Month: December 2021

“…so yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to,” I tried to fake a casual tone as I battled to swallow the golf ball growing in my throat.
“Well,” His tone seemed to pierce the air; I could tell he’d been trying hard to bite his tongue the entire time I’d been talking. “I think you’re smarter than the choices you’ve been making.”
I rolled my eyes but, he was right.

I’m smarter than the choices I’d been making, was the exact phrase I kept repeating to myself the whole year.  Life is hard, don’t make it harder.
You can’t keep dancing with the devil and wonder why you’re still in hell.
Take your pick, they all fit my present.
“Can I text you later?” I abruptly asked him, “Natalie is calling.”
“LOVE YOU, BYE.” He announed quickly as he clicked off the line.

“Hi baby!” I whined to Natalie in a huff of relief.
“Hey girl!” She called to me, “Where are you, what are you doing?”
“Can you come get me?” I basically crumbled.
“I’m getting up right now!”

I could feel myself detaching further from you each time I had to listen to you apologize. I could feel myself growing with resentment each time you forced the blame of your insecurities onto me. I could hear the voice in my head getting louder each time you drunkenly berated me. I thought constantly of the girl sitting in your garage 3 summers ago telling herself, this is not for me.
“Sometimes you have to learn the same lesson fourteen times.”

I’ve orchestrated my entire path in life by taking leaps of faith. It’s been beautiful but-
I didn’t make the right choice this time. And I’m working hard every day to forgive myself for it.
Can’t win ’em all.

“I’m so sorry,” she told me as she collected me into a hug the morning after the most recent showing. Drunk and Angry: Party of One.
“I knew it was a possibility,” I told her through tears, “I just didn’t think it would get this bad.”

About a half mile past the very last street lamp, I found a beam of light swiping across the entrance of the muddy drive. A flashlight. I came to a stop as I saw her approach the passenger window.
“Micaela?” She asked me from under the hood of her jacket. Rain fell all around us. Her headlamp illuminated my puffy eyes and tear streaked cheeks. Killer first impression.
I wiped my face dry as I nodded. I knew I looked pathetic. I knew I was going to start leaking more tears any moment.
“I’m so happy you’re here.” She smiled with a pause. “Dean is a little further up the road, he’ll guide you in.” She pointed her flashlight towards the back of the property. “Just take a deep breath. You guys are alright now, okay?” She grabbed my hand through the window.

I was glad I’d poked around the place in the sunlight, or I may have felt nervous about navigating this U-Haul up the road in complete darkness. I saw another headlamp dancing in the distance: Dean.
“Hey,” I greeted him quickly as I pulled up near him and put the truck in reverse.
“Oh, it’s you driving!” He told me, “then you know where you’re going.” He took a step back as he shone his flashlight onto the gravel drive behind me.

“They’re here!” I heard Cathy call out to the property as she trailed through the mud on the way to me. I heard a voice more voices gather before they headed my way.

o0o

“Isn’t it strange,” Kalista told me, “How we are so used to being treated like shit, that the second a stranger shows us an ounce of kindness, we’re just so- surprised. But we’re all just humans, you know? It’s literally just humanity.”

I have a bad habit of romanticizing the past.  I’ve always struggled with my own hindsight, remembering monsters from my past as modern day saints instead.  Remembering people as if they had been who I wish they were, instead of who they actually were.

This past summer I was on a bar stool next to Tim as we played word games on his phone.
“I used to play this game with Jeremiah all the time,” I told him as I leaned back on my bar stool to finish my drink, “He’d send me messages through the app and talk shit to me, even though we were both in our apartment laying on the same couch.” I laughed lightly, as I allowed the memory to play freely in my mind.
Tim set his whiskey glass down on the bar, “You know, when you tell me stories like that, it makes me think that he wasn’t awful all the time.” he said almost absentmindedly.
I gave him a sharp side-eye, “He wasn’t.”

The summer after he threw our world upside down, I moved as far away as my commute to work would allow me.  A small town I knew very little about, next a half-dozen other towns I knew nothing about.  When people would ask me, “How did you end up all the way out here?” I used to shrug with a laugh and say, “I needed to make sure I didn’t share a Home Depot with my ex.”

A couple weeks after I’d moved, I was sad and lonely, and hitting the dating apps hard.  I was broke and hungry and agreed to a second date with a boring guy under the premise of “the best chicken parm I’ve ever had”.  When I got there he was watching A Star is Born- the newer one with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.  I had no idea what the movie was about, I’d never seen this one, or any other rendition before.  It was at the scene where Alley wins a Grammy, and during her acceptance speech Jack crawls onto stage drunkenly slurring, “did you just win?”  He eventually stands up next to her, but then pisses himself on stage next to her, and the crowd roars with laughter in the middle of her speech.  The embarrassment in her voice, and the panic that overcomes her, as she uses herself to hide him, sent my heart racing. The few minutes I spent watching this scene sent me into fight-or-flight.  I felt nauseated.
“What the fuck is this?” My trauma response barked at him.
“A star is born.  You haven’t seen it?”
“No,” I told him as I remained standing at the end of the couch.

It continues onto a scene where Jack is finally released from rehab.  When her manager denies her taking him on tour with her, she decides to cancel the tour altogether.  My heart broke, for her.  I was angry, for her.  I felt betrayed, for her.
“That’s a good woman,” whatshisface said out loud.
“What is?” I snapped at him, clearly exuding my own past. “Putting her life on hold to coddle his drinking problem?”
It was quiet for a moment as we both recognized the tension in the room.
“A good woman stands by her man.” He told me.
I laughed loudly as I grabbed my keys off the coffee table: “Yeah, and a good man wouldn’t put her through hell for it.”

In a recent conversation exchange with my ex, he drunkenly blabbed to me that I wasn’t able to “handle him”, in reference to the fact I’d chosen to leave him.  A cheap way to shift accountability of his actions onto me.  As if I hadn’t spent years of my twenties watching him continually jeopardize the health and safety of our relationship over a glass of johnny walker.  As if I hadn’t once driven to every bar between Folsom and Elk Grove, looking for his truck the night he didn’t come home from Sunday golf. As if he’d never jumped out of my car at a red light and busted his face open falling into a ditch, on the way home from my nephew’s first birthday party. As if I hadn’t begged him for weeks to go back to AA with me.  As if he didn’t gaslight me for months, insisting that he “wasn’t even drinking”. As if I wasn’t coming across empty vodka bottles hidden in the closets any time I cleaned the house.  As if I was supposed to just remain unhappy, because he was comfortable.

By the end of our relationship, I’d felt as though I’d given up so much of myself- so many pieces of personality, just trying to keep him on track. After I finally got to clean out the debris of our relationship, and create my life again, I felt like I didn’t know myself at all.  I spent the summer pushing my own limits, throwing myself into situations just to see how I’d react, trying everything once, maybe twice.  Saying Yes to almost anything, trying to make up for time with myself that I’d lost.

A lot of things that happened this year have made me realize I’m not yet healed from the trauma of loving an addict.  I’ve been in denial of the post-traumatic stress I’ve been carrying.  I’ve been telling myself, “It’s been 2-years” as if time alone will heal me, as if healing is linear, or has a timeline. As if my healing hasn’t been hindered by the company I’ve been keeping; As if choosing to live with a different addict did not absolutely halt my ability to heal.

“I was just telling a friend of mine the other day,” he began to tell me a few weeks ago from the bar stool next to mine, “Man, she is so chill, all the time.  The most easy-going chick I’ve ever known.”

I could feel my eyes begin to roll with annoyance, as I picked at the paper label wrapped around the beer in front of me.  The usual discomfort that consumes me when I receive a compliment, in addition to the discomfort of being uncertain how to remain unbothered by something that clearly bothers me.

It’s comical that I’ve used “easy-going” to describe myself almost my entire life but hearing it in your voice bothers me.

If I’m being honest, I hate that you think I’m easy-going.  That cool, calm, and collected personality that you love so much doesn’t come easy for me when you’re here. 

“Easy-going” is not how I would describe the Sunday mornings that I was telling you to FUCK OFF for having shown up at our bar with another girl the night before.  “Easy-going” is not how I would describe the novel-sized text messages I would send you telling you what an asshole you are for dating everyone but me, since 2019.

It’s not “easy-going”, it’s waging a war within myself just so I can sit in your presence for an hour or two.

I remember laying around on your couch about a year ago, when you stopped mid-sentence to answer your phone: “Hey Magen.”
I laughed out loud, and immediately hoped she heard me.
Of course, it’s Magen.
The reason I constantly heard “No” since the day I met you.
No, you can’t come over. No, you can’t talk right now.  No, we can’t date.

But you’d still fuck me in your shower anyway.  You’d still lift my dress up after you tossed me onto the bar in your guest house. On the floor at 3am after the bar. Over your kitchen counter with our clothes thrown all over the living room. In your driveway over the hood of my car.  You’d still pay for my drinks, and fill up my gas tank, and take me to breakfast on my birthday. Tell me I’m beautiful and kiss me at the bar in front of everyone, anyway.
“I’m just dating this girl right now,” you told me for over a year. “It just wouldn’t be right.”

Of course, she’s calling.  Of course, you’re answering.
“I’m just sitting around the apartment with Micaela,” you told her.
She said something back that I couldn’t hear.

I remember sinking into your couch. Surprised that you called me by name, and grateful I couldn’t make out what she had responded with.

“I don’t think so,” you told her, before pulling the phone away from your lips to look at me:
“You’re not obsessed with me, are you?”  You grinned at me.
I could feel my cheeks suddenly burning bright red.  It felt like all the whiskey suddenly hit me at once.  My legs suddenly felt weightless in your lap.  I had to say something, anything.
After all, the three of us were just sitting there, waiting.

“Clearly, I’m madly in love with you.” I said, giving sarcasm my best shot. I put my whiskey glass back up to my lips.  What was I supposed to do? Awkwardly fumble denial?

She ended the call without saying anything else.  You chuckled in response and tossed your phone back on the ottoman. I forced a smile back at you, and quietly finished my drink.

I’m so easy-fucking-going.

I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t bother me when you look for a reason to disapprove of who I’m dating:
He’s too old for you, He doesn’t treat you well enough, You can do better.

I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t bother me each time you say your current relationship “isn’t that serious”.  I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t bother me each time you call me beautiful, or creative, or strong, or smart. Any time you tell me it’s so much fun to hang out together.  I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t bother me when you leave the bar at 2:00AM without me.  I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t make me boil over with laughter any time you tell me she did something that turned you off.  I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t bother me that you didn’t check on me the morning after.

“You’re 110 percent right. That’s super shitty of me. I’m sorry. I should have been communicating.”

I’m tired of pretending that I don’t love you, or that I’m not in love with you, or that I haven’t been in love with you for the past three years.  I’m tired of pretending that this type of unconditional one-way love isn’t completely unhealthy for me.

Your silence is screaming. Hope we’re ok.

No no no we’re fine.

I’m tired of being so easy-fucking-going.