Romantic Winning and Woe

[rednblacklumberjack]

Not sure if this should be in Reality or even Tea Time - (or perhaps Hell?), but here's a thread for documenting what you've witnessed, whether more veni vidi vici or forlorn hope.

[Tinker]

[rednblacklumberjack]

[Hoosiernorm]

Yeah I know that the one that got away that was my temptation of what idealized humanity should be is probably as fat as my wife at this late date.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I'm about to end it with the woman I was going to marry and I am a bit devastated and don't know whether to do it tomorrow, or do it after she starts her new job on Monday. I know, I know, it doesn't matter in the long run, but it would be extremely awkward to end it tomorrow and then she receives the surprise gift I already paid for to show up at her new office on Monday- something about that seems cruel...sometime this week; until then, I am a wreck.

She has pushed me away and I get it. She no longer wants me, she turned 25 last month and all of a sudden, she saw her friends more established than her and she freaked out. It doesn't help that we've been on two different continents for the past 3 months. And she doesn't want to work on the relationship.

I've tried talking to her about this and I've tried to end it already: She doesn't want to talk about it, but she doesn't want it to end. She literally changed the subject to the weather when I tried to talk about this last Wednesday and Thursday. Frankly, I think she wants to hold on until someone else catches her eye- and that is what hurts the most. It's disrespectful; typical and forgivable, but not something that gives me any incentive.

So...I'm going to tell her the door is open but I have to move on and get some barring in my life.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Colonel Sun]

[Hoosiernorm]

[Demon of Undoing]

I met my wife on a Greyhound bus.

She was running from state custody ( child welfare types, in fact, but at six months shy of 18, they don't look for you). I was running from a disharmonious situation somewhere north of my current location ( yeah, that's what we'll call it). The Grey Dog is the home of poor folks, drug mules, runaways, mutants and other assorted travelers of the modern underground railroad. Entirely tolerable with the right mix of home chemistry and the proper mien, but I digress.

And actually, it was in the terminal. I had been up for the better part of three days and was pretty sick of, well, everything. I won't lie, I noticed how good she looked first, and that she was crying a bit. I don't let women cry around me if I can avoid it because it makes me do stupid stuff, but as I wasn't far from her anyway, I went up and asked if she was okay. She told me she was just making a break with a few things, and I told her sometimes old things had to go to make way for the new. She agreed and that was it. I was just being polite. I don't think I looked at her again until later on the bus when I noticed someone not altogether copacetic was asking too many questions of her after she had already put in some headphones. She was scared- she really shouldn't have been dressed quite that ostentatiously, but she told me later she wore whatever she had that made her look older, and it worked. Sugar britches that was asking her, however, smelled rather differently.

Nowhere north of Atlanta, the bus stopped to let people get a bite to eat and stretch their legs, an event both longed for by some and cursed by others, depending on how fast they were attempting to either get to or get away from somewhere . I try not to eat when I am moving, so I just watched everything. Sugar Britches was really pushing it on her, and I think maybe she saw me looking. She has since learned to not try to puzzle out my mood by looking at my facial expression unless I am speaking directly to someone, but I think she got a pretty clear picture of where my head was right then. This being the road, though, and that being none of my bizness, my name's Paul, and this is between y'all. Again, in my mind, that was the end of it.

Cut to the terminal in Atlanta, which was large, loud, frighteningly chaotic and >< this far from the asshole of the world. Probably they got fingerpainting from happy kids on Ritalin all over the walls there now. Back then, they had painted over bullet holes. Almost choked out a street preacher with a fixation on me and a crackhead selling cheap " gold" necklaces almost got relieved, so my adrenaline is going up. It's showing. Black people are looking at me with the " crazy whitey " alarm ( it's a Southern thing), and this is in Atlanta where they own the place. So I'm pretty well keeping my gym bag right in hand and feeling the lump in it every thirty seconds as a reflex. The room was getting to me, and there was nowhere to go, so while I am starting to have a moment somewhere between PTSD and DILLIGAF, out of nowhere comes the pretty strawberry blonde. I was already in the line for the connecting bus and the sun was going down, always a weird time for me, and she tells me that Sugar Britches was becoming scary and wanted to sit near me.

This was, as she later admitted, something like riding " Old Meateater" in the rodeo because " Pansy the Creepy Goat" was just a little worrying. Nothing like this had ever happened in my life, that's for damn sure. Marv's words," on account of how I look" comes to mind as a reason. But like Goldie, she was trying to be safe. She says she knew me when she saw me. I guess so. Sugar Pants got a look and left.

Flash back to about three months before. I'm about five stories up on a rooftop looking at shit through a spotting scope, getting bored, looking at stars ( always fun). Watching city lights, listening to people fight and fuck and run footraces at two AM. Decided it wasn't happening and commenced to flooding the train with choo-choo altering logarithms, and all the sadness came back. Pissed at God, pissed at the world for fucking up, pissed at me for fucking it up when I had the chance to do so or not. You can end it out of bravery, but not cowardice. So there I am cursing at God as usual, and I just cut to the chase and told him I was out. I couldn't do it any more. No more of any of it , no more of it alone. Wasn't who we thought we were. It fell apart. And I told Him that I'd just drone on if that's the way it shook out, but if He had a say in it, could he send someone my way? I told Him to keep in mind that I'm a dumb shit, and that subtlety was for fags and Frenchmen. If He was cooking something up, He couldn't leave it to me, couldn't leave the determination of what was the right thing to do in my hands, what with me holding both of Murphy's . She had to tell me. She had to come after me. And that was, to me, the deal breaker. At that point, I would have been mad to have any women that would have me. And I was pretty mad, but not that nuts. It was like saying," I'm only going to New York if I fly there in a G6". It's a way of admitting it's all batshit crazy from the get go. I didn't expect to be heard or taken seriously if I were.

So, back on the bus leaving Atlanta, we sit together and talk for about eight hours or so until we hit Jacksonville. I roundabout ask how old she is and what she's doing. She says 19 and brings it off( not that hard)and tells me she is leaving a job and family situation, and I don't pry. Considerably later, she confesses that she lied and felt terrible about it, but felt that if I had known the truth, I would have handled things differently ( and she is right, I would have had nothing to do with her) . Whatever. We talked all through the night, one of those interminable conversations that are characteristic of sudden and massive contact on the personal level. Now, I've had a million personal encounters that went way way deeper with strangers than is seemly- I see things in people- but not like this. This wasn't a case where I came up to someone, not an instance of going out of my way to transmogrify into something less obtrusive( hunch the shoulders, slack the face, plod aimlessly like most people) that got lucky. When she first saw me, and for quite a while thereafter, I was in the " eating barbed wire/pissing napalm" phase of being, and that's not real friendly-looking. But she swears that in spite of all appearances, she knew she needed to go to me. She knew as we talked on the bus she wanted forever, and we were talking about everything from comparative religion to emotion to dreams- me listening on that one-, so it fit.

Eventually, we pulled into Jax, and she had to go her way. As much as it was good, I knew how this things went. I was going still further South for the last time ( fuck Miami, there I said it), and this was another encounter that would be vaguely remembered. She left quite an impression, I do have to say, but honestly? At that point, I was so burnt out on the bullshit and futility of it all that it didn't occur to me as anything more than a nice thought when she asked for a number where she could reach me. I gave her an old card and that was, again, all of it. I wrote it off. Thought the evening nice,so are sunsets, and fuck them both. Neither had much more to do with me, as I saw it then. Sometimes it's a real challenge being a low-scoring sociopath. It's always a challenge being an asshole.

So a day later, Mary Jane is sending messages that some chick is calling the mojo box and asking for me, and I wasn't where I could make much contact at that point. A day or two goes by, and she leaves a number where I can reach her, and by that time, I'm not even sure who I am talking to . Time had moved on, but not for her. She'd been around a bit, but apparently could not get our evening together out of her mind( and I swear, I only grabbed her hand that one time out of emphasis, not touchy-feely, but it worked, and that's as physical as it got).

So over the next few months, as I basically killed one identity and re-entered an older, torpid one, we talked back and forth quite a lot. There were lots of those interminable conversations. She eventually got out of that shithole in Jax and wound up going to live in BFE, Iowa, where she had a grandmother that wasn't totally worthless. Worked nowhere jobs, convinced herself it was better in Florida, and after almost two years of not seeing each other, and then only that one night, we made plans to get her where I was. She got here, the rest is history, and being married to a woman ten years younger has a lot going for it. I have no regrets.

So was it "fate"? Divine intervention? Happenstance? Looking back now, I can see the probability involved better, and can cynically say that as I have lost much of my older sense of faith, I have lost much of my feeling that there was something transcendent going on. And yet the thing is so unlikely that it is miraculous, in far more than one respect. We are so well matched that neither of us talk with co-workers or acquaintances much about our marriage, because to use the language these kids speak in today, it will get the haters hatin'. It's pretty sick, and it works like downhill water.

But for the kids, all the rest of this can get hanged. I'm staying near civilization as long as the chillun are in the house- though I reserve the right to keep the bulk of it at rifle range- because they have the right to choose their own poison and I'd hate for them to catch my disease. After that, though? I'm out like a trout. We will be so gone there will be a snap as air rushes into the vacuum we will leave. A boat, a jungle, an island, something. We don't really need much, actually just about nothing at all, when it's just us. I'll origami a teepee or something. Fuck a bunch of all this.

[YMix]

..... wow.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

So it's done. And it was messed up.

It's a little too close to home to write about yet, but my story involves continent jumping and the fashion industry and life and death struggles and a revelation so twisted and sick, that it will make you numb.

I'm hurt but it's for the best and I'm ready to move on.

Just where do I go from here.

[Tinker]

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[Tinker]

[YMix]

[Demon of Undoing]

Other fish in the sea, they're all special, blah, blah blah.

There is almost always time enough for reason. But it isn't always time for reason.

This too shall pass.

[Hoosiernorm]

[Hoosiernorm]