For Sam or George
“They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alternations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage.” (William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p.374)
He is a narcissist, a bully, entitled, and he is a man who came from privilege and wealth, and he has never been held accountable for his despicable behavior. Occasionally, he is strong and honest. He is conservative, hard-headed, traumatized, and is too unaware of the tricky ways he evades his personal responsibilities to ever be compatible with anybody, truthfully. He set me flowers early on, and could sometimes sense with a subtle sweetness when I didn't feel good about whatever and would inquire why. He couldn’t care past the “why” and I often felt lonely and isolated, ashamed for answering. I don't know why I got involved with him — maybe because the company was good when he helped me move and his house caught on fire and we spent several nights camped on my floor eating pizza on tables made out of boxes he brought me from work that I needed to fill with more items from my kitchen. He put his arm around me and introduced me as his girlfriend with a bright toothy smile, emboldened from the self-conscious smile he wore when I approached him to spend a night out with him, late nights at concerts and shows I wouldn’t have wanted to go to a few weeks earlier.
Suddenly I wanted to go, and I was involved with a man who didn't share my values, who would interrupt, or tell me that teachers didn’t live in reality because they didn't actually build real things like he did — he built a deck earlier. I would tell him to drive me home in his 1960 Indigo Metallic Cadillac and he would look at me solemnly in the driveway, and apologize, but concede it was nothing personal; maybe I just took things too personally, all liberals do.
I don’t know why I told him I loved him after the worst of it — when he told me to get the fuck out of his house because he has gas-lighted me the night before, accused me of being crazy, gave me the silent treatment, and I came over because I wanted to talk and listen and understand why he was doing this to me. “Why are you doing this to me?” I gathered my things and cried as he staunchly sat behind his guitar like a man who did what he had to do. “I bought you this,” I said. I threw him the magazine I had bought to take my mind off of the pain of him ignoring my texts and phone calls, a glossy magazine on America’s National Parks, one of his favorite things. “I don’t know why,” he said, and I took a breath and shook my head. “Because I love you,” I said, almost like a question. And he was hit, he paused for a second as to reconsider, but pushed through it, and continued with his rant, that I am an emotional powder keg and he did nothing wrong and has never done anything wrong and is not going to apologize. I noticed that he looked crazy when he said this — he looked homeless; he was homeless.
I wish that was the end of our contest, but it wasn't — more iterations of the same attempt to make things work, each one more uncomfortable and painful than the last, each battle more terrible than the one before it until that very scary one at night when, roused from bed, I left (“get out or I’ll throw you out”) feeling like robot, and I knew I had to not go back; I had to leave the war. But a few days later, “not sure if you want me contacting you but if ur around this weekend could you feed kitty?” and “I could get john to do it but trust you more.” And, Reader, of course I fed his cat, not once, twice, but three times, and I watered the vegetable garden I planted for him, and I picked the Japanese eggplant that was ripe and drove it all the way out to Santa Fe and cooked it for lunch. A few weeks later, he brought tomatoes to my mom.
Note 1: “you would not know / that the worst of anyone / can be, finally, / an accident of hope.
Note 2: “There ought to be something special / for someone / in this kind of hope.
(both from Anne Sexton, “For John, Who Asks Me Not to Enquire Further”)