March 30, 2011

"What He Wants"

Looking back it’s obvious. He wasn’t that ‘into’ me from the beginning, but I chose to quash the thing in me that knew. I was trying to teach myself something about restraint—about not sacrificing myself for the sake of a relationship. I hated that my brother ‘knew,’ telling my mom my guy didn’t want the same things I did after downing a few beers with him one Friday night. When she told me, agreeing with the assessment after a two-minute introduction, I felt challenged, like I wanted to prove them both wrong.

But the thing is, I never lost myself in my marriage—if anything, I asserted myself more than I ever had before. My ex supported that discovery, choosing to sit it out until I’d had enough of working for two, and I ultimately opted for a solo career. It occurs to me that I am stronger than I give myself credit for—that losing myself in love is something other women do that I’ve appropriated because I haven’t ever actually been in love. How would I know what it’s like? Well maybe that’s not entirely true, but it’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night. I pay for everything I get, tending to over-give then resent.

The emotional angst I’m feeling has more to do with my ego—the fact I knew, too—that I didn’t want to be with an emotional cripple, that his wounds were much to deep for me to help heal, that the distance between us was not code for ‘I’m waiting to see how I feel about you.’ Instead it meant, ‘Don’t get too close. Ever.’ He merely said it before I did.

I keep thinking of why I don’t want to be in his life but should, knowing for certain that spending time with him will only reinforce this feeling of not being fill-in-the-blank enough. Because I don’t know why he stopped wanting to see me romantically. All I know is I have to take him at his word. He said he felt like a jerk stringing me along; that he wanted to stop feeling like the bad guy ever since the ‘status quo’ conversation.

So now he has.

And the thing I keep waiting for is to stop caring about what he wants, what he expects, and which promises I’m breaking by not wanting to stay in his life. I remember asking him to be honest—to tell me when he’s figured out I’m not the girl for him, assuring him I would do the same. I said it would be okay, that we could be friends.

But I don’t want to anymore. Not just because of my ego, but because I’ve just spent six months in this horrible limbo, piecing together every scrap of evidence I could find to figure out if I existed in his world when my feet weren’t in his lap. I didn’t, obviously. He was just a ‘nice guy,’ buying me books and taking me out to dinners, fucking my brains out as a public service to the undersexed.

I know myself. Every time I’d see him, I’d try to get him to want me, beg desperately for him to give me what he can’t, and hand myself over to him to prove I’m not as worthless as I feel. It would get worse: I’d finish writing his life story and think that meant something to him, hope he’d change his mind about me, fall in love with me, so I could tell him to fuck off.

Because it seems to me that he wants to eat his cake, which is completely normal—who wouldn’t want to have their cake and eat it, too? Why even have cake if you’re not going to eat it? It’s the whole fucking point. Optimally, he could search for love and have me as a friend—the writer friend who will articulate everything he can’t say because he can’t even tell the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re,’ or use three dots instead of two in his ellipses—without having to actually give anything back except the unspoken knowledge that I wanted him more, dangling it there until I’ve tortured myself enough to say “Enough!”

All of my energy whirlwinds around everyone else all the time and I’m tired of it. My habit is always to look outside for validation, to ignore what I love about myself. Frustrated, choking, I make a prayer out of my anger: Please, dear god, help me to redirect my energy into my own heart, my own voice, my own thoughts. Help me to let go of this addiction to others, to thinking about him. I just want to be okay being alone, and if that calm presence only comes a little while each day, help me to nurture it and make it grow. Help me to know peace and patience with myself along the way.