your teeth, that you didn’t care for any of us. You didn’t care the least about what I thought, liked, wanted to tell you. You told me what I wanted to hear so as to be as unobtrusive as possible, as impersonal as a wall. There’s two people now. One I knew and the one that exists now. Which is the truth? The dream hopelessly built upon the past or the misshapen miscegenation you are now?

            Under stress and need without seeing any other way forward I would break down. Do the same and tell you what you wanted to hear. You deserved a better display of car and love and I said it many times. Someone who would be there to give you everything you wanted emotionally, materially, physically. I want to say no one will ever give you all that you need and never expect more from you but only a person desperate enough and without self-respect would. It’s not much to expect from a relationship, caring and understand, we’re led to believe that is what health and longevity are built upon. The kind and degree of caring are important though. I remember you coming home tired and sad, drained by all the terrible things that happened during the day. I would hold you, comfort you, talk to you, and do all kinds of things for you if only to salve the pain a bit. To stave off the end a little bit more.

But you never raised your voice at me, and always sat and stared ahead whenever anything I did or said displeased you. The same to people near to me, whether old teachers of mine or family friends. You would sit and stare ahead without a feeling in your soul. I didn’t expect you to pretend to like them or enjoy their company but when I went out of my way to introduce you to them and to have you reject them so soundly hurt me as a part being rejected of me doubtlessly hurts. To you it meant nothing, you simply wanted to endure it. To get through it, to be somewhere else where nothing would be expected of you. I understand the world puts a magnitude of expectations upon you, familial and societal, piling on their dreams and problems until you collapse from the weight of the load. You make choices about what to worry about but I still look back and don’t see a single thing you cared about. You must be screaming and I’m deaf, so beat upon the ears I can’t fathom a single word-emotion you try to convey. To me you’re steel. Cold as a cage.

            I would ask and ask, about what you cared about and you would retort television shows, guinea pigs, mushrooms. Did I stomp on your dreams? Did I ever tire of hearing about the different species of mushrooms? Or when you would stop and go out of your way to inspect one in the middle of the national zoo? No. I brought up once you were obsessed with Kitchen Nightmares and you dismissed it and me. Even further you were hurt by the insinuation and sought to exact a reason why I had said it upon me. You pleaded and questioned as to why I would say such a thing. Why would I say such a thing if it were not true? If I didn’t believe it to be true? When it bothered me how you referred to your pets as children, substituted their lives for people, I spoke not a word. I never said anything because I accepted it. I didn’t care because it didn’t change what I thought of you. The rest did. The hiding of everything from me, your inner life, thoughts and emotions. You stole them away when I lived and breathed them, starving me of all I ever cared about you. Sure you said you had never a thing in this world to yourself. But you were supposed to share yourself with me. You did. Once.

            And now you are still indebted to your family. Who pays for you to go to school and live where you do? I know for a fact you don’t make enough to afford that neighbourhood. When I see your Hitler hair-do it really does make me feel ill as to think I ever saw that coming through the doorway. How when first I met you your hair was long and beautiful, with you wearing a flimsy plastic choker. The index finger of my hand in between the plastic and your throat, the ridges on your neck, sweat and anticipation. Now the color is the same generic shock I see everywhere standing for “I need something to replace my dearth of a personality” the instability of hair colouration. I don’t know what you are anymore, half a person perhaps though to say that and have you disprove me with popular acclaim and success would be irony itself. Presumably you bleed, hurt, and your heart still beats but I haven’t found any evidence to that end. 

Listening to: Exile on Main Street-The Rolling Stones
Reading: Invisible Man-Ralph Ellison