Stages

One of my favorite things to do each year is go to Butler’s Orchard with my cousin and her family. There is a corn maze, and a hayloft for jumping, and church ladies selling pit beef sandwiches that we eat on sloping picnic tables. We take a hayride to the pumpkin patch and search carefully for the perfect gourd, round and orange and totally evocative of everything I love about fall.

I’m both a nester and a person who suffers mightily from the twin demons of sentimentality and seasonal affective disorder. I want to wear a fuzzy sweater and make you soup, but serving it is just an excuse for you to sit next to me on the couch and lean in, put your warm human shoulders between me and the swift night that crowds the windows earlier and earlier each October evening.

And by you, of course, I mean Lieu.

I can’t really express how very much I wanted him to go to the pumpkin patch with us this year, to chase the kids through the corn maze with me and split a caramel apple. I can’t tell you because I can’t even tell myself. I can’t think about him at all, can’t remember the good times or the bad times or any times at all. I’ve stuffed everything about him into a closet in my mind, and the whole pile teeters there in the dark; I feel like if I look at it too hard, let alone touch it, it’s all going to crash down on my head and bury me.

I’ve said it here before: I am not particularly resilient. Sometimes I tell myself it’s the price I pay for feeling things deeply (so sensitive!) and sometimes I tell myself that it’s just a plain old personality flaw (so lame!)  This summer, about a month after the breakup, I realized that I had badly misunderstood the cost of my credits at school in Philly and over-committed myself to the tune of about $10,000 un-budgeted dollars. It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and I lost it, completely. I had a huge, endless panic attack–not something that has ever been a problem for me–and had to leave work, very visibly and messily. My sister had to leave her office and come get me. I had panic attacks for days afterwards, my system flooded with terror while I bent over, sobbing and gasping as I tried vainly to get a lungful of air.

Panic attacks suck, but I knew what it was, and I knew I wasn’t dying.  Honestly, though, I kind of wished I was a few times. I scared the shit out of myself.

Since then, I’ve taken many measures to ensure that I don’t get that low again, and studiously avoiding thinking about Lieu is one of them. There was a brief breach in the defenses when I saw him the day of the earthquake, but I patched it up as fast as I could and now when something reminds me of him, I change course immediately. This is a complete reversal of when we were together; then, I savored every opportunity I had to run my mental reel of Lieu moments, all slo-mo and backlit. Now I compulsively use every form of media and starch available to keep those thoughts at bay, like a villager spitting to ward off the evil eye.

At some point, I have to figure out what lesson I’m supposed to learn from all of this. The ones that jump out at me are not that appealing: I have bad taste in men, I screwed myself by not walking away sooner, I was willfully blind when I should have been looking, the fact that he didn’t love me means I am unlovable.

I spent a significant part of our actual relationship in denial, so I think I’ve covered that stage of the grieving process. I did a good amount of bargaining too–I will respond to this rejection by being EXTRA upbeat and easygoing and he will see the error of his ways! I’ve spent some significant time mired in grief, and I didn’t particularly enjoy it. What I need is some cleansing, righteous anger to burn through some of the clutter, but when I think about the things he did that made me mad, I just feel embarrassed and sad that I put up with it. How did I become that girl, who quits telling people what’s going on in her relationship because they visibly cringe?

I just read a great book, Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. It’s about a man with two families, a bigamist.  His two daughters take turns narrating, the outside child who knows the score her whole life and the acknowledged child whose disillusionment forms the novel’s denouement.  Talking about the fallout when everything finally unravels, the inside child says, Of course it went this way.  How else could it have gone? As an adult I can see that I should have seen this coming, but at the time it was surprising. What struck me about both sets of characters–the secret family and then the legit one–was how powerful their denial was. They made every circumstance okay within the confines of how they needed the narrative to go.  This is a good man, only acting this way because of X uncontrollable factor, and it’s no one’s fault that the situation is what it is, certainly not mine. 

I see that same capacity in myself, to arrange reality to suit me instead of arranging me to suit reality. One of the best pieces of advice I got about Le Dumping was from one of my commenters:  Grieve the relationship you really had – not the polished version we are all tempted to create following loss. I try to do that, but I find I wind up seesawing back and forth between two extremes–it was all terrible and I’m an idiot for letting it last, or it was all wonderful and if I were more worthy, I’d still have it.  (Both plotlines end with me dying alone and being eaten by cats.)

The truth of my relationship with Lieu, as with most things, is in the middle somewhere.  But the truth of my current reality is that I need to figure out how to examine the pile of what’s left and figure out which artifacts to take with me to the next thing and which to discard, and in order to do that I need to be able to approach the rubble with my eyes open. I’m gonna work on that as soon as I finish this mug of vegetable soup and find some pants.