Out of the Past

I haven't been here for a long, long time. I almost thought I had forgotten the password. I never feel much like giving out anything lately. And I have been very, very busy dancing the tango, performing, having love affairs and making all the assorted art I make -- when I'm not working.

And today, like a stray bullet, from out of the past comes my amour fou from 2008 with all his normal dark cloud of drama and crazy. Seems he's got legal problems now as a result of the love affair he embarked on after ours. And the opposing party is gathering evidence against him to "assassinate his character" in a lawsuit. No, I don't make this stuff up. Yes, my life is like a movie.

Do I feel anything? No. Not pity, not concern, not compassion, nothing. I thought I'd preserve happy memories of some of our time together eventually. Nope. There's nothing there now. Nothing at all. He bled me dry, abandoned me, and now I do not care at all what happens to him. Sounds like he's racked up some kind of karmic debt and now he's being asked to pay the bill. My heart is rattlingly empty of him.

Life is so sad like this -- how things changed so radically in exactly three years. Cue Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Once I thought I would die without him. And now I cannot even imagine why I ever loved him. But I am so glad I dodged the bullet of committing myself to him. And he couldn't even dance.

I should have told the lawyer all I care about is that they cast Madonna to play me in the movie about all this. :)

Thanksgiving. And the seasonal depression has begun.

I'm alone today on Thanksgiving, for the very first time in my entire fifty-four years. One child lives half a continent away and isn't coming "home," and the other and her entire clan accepted an invitation from her father and his wife to go there. He's never before made this invitation to host her, her partner and the grandbabies at his place and evidently felt snubbed that she has always spent Thanksgiving with me all these years. So I kept quiet, and let everyone else assume I was doing Thanksgiving with my family as usual and so no invitations to join another family or group of "orphans" were extended to me. Of course, my own mother invited me to her home, but having gone there only one time since I left home at eighteen -- on the heels of divorce, with small children in tow -- hers is really only a "ceremonial" invitation; she knows I won't actually accept.

And I must admit, I am sad today. But I'll take the dog for a long work, rehearse and work in the studio today. And eat just what I would normally, alone, this evening.

I went to Target yesterday for what I hope will be the very last time until after Christmas to get it out of the way because of the Christmas music that will now start playing there. I cannot listen to Christmas carols or songs on Muzak or on the radio. I have to avoid any environment where they will be playing. My heart hurts me, a lump rises in my throat and tears flood my eyes. It all goes back to my father's death in October when I was eight, and the Christmas following. I cannot "have myself a merry little Christmas." The holiday season is incredibly hard for me and I'm sad, usually, from Thanksgiving right through New Year's Day. Without small children of my own to make the holiday bright for as I did all those years, my true feelings surface. My heart hurts, literally. It's a time for me, always, of reflection and regret and longing. It's a time to wonder what might have been if the course of my own life had not been forever altered that fall long ago. The feeling I have is roughly equivalent to most people's emotional reaction to the ending of the movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. So I have to protect myself during the holiday season.

And then, the dreams start.

It's especially excruciating this year because of what my life was like at this time one year ago. I was madly in love, had just returned from my lover in Italy, and was preparing to return to him there for my birthday, Christmas and New Year's -- to live a fairy tale. I was buying him a million little gifts and wrapping them. He confessed he loved to sing Christmas carols around the house when no one was there, so I had even burned half a dozen Christmas music CD's for us to sing together while I was there. And I was able to tolerate the Christmas music, even enjoy it, because it was for HIM. My love for him enabled me to transcend the loss and sadness the music had always before triggered. My love for him inspired a desire for Christmas in me I hadn't felt in my heart since 1962. It had been too difficult. The hurt had been too great.

And here I am, one year later. Alone.

Last night I dreamed of him for the first time in many months. In my dream, I confronted him about how very much he had hurt me and confessed about the Christmas music CD's -- about how uncharacteristic an action that had been for me, how untrue to my own natural preferences, but how joyful a gift it had been for me to make them for him because I loved him so and wanted to please him. I told him he had no idea how much our love affair -- or how it ended, really -- has harmed me emotionally. I asked him if he has ever cried over me, as I have cried over him. He nodded his head vigorously up and down in a funny, childish gesture he sometimes makes. I told him since the ending of our affair early this year I've been all over the place psychically -- but the positive outcome has been that I have thrown myself into all kinds of experiences and creative activity as if chased by the devil. And then I lay face down on my bed, where my dream confrontation was set, and wept. He made no attempt to console me, and I woke myself up. Too painful.

Have yourself a happy little Thanksgiving and treasure those with whom you'll spend this day. Do not take it for granted. Even if you've been up cooking since 5:00 a.m. this morning, it's worth it. And say a little prayer for those who are all alone today, whether of their own devising, the twists of their own fates or by necessity. We were all born alone, and we will die alone. Some of us just start practicing early.

...and I miss you most of all, my darling, when Autumn leaves start to fall.

I'm touched that people are so kind to me.

I decided, since I was buying groceries anyway, to go ahead and order the cake for the Anti(dote)Wedding today. I explained very briefly to the nice baker that I was doing an exhibition and performance on the day I probably would have been married as a ritual end to this chapter of my life. He was a man in his thirties, and his eyes got moist and he told me how sorry he was and that the cake would be beautiful, he promised. I told him not to be sad, that it was fine, really, that I'm an artist and this is just how I have to process my life. But he was genuinely sympathetic and it was so touching!

Same thing happened when I talked to the florist about the wrist corsage I ordered. She promised me it was going to be exquisite and exactly as I had envisioned originally when X and I were making wedding plans.

And when I told a co-worker about having gone ahead and bought the dress I had picked out and that I'm going to wear it anyway (not just for the show, but afterwards, too), and about "performing" my vows for the witnesses gathered just as I would really have done to X at the wedding, she teared up, too. She's getting a divorce, so, of course, she's probably super-sensitive about affairs of the heart right now.

It's all fine! Really. And I am just fine. In fact, I'm more than fine. Look what a period of creative output my heart-ache has fueled since January. But I am so deeply, deeply moved at how sweet, kind and tender-hearted everyone has been with me as I plan this show. Thank you. Vous êtes très gentilles.

The final drawing of the Epilogue

...is going just the way I dreamed it. But I had an eerie experience late last night as I drew feverishly. I very distinctly heard my refrigerator door open and close, as if there were a ghost in my kitchen, or as if my own fierce drawing energy had caused a poltergeist to come into my space. My hair stood on end. I had to call Ali and talk for a few minutes, and go outside.

I was having really intense thoughts as I drew about the concept of "soul mate" and I had even been crying a little about having missed mine in this incarnation, and about how very near he often seems to me. I just can't seem to break through to him. I miss him so terribly sometimes. Sometimes my heart hurts for both of us, since we can't seem to find one another this time.

It's probably the sadness of dealing with the very final emotional dregs of my most recent romance's ending that caused this metaphysical event. My mind and my heart are so strong. I was finally able to weep last night, after all these months, and admit to myself how very sad I am that I was wrong, that Felix was not my soul-mate after all, as I had once thought. And to acknowledge that I feel sad that in being wrong I was "unfaithful" to my real soul-mate in giving Felix the love I meant for him.

I probably shouldn't even write such things because it probably sounds like total craziness to everyone but me. But my past-life love is always hovering so near me, and I am so near him. I must have loved him so much I can never escape the vestiges and echoes of our love even in this incarnation. I feel I have long lived my life as his invisible widow, grieving the loss of the love he and I shared.

I know: Goth. 19th Century Romantic. Wuthering Heights. Yes. It is exactly like that, and I feel it, always, keenly, exactly like that. For me, it is always real, always tangible and so, so bitter-sweetly sad.

My darling, if you can read what I write here through the dimension that separates us, please, please be waiting for me at the end of time. I have searched for you for forty years, and I am so sorry about my recent mistake, thinking that, in Felix, I had finally found you again. Please forgive me, my darling. Open the refrigerator door all you want to, to remind me you really are there, loving me always still, and always waiting for me.

Damn. I haven't listened to this Amy Winehouse...

CD in about a year. She so called it, all the way. I can't believe these lyrics haven't been ringing in my ears before. But I get it now.



This is exactly how I felt.

I had a thought. When, in the future, the other women in his life are reminding him of our ill-fated romance, I bet they all picture me as Amy Winehouse. I bet our interlude will be known as his "Amy Winehouse affair."

Dreams and sleep have meaning.

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning
By TIFFANY SHARPLES Tiffany Sharples Tue Jun 16, 4:15 am ET

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams - and, more so, sleep - are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotions.

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)

A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: "If it's getting food, if it's getting some kind of reward, finding a wife - those things are pretty good to pick up on."

Our daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives."

REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

"It's not that you've forgotten. You haven't," he says. "It's a memory of an emotional episode, but it's no longer emotional itself."

That palliative safety-valve quality of sleep may be hampered when we fail to reach REM sleep or when REM sleep is disrupted, Walker says. "If you don't let go of the emotion, what results is a constant state of anxiety," he says.

The theory is consistent with new research conducted by Rebecca Bernert, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Florida State University who specializes in the relationship between sleep and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and who also presented her work at the sleep conference this week.

In her study of 82 men and women between the ages of 18 and 66 who were admitted into a mental-health hospital for emergency psychiatric evaluation, Bernert discovered that the presence of severe and frequent nightmares or insomnia was a strong predictor of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. More than half of the study participants had attempted suicide at least once in the past, and the 17% of the study group who had made an attempt within the previous month had dramatically higher scores in nightmare frequency and intensity than the rest. Bernert found that the relationship between nightmares or insomnia and suicide persisted, even when researchers controlled for other factors like depression.

Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.

If that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event.' "

At the biological level, Walker explains, the "emotional rind" translates to sympathetic nervous-system activity during sleep: faster heart rate and the release of stress chemicals. Understanding why nightmares recur and how REM sleep facilitates emotional processing - or hinders it, when nightmares take place and perpetuate the physical stress symptoms - may eventually provide clues to effective treatments of painful mental disorders. Perhaps, even, by simply addressing sleeping habits, doctors could potentially interrupt the emotional cycle that can lead to suicide. "There is an opportunity for prevention," Bernert says.

The new findings highlight what researchers are increasingly recognizing as a two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. "Modern medicine and psychiatry have consistently thought that psychological disorders seem to have co-occuring sleep problems and that it's the disorder perpetuating the sleep problems," says Walker. "Is it possible that, in fact, it's the sleep disruption contributing to the psychiatric disorder?"

Feeling a little sad and vulnerable

I think it's because June 7 last year was the first day of the real-life romance I wrote about in Les Très Riches Heures. And part of it is Bob's death.

And maybe it's because coming to the end of a huge artistic project always triggers a kind of post-natal depression in me. I had been writing since January, then editing feverishly during the past month, and now it's all done and out there and I wait. It's a new experience for me, putting what I've made out there. Usually I just make things and never show them to anyone. Since I put this work out there, I feel a little on pins and needles waiting to get some feedback from someone. Ali was, of course, right there, reading in the first few days and she's already given me notes. I do have to examine how I feel about making and showing vs. just making and never showing. Part of me feels that maybe it's time I do put my work out there. I think maybe some lessons I learned from Bob are talking to me these days...

I do know what I'm doing next, though, and started working on the first color plate for that series Sunday night. And I have too many conceptual ideas to even count. But it seems fairly obvious I am going to have to learn some HTML to pull off most of what I can imagine doing in the future.

The human heart is so mysterious.

At work, I am dealing with yet another tragic student suicide. I don't want to trivialize the great tragedy by writing about it here. I'll just say it's very sad and my heart goes out to the poor, lost young woman.

Personally, I am suddenly furious with my former lover for his freeze-out since our parting in January. My contempt for him, long coming, has arrived. I am really angry with him now. As Ali says, "He's renting too much real estate in your psyche. I assure you, you aren't in his."

She's right. But I am truly angry, four months later. I guess it took me this long just to get over the sorrow, numbness and horror. But I am now. So the anger has arrived. Cue the orchestra: Carmen's made her entrance.

Another possible trigger: the book's so close to being finished. I think it's very good. My goal is to finish it by symbolic June 7. If I can finish it and simultaneously do the music video and all the other opportunities I have next in queue, that is. If not, shortly thereafter.

I take up no space in his heart or mind or he would have contacted me by now after reading my final posts to our private blog in the last few weeks. I'm erased, invisible, banished. Got it.

Why would he orchestrate this pathetic ending to a beautiful romance, knowing full well I'd lose all respect for him forever in the bargain? I suppose I'm angry with myself for being duped. I loved him, so I thought I knew him. I couldn't have been more wrong. As I wrote him, "I broke my own heart." I own that.

"Love is my religion - I could die for it" John Keats

And evidently one of my former advisees did last week, by his own hand. Tragic. A beautiful boy, a sensitive soul of thirty years. I'm haunted by his death these days.

I always think at the end of a love affair that I will die (or must die, or should die), but I don't. Perhaps that's my tragedy: I live on. I put one foot in front of the other, I breathe, I take meals, I work, I see friends, I shop, I make plans for the future. My life goes on. I survive. But, truly, a part of me has died forever -- the part of me I shared only with my lover.

But, perhaps, with each ending something is also created? A timeless, transcendent space, a kind of metaphysical empty room full of blinding light? An intimate space that may only be shared with one other human being in all the world? And maybe will be again someday? Or so it seems to me.

"In my father's house there are many mansions." And in some of them dwell those I once loved so much I believed I would die if they ceased to love me. Perhaps one day, outside of time and space, we will love again in those rooms full of white light.

Violetta? Mimi? No.

Musetta a little. Carmen: yes.

*****

I passed a man on the hike and bike trail today walking Buster. When he was completely past me, I suddenly thought, "Wait! Was that my second husband?!"

A letter I won't send: It's tragic that you deprived yourself of all this...

because, when all is said and done, it all boils down to this: truly, you could not take the risk. (You could not eat the peach.) You preferred the familiar sadness, the moral "correctness" of staying in name only in a marriage from which you continually seek to escape, whether through moving halfway across the world or through your several emotional or sexual affairs. It's sad, too, because you were so completely safe with me. But you were afraid. It must have been terrifying, to have all you said you dreamed of right in front of you, for the taking.

This is my family. One of my little granddaughters wears a dress and bonnet made for me in 1961 by my mother; the other wears my leopard heels. My own younger child, out of frame, takes the photograph, and I play the accordion.

The younger of my granddaughters is singing a song, à la Piaf, while accompanied by two melodicas, an accordion, and her sister on one of your minor key harmonicas. Our eight-year-old chanteuse composed her song on the spot. It's about an ended romance. It's about all the things that were sent back in boxes. The last words of her song are, "He's just a little man." She's brilliant, and her lyrics come from a deep, authentic, healthy place. We're a tribe of adherents to a philosophy of radical honesty, you see. We inhabit your Paradise Lost. And we rag-tag gypsies WILL BE HAPPY. We seek, and find JOY on a daily basis.

You've lost not only me, but all this. A tribe of women and girls will now wear what once were your clothes, your ties, your sock garters, your watch, your rings. They will play your harmonicas.

It's a tragedy. You, as my beloved, had earned the right to partake of this magical, nomadic feast, to enter a world of radical truthfulness to which you'll never, ever again be offered an invitation. My people were all standing by ready to welcome you as my chosen one, my beloved. It is a world of great beauty -- unimaginable, in fact, to outsiders -- and I am sorry that you will not be part of it. It might have filled some of that abyss inside you. It might have helped heal some of your terrible wounds.

It's on nights like these that I'll remember you most often and be a little sad. Not because I miss you and you are lost to me. But because of all you yourself deprive yourself of and have lost. Tu es perdu à nous et tout est perdu à toi. But the red wine will flow, we will make the music and I will sing and dance. Because, unlike you, I am always passionately committed to being fully IN LIFE.

Ultimately, that's why our relationship could not work out: I am committed to being fully in life and you most probably have chosen to turn your back on all these joys and spend much of your time in darkness. I'm not angry at you for rejecting ME. I'm angry that you reject life, and joy. What a waste. What ingratitude to life for all its riches.

I can rock that.

I figured out a way to tie a silk bow tie from Italy so that it makes a rather charming choker with a bow. And there's a pocket square to coordinate with each of the two bow ties. When I want to wear Dietrich drag to work in the future, I can rock those ties as chokers under an open necked shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, which I'll wear with a vest. And argyle socks. And spectator shoes. And with that cologne, Heritage, he selected at Guerlain on the Champs Elysées.

Because he sent that back to me, too.

Part of me really wants to know why the ending of the romance couldn't have been like Intermezzo (1939). Or Brief Encounter (1946). "How apt that this beautiful film is named Intermezzo, a term that connotes a short musical piece played between two longer movements. --Netflix"

A box arrived.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, second part of 11, 13. And a bunch of other objects, once gifts from me to the sender -- or little things of mine with no value at all.

Still missing:
6, 7, 9, first part of 11, 12.

What kind of head-trip is this anyway? It's baffling. It's my things and the sender's things, not clearly one or the other, in these expensive-to-send boxes full of pathetic, unwanted objects.

I suppose I'm meant to feel erased? Whatever comfort he can find for himself is good. Or perhaps I'm meant to feel grateful that he went to the trouble and expense to send the things after I asked him not to? I don't feel at all grateful. It seems so ungrateful to the universe for the rare gift of love and intimacy it once bestowed on us to now return the symbols of our romance. I find all this endless box-sending, frankly, inexplicable in motive, materialistic and, really, quite sad.

Life is, after all, simultaneously so long, so short, so rich, so painful. And all we have is today, and when today ends, only our memories, which are our treasures.

But I guess I'm a romantic...

A list of random objects?

1. Venus in Furs
2. Yellow cashmere sweater, argyle pattern
3. Two silk bow ties, four pair silk knot cufflinks
4. Ferdinand, the Flower-Smelling Bull.
5. Burgundy flats, spectator style
6. Rubber riding boots
7. Velvet dress, vintage, sleeveless sheath, the color of old theatre seats
8. Ballet pink 3/4 sleeve top
9. A little fur piece -- dyed rabbit?
10. Blue jeans skirt
11. Chocolate brown nail polish, greenish-black eye shadow
12. Waterman pen
13. French Foreign Legion button, beribboned

It's a kind of Joseph Cornell assemblage of the wardrobe.

It was like this.

His behaving in the ways this article describes really began to frighten me when I visited him in December: his extreme emotional reactivity was not only scary, but made me feel as if I was walking through a mine field or on eggshells.

It's so difficult to know that someone I loved so much now hates me, and wants to hurt me as he feels I hurt him by honestly communicating my concerns. I was "too real." And not in a good way, like the Velveteen Rabbit.

The Frustrating No-Man’s-Land of Borderline Personality Disorder
By Harold W. Koenigsberg, and Larry J. Siever

THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF AFFECTIVE INSTABILITY

In addition to vulnerability to impulsive aggression, people with borderline personality disorder are unusually emotionally reactive. They may be content for a while, then become intensely angry or hopelessly depressed or unbearably anxious—each state, although intense, lasting only a few hours or a day.

To those who are close to them, borderline patients appear to have random and unpredictable emotions. On closer investigation, those emotions often seem to involve heightened emotional reactions to other people. Borderline patients may become distraught at ordinary criticism, which they experience as a blow to self-esteem; may react with rage to a disappointment or minor slight; or may feel terror at a separation that they experience as virtual abandonment. Their emotional, or affective, instability may contribute to their turbulent, often unstable relationships and the inconstancy in their experience of themselves that leads to a confused sense of identity.

Infants who are very emotionally sensitive may respond more intensely to the comings and goings of their mother or caretakers and show much greater distress at separating. This may lead to a more insecure attachment between infant and mother. If the infant is more impulsive and aggressive— that is, likely to express emotions forcefully— he may have crying spells and, later, temper tantrums when frustrated or left alone, which can wear down even the most supportive parents and overwhelm those who are depressed or who themselves have trouble with emotional reactivity and impulsiveness. Parents may become frustrated at their inability to soothe such a child and decide not to respond to its distress; at other times they may try everything to indulge the child to appease its upset and rage. These inconsistent (and, to the infant, unpredictable) responses may make it likely that the child will learn to deal with unpredictability by means of emotional storms or tantrums.

Only by looking at the behaviors of someone with borderline personality disorder in that person’s social milieu do we fully understand their meaning.

As the child matures, he may draw on these interpersonal strategies in order to regain emotional equilibrium. For example, when an upsurge of depression follows a blow to self-esteem, the borderline person may try to bolster her self-esteem by devaluing someone else. When feeling alone and abandoned, she may behave recklessly to stimulate the worry and involvement of others. To onlookers, these behaviors may appear manipulative because their purpose is to bring another person to attend to the borderline’s needs. But because of their heightened sensitivity to the availability of others, people with borderline personality disorder often feel that they are not in charge of their own emotions—their emotions depend on the behavior of those around them. Attempting to control their own feelings, they find themselves trying to control the behavior of people they depend upon and care about. Repeated again and again, these patterns of behavior become ingrained. The borderline person experiences these styles of relating as the only way to survive emotional ups and downs and the feeling that others cannot be trusted to support her.

By the last month of our relationship I often felt we were thrashing in a lake, that he held me by the neck in the crook of his arm and that he would accidentally drown me. I felt and (perhaps still feel) terribly guilty that I couldn't save him, and I felt ashamed that every self-preservation instinct in my psyche was screaming, "Fly! Fly!" I thought I was so strong that I could help him, and that my great love for him could help heal his terrible psychic wounds. What I hadn't realized at the beginning was the terrible risk I had willingly and lovingly put myself in; I feel ashamed that I ultimately had to make the choice to save myself. What I'm trying to become very clear on is this: I could not have saved him. He is the only one who can save himself. I feel such compassion for his wife of many years; how frequently she must have felt as I felt, and how sad and helpless she must feel. She can't save him, either.

But I predict his brilliance, charm and boyish qualities will insure a steady future supply of women riding in on their white horses, hoping, as I hoped and as his wife surely must have once hoped, to save him. There were, what? Three other women I quickly discovered in his life in addition to his wife and me?

I don't think his is a histrionic or narcissistic personality. I think he has suffered unbearably most of his life from a borderline personality disorder that the circumstances of his early life set up. Too bad I wasn't able to do the research as the behaviors occurred; it was all completely baffling and very painful for me at the time. Poor man. Will he ever be able to move on past those wounds? Will he ever begin to heal a little or feel at least a sense of peace of mind? Will his vicious self-loathing -- which he sometimes turns outward on others -- ever end?

Thinking about him makes me terribly sad.

Often when a relationship ends

...I feel the urge to buy a bicycle.

And so I did today.

Just like this, but red. No gears, no hand brakes, just a simple old-fashioned coaster. I love it! It's a Sun Bicycle -- I never had one before.
http://www.sunbicycles.com/sun/index.html

I purchased it an Eastside bicycle shop, so it comes with support, unlike a Huffy or Schwinn from a big box store. And it's much better quality for only about $50 more than what I thought I'd pay at Academy or Target for a Chinese bike. And I got a basket installed so I can run errands on it. Or so I can train Buster to sit in it and go for a ride with me. Good times!

And if it's the Second Coming of the Great Depression, at least I've got alternative, non fossil fuel transportation now.

Dear (British) Abby,

I met a man recently out of an unhappy long-term relationship and supposedly ready to move on. We live in different cities, but would spend hours on the phone. He was shy and nervous, which was endearing. We got on amazingly well...(snip) Now I’ve walked away, but I fear I’ve left an amazing connection behind. Was I holding on to something that wasn't there? It’s so easy to say that people have baggage, but surely it’s better to help and be understanding?

*****

Of course it’s good to help others and to be understanding about emotional baggage, but just because it’s good to be that way, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you.

Look, for whatever reason, some people are emotional black holes. No matter how much love and kindness we hand out, it’s all absorbed into the vortex. Our actions come to seem both meaningless and pointless, because no amount of love and reassurance has any effect except to make them crave more — and more. That leaves us bewildered, anxious and, frankly, feeling as if we don’t much matter.

I think of people like that as emotional vampires. Unable to sustain themselves or fill the hole of need they carry inside, they leech the life out of others. I suspect you feel low because it is extraordinarily disappointing to encounter somebody who seems able to speak the language of love, but is unable, emotionally, to absorb its lessons. All the promises are simply dust. When he says he loves you, I’m sure he believes it to be the truth. It’s just that, emotionally, he can’t follow it through. We can understand something intellectually, but fail to feel it emotionally. It’s a head-to-heart disconnect.

He may want to love you (or, rather, the idea of you), but as soon as you respond, he shuts down, and when you get too close, he runs away. It seems likely that he’s badly wounded emotionally, but — and here’s a big but — just because he’s wounded, it doesn’t mean that you can heal him, or that you should try. You don’t say what happened in his previous relationship. It could be that he was bullied or neglected, and that has caused him to feel scared of being hurt again. Or it could be that he was acting out similar dysfunctional behaviour with his ex-partner, who, after a long battle to love and reassure him, came to feel as low as you do and gave up.

Who’s to know? Perhaps not even he does. It’s difficult to see our own destructive patterns until something sufficiently painful happens to make us pay attention. It takes years to establish behaviour and, no matter how dysfunctional or destructive, it at least has the merit of being familiar and, therefore, safe. Change is frightening because it’s a leap into the unknown, but I suspect your frustration lies in wanting to believe that, with sufficient love and kindness, he could and would change. People can change, but challenging established patterns of destructive behaviour takes enormous personal effort. Unless somebody is really willing to put in the work, it’s impossible to help them, no matter how much kindness, love and good emotional sense we send their way.

It’s like the oxygen masks in an aeroplane. You must put the mask to your own face before helping anybody else. Why? Because if you don’t have your own supply of oxygen, you’ll soon start grabbing at others and pulling them down in your desperation to get at their supply.

He’s not deceitful or unkind; he’s just an oxygen-grabber. You, on the other hand, are a giver and someone who believes in honesty, trust and kindness. Good. Those are excellent, healthy instincts that make for real happiness in a relationship. If I were you, I’d keep walking until you find them.

****

And someone else wrote elsewhere, If a vampire came up to you and asked you to let them drink your blood or else they'd die, would you feel guilty if you wouldn't allow them to drain you?

It was like that. At first I was, in a way, hypnotized, walking toward him in an extraordinarily beautiful and atmospheric dream. But by the end I began to distinctly feel as if I were suffering from acute blood loss and that my survival was in jeopardy.

And someone else, a psychiatrist I recently visited, in fact, reminded me that she who tries to save a drowning man is in great danger of being drowned herself, as the drowning man, in a panic, sometimes drags her down with him -- and not on purpose. It's simply a tragic accident.

This is really about all I can say about the end of my romance. In case you were at all curious. But I think that's all I want to share.

My dreams these days

...seem frequently to be about my recently ended romance. About a week ago I dreamed I was riding in a car with his long-suffering wife (she was driving), who assured me everything I found troubling about my former lover's behavior was par for the course, his normal m.o. She sweetly thanked me for trying to help him and told me my efforts were, unfortunately, totally useless.

Last night I dreamed my former lover was played by some other man, like an actor would play a role -- but still, I knew it was him. He greeted me joyfully and seemed delighted to be with me again. I said, confused, "Are we still a couple? I don't understand. You seem so happy now, when before you often seemed so miserable and mopey. You seem like a new man!" Then the actor playing him beamed at me. And I said to him, "Wait! You ARE another man, not my former lover," and woke myself up.

I had to take the day off yesterday.

I'm not exactly grieving. That would be too strong a way to characterize what I'm feeling and going through emotionally these days. I'm sad, yes. But I know the ending of this brief romance is necessary, that the relationship was never going to work out in the long run for a million reasons and that prolonging the inevitable ending wouldn't have been healthy. But my life seems profoundly changed now -- and it is. It's so strange not to count to seven on my fingers to figure out what time it is in Italy, and then to Skype him every day. It's sad not to make or receive wake-up calls. I no longer post to our private blog or check it for a post from my beloved. It's a profound shift to no longer ponder living with him someday in the future. Endings, I suppose, are never easy.

I had a sore throat and ear ache and so was able to take a sick day yesterday. I really had never completely unpacked since my return from Italy January 7 and needed to deal with that. Something in me just didn't want to see the clothes I lately wore when I was with him again or wash them or fold them or put them away. Something in me wanted to avoid storing the bags that have been so frequently used on these trips to see him since June that I normally just leave them out, ready to be packed up for the next trip. I needed to go through the house and remove all the photos of him or of us as a couple from the fridge and from the edges of mirrors and picture frames where I'd stuck them. I needed to take the big picture of us in Paris down from the ledge where it's sat, keeping me company at the kitchen sink as I washed dishes these seven months.

It's all done now, the unpacking and the packing away and the storing of things too poignant to contemplate on a daily basis. Something in me feels a sense of relief; it's always good to get organized. But it is all sad, this sense of finality, of something beautiful and wild and unexpected ending forever.

It's over. I'm no longer madly in love with anyone. I'm alone again. I'm deeply grateful for the love affair he and I shared, for the tenderness, for the intimacy. I will work hard to preserve the rich, sweet memories. But I will likely always worry about him and his well-being in the long run -- I fear his workaholic tendencies, his depression, his guilt, his dark moods will eventually destroy him. And I won't be there to save him.

As if I ever could have.