|
|
|
|
Tuesday, 2 August 2005
|
|
Today I start looking for a job. I was awakened by the dog's wet nose on my hand at 7am and showered and re-heated some two-day old coffee in the microwave and sat back down at my desk to ponder a bit. I don’t want this right now.
Everything I do here puts me one step further away from my life up north. Not my life with Matt. That was over at the end of 2003 when I left Minnesota the first time. My return in July of 2004 was a coda to that opus, but a necessary one. I got to meet the in-laws and get him back into the city where he wanted to be, and I felt I owed him that. I got to give him the chance to find my replacement and get moving forward into his new life, and I likely owed him that as well. That’s the price I paid for marrying someone that young and, well, just for being me in a relationship. The part that went too far was me bringing myself back to Texas and throwing away my second chance as well. My new start didn’t take place.
I had planned to move back on 1 July and find a job up north and start over. I cancelled those plans at the last minute and stayed here. I couldn’t see having my father stake me on a fresh start with his limited resources. However, we’ve spent nearly double what it would’ve taken just putting me into a set of wheels that I probably can’t afford to drive and cementing my feet in place here on the farm. Dad has been a champ. I’ve moped and yelled and lived off his largesse for six months now. I’ve sweated my ass off outside doing things that Dad wouldn’t have done anyway and thinking I was performing great works. I’m not taking care of my father; he’s taking care of me. It costs about a thousand dollars a month just to keep me living in abject penury here, not including the copious groceries I eat.
I’m so sad and dysfunctional lately.
This is one of the few things I’ve written besides letters in the entire time I’ve lived here this year. I’ve read one book since I arrived, and that was in February. I might as well give my books away and forget about my former life. Everything about me is in pieces on the streets of Minneapolis and in the dirt of this property on the Brazos River. My only purpose is to be my father’s yardman and chauffeur and companion, and he pays handsomely for that. I’ll be forty-two in a month. I have $0.27 in the bank and $14,000 of IRS debt from supporting myself and Matt on my gross income for the last four years. The weight of my circumstances is equivalent to what I felt ten years ago living in my grandmother’s old house when I rarely went outside for an entire three month period, only this time I can’t seem to read in order to abate that noise in my head.
Being in love changed me. Moving away changed me as well. My time in Minneapolis was the happiest period in my life. I can’t get that back, and I can’t seem to return to it. Why did I cancel the move? I felt a bit odd going back into the same building we’d lived in together and where Matt still lives today. He certainly didn’t want that.
I had no job waiting on me this time, and I couldn’t see asking Dad to stake me on the move just to heal my wounded pride. I couldn’t see abandoning yet another animal when it became inconvenient to my circumstances. I have not been responsible towards an animal since the night my first dog Angus died in 1979. Sarah may be officially Dad’s dog, but she is my only companion aside from him; and she is closely bonded with me and dependent upon me for her well-being. Dad couldn’t keep her by himself. He has enough trouble walking unencumbered. She won’t mind him well enough to make that option viable. He would more than likely have to adopt her out. I also care a great deal for her on top of all that and would miss her too much.
Matt hasn’t missed a beat since the split. He’s dated and tricked with more guys in the last six months than I have in the last ten years. I don’t blame him, I suppose. I resent him, certainly. He has online romances in half a dozen states with guys who all think he’s the one. I’m sure he tells them he’s a non-smoker and doesn’t do drugs and has a good head on his shoulders. I suppose the last part is true. He is surely calculating, whether he does that consciously or not. He spent his days at home while I worked those last six months doing the same thing. He sat online on the chat channels looking for someone to keep him company so he could move on, and it worked. He met Dave online sometime before we broke up and met him in person a week prior. He was in his bed the day after I left. He works at a gay bar in Minneapolis now, and he has quite an entourage of men buying him drinks and keeping him company. Bright lights, big city, took my baby from me. I helped a great deal. I wasn’t a good catch. But I was devoted and largely faithful and worshipped the ground he walked on the entire time we were together. But like it says in the book, “our inability to form a true partnership with another human being is the source of most of our troubles…” That has held true for me in spades.
I will remain here for now. I will find a job and start paying my own way. That, at least, will give me some measure of self-esteem. If you want self-esteem, do esteemable things. The image of my former life fades a bit more every day, and I am left tracing the outlines and orbiting this black hole I have created with the mass of my imploded happiness, scabbed and crusted and impenetrably hard to the touch.
Love was salvation for me in some way. I know that sounds trite, but it was true. Moving away from my family and Texas was the most liberating thing I’d ever done. But I never really left home. I had a few years when I could pretend that I had a life of my own and a future of my own creation. I have to let go of that fantasy. I have to let go of Matt. I have to accept my current circumstance and let go of Minnesota.
I have to find a way to read and write again. I have to find some boundaries here so that I feel I have a life of my own independent of my father. I have to support myself and save some money in order to feel even a tiny bit of autonomy. The love of my life has become just another one of my exes, only one of longer duration than the rest. I enjoyed my own company when we met and for some time afterward. I think I still do, but I can’t seem to gather enough of myself together at any one time to have that company available to me. I still have things I haven’t unpacked from February. I have returned into the haunted house at the end of the movie, and I am trapped there. That has nothing to do with my father or the farm. It has everything to do with that place in my head that I cannot escape. Drinking is not the answer. I may be done with that. It’s frightening and disgusting me again, and it will lead me into prison or death soon. It wasn’t a real factor in my life for most of the time I was with Matt. I had the relationship as my primary drug of choice. Whatever I put in the place of a relationship with my idea of God is eventually removed from me. But where does my solution lie?
I will do the next right thing, regardless of what my emotions tell me. I will do what is wise rather than what I want. I will take the next indicated step and trust my idea of God to carry me into something better than I can imagine at the moment. That sounds so impossible to me right now. It will truly be a miracle if I can find some happiness out of the present set of circumstances. The pallet seems so devoid of the colors I find appealing.
I can probably pass a piss test; I’m sure I can in a week or so. I fainted the other day in Dallas and hit my head on a wooden deck and ended up with bruises on the bridge of my nose where my sunglasses were. I wasn’t drunk, so I figure it was the heat or my blood sugar or who knows what. I feel like I’m falling apart, but I’ll live. Perhaps I can forestall any interviews until those bruises abate and my chemistry is completely clean. Perhaps I can muster the necessary good humor and charm to wing it with someone searching for a crack in my façade. But how on earth can I do that with myself?
Returning to Texas was a necessary thing and good.
I am the principle author of all of my difficulties. They stem from my resentments, fears and attachments to any fixed pattern of circumstance upon which I attempt to predicate my happiness. Any effort I make to create a new set of circumstances upon which to base a new happiness is misguided in that regard, for I am also the author of my own joy. If I cannot find that here and now, then it will remain elusive no matter what patterns I create in the future. I am my own worst enemy in that way.
Lord, who will deliver me from this body of death?
|
|
|
|
|
