mending

I’m not sure exactly how it happens. Formulas work well for both NASA launches and cocktails, but matter not when you’re in the depths of It.

I recall naturally and am well reminded by private writings that life was in shambles, that work consisted of showing up and hoping on a fundamental level that even my shoes matched. That I would make it through a regular just-after-9-am call from a caring someone checking to see if I was composed enough to sit with my office door open. To then make it to a 10 o’clock meeting. Why didn’t I try lunch out with a friend? Because naturally that would set the world upright again. Perhaps a new activity? Because that would wipe my psychic slate clean. I’d phone in an entry on this site, something about Cusack or happy hour or new success at swimming. I’d hope he’d read it. After all, if he did, didn’t that mean something for us?

The messages from friends were well intentioned. He doesn’t deserve you. But if he doesn’t, why did I pick him in the first place? This doesn’t say anything about you. Sweet friend, you must not have heard me – he didn’t want me back. Kris, you are complete as you are. If this drunken sobbing is really me, then do I really want to be me anymore? They tried. I appreciated. I bucked and discarded.

I used to drive past his house on the way to work. I knew there were other routes, options that DC and distant friends and a paid Kris advocate and yes, even myself, knew were available, and I cared not. I’d curse him under my breath and remind him via CourtTV telepathy that I was the best Goddamn thing ever to happen to him, knowing full well in my gut that things would never be - and never should be - again. I’d talk of him in the past tense when things were very much present for me. And I’d come home after work to the dark windows and the needy cats. Even in a Pinot haze, the hatred of being alone, of being a me rather than an us, of telling people of the unchanging outcome in a steady stream of weeks and months, was absolute torture. Even though our end was a sewn together series of silences, once having shared a space and a life and all of your reachable memory can almost consume your insides. Every last thing had to go, if not literally then figuratively. Stray clothing was tossed as if it might infect me, music was shelved for a time that it would no longer be self indulgent and ridiculously painful.

All I wanted was a formula, a recipe online or news from confidantes or effing Dr. Phil to make things better. Nothing came.

Months later there were moments during which I could appreciate the humor of the blinding white of the snow and Cricket consuming all of Bug’s food as he groomed himself post-gorging. Expected neighborhood run-ins brought the same amount of pain and often minutes and sometime hours spent on long-distance therapeutic phone calls, but I no longer ruined contacts the day after ripping open the pack. I was reminded that these were simple successes. How I hated those morsels of wisdom with all of my being. I dated again, under a heavy cloak of Spanish reds and California whites, and only found ridiculous amounts of humor in a man who kissed me just as a mason jar might. Life became a series of building blocks that I openly mocked. Of putting myself out there in every forum so life could take me down. Again.

Somehow it didn’t.

And then I drove past his house last night. It was a last-minute necessity given a long trip home and the promise of awaiting traffic that I simply could not stand. And for a moment I remembered the time that I showed up on his doorstep and knocked on the darkened apartment door to find he wasn’t home, only minutes later to call and discover he was a state away surprising me with the very same arrival. This was a rowhouse of countless hours of chilled white wine, nighttime and mid-afternoon and whatever-the-hell-time-it-is sex, napping until the irritating alarm sounded, and checking your blogs from an unknown IP. The associated aftermath was an embarrassing collage of I-know-better-than-this drive bys and full pressed powder application before hitting the corner store. Of thinking there was a chance. That if I made myself pretty enough and somehow emotionally fresh enough that things could work.

They didn’t. And they never should have.

I still have no formula. And I’m not sure exactly how it happens. It isn’t the influence of another person or a tripod cat donning a scar to let you know what’s really important in life. But one day or over a series of them linked together you just wake up and the pull is gone. The ache subsides. The pictoral bits and pieces are fine in the scrapbook on the shelf with those that came before. And you realize with sadness that although it and you all meant something, it also means absolutely nothing at all.