I miss her. I’ve missed her for days, weeks. Maybe I’ve missed her for years if you look back at the reasons I left her last summer. But I have decided that for my sanity and hers we can’t be together right now and possibly ever… though I have to take that one day at a time. Sometimes it seems every moment I stop and think “Is this the moment I take her back?” but the answer always seems to be “No, you shouldn’t.”
I look closer at her, at the changes she is trying to undergo, and realize that it isn’t really about her. She is in her own place and she is either going to change or the lack of change will destroy her as she keeps falling back in the same patterns. She wants to repeat that dance with me though she seems content to do it with psychoex as well.
Instead, I have to move on and focus on myself and get my things together. There’s nothing she could say right now that miraculously change the things she has done. Only time will tell if anything will come of it and time right now isn’t being optimistic.
But there is a life ahead for me, that’s something the therapist is convinced of and I should not give up hope. It isn’t about hope in her but hope for myself. I have trouble with that because it seems a little selfish, but it is a place I must go. I love her and I love myself, and based on that things must stay off.
It is just so hard when I was sitting in a blackened movie theater with my friends and my thoughts suddenly drifted to her. But maybe that is more the shakes of the junkie addicted to her drama then the call of love pulling me back. There is no way to be sure.
It has been a good week full of “me” actions. I haven’t been at the computer in order to keep myself with people busy. At rest has so often meant thinking about her and so instead I stay in motion.
We’ve exchanged a few emails this week though I’ve kept running them by my therapist to be extra careful in safe with them: encouraging her to get help but trying not to offer her hope for us. For longest time in our relationship she mentioned she envied my ability to work through my ocd while she struggled with her depression which often reminded me of this:
The simple answer was get therapy, get the bad out of your life, get help. As I moved away from her in my life and tried to create space, she would always find ways to convince me not to leave. Whenever I’d express doubt about the relationship, she would change for a moment or instead grow angry at my lack of faith in her. When we broke up she suddenly transmogrified in to the sexy girl in love with life that I knew was a part of her. At first I couldn’t believe it but when she kept up that attitude for months (as well as beginning therapy for the first time) I wondered. We’d end up spending more time together leading to the usual way things go between ex-couples:
After all, I still loved her and was attracted to her. I’m not saying they were wise decisions but they happened and we both enjoyed it. Over time, my memories of the good times and the good memories we had begun re-creating outweighed those times she’d spend days crying and make me feel unable to leave her side for fear that she would shatter.
When we first officially got back together she did something very stupid that I should have caught on to as a danger sign: she was unable to get rid of the psycho-ex. When a few hour trip to permanently end things with him turned in a two day vanishing, I should have been wise. He was abusive and he manipulated her into staying, but I should have seen what was to come. Blind hope, blind faith, and blind love let me take her back after that but when she left me again during the Panic Weekend (back when I first began the blog) it didn’t come as a huge surprise. She had already dropped the sane and loving facade to reintroduce the cutting and depressive parts that at times were so bizarre that even when she directly did something, she couldn’t recognize the ways it hurt me or other people. Especially after she left me and came back, any conversation we’d have would go off the rails of reason if I questioned her or challenged her. These were not good signs but still I tried to believe.
She’s spent most of the last week trying to prove herself to me: sending emails filled with promises and vows, making and breaking a therapy appointment, even messaging my friends to see how I am. She mentioned how psycho-ex had abused her that day and how she felt suicidal. As I heard these, my heart wept for her but at the same time I recognized the same techniques psycho-ex used to keep her from gathering to will to leave. She learned fast and she learned well. The techniques I tried to teach her to free herself from him – no contact and getting him out of her life- she instead had tried to apply to me.
While it was hard and heartbreaking, we had a phone conversation on Friday where she finally owned up to the mistakes she made and apologized for inviting him to the house and not telling me. That said, I told her I could not trust her after vowing never to see him again yet two days later acting with such deceit and following it up with such judgment. Even though she is promising now to get help, even that has proven to be false hope time and again. I wished her the best but told her how much the lies had hurt me and that she has to do this for herself, not for me. I care about her and love her, but I can not be there for her while she heals or self-destructs. I let it end there, there wasn’t much more to say though clearly articulating the ways she had hurt me was a selfish moment I wish I could take back.
I’ve spent the weekend away from her, secure that whatever the situation of the future, I have to keep my distance for now. She sits there believing we should be together but no matter the situation, she did not have to invite him into her home and she did not have to judge him. Her pleas seem as finely timed as those of the girl in this comic, though I have every intention of continuing my life so don’t be alarmed:
When I woke up today I found an email she had sent a psychiatrist requesting an appointment at the advice of her therapist. I’m glad for her, I really believe medication can help her with her anxiety and her depression. But why would she send this to me if getting better was about her? Instead, I can’t help but wonder if she is still in the phase of trying to win me back by proving she can heal her wounded mind. Anything she does to call me back would be temporary though, this has already been shown by how quickly that happy fun-loving girl hid under a rock in our last relationship as she invited psycho-ex into her life. Is there any way she could prove herself? I don’t think so. Either way, it won’t be today and it won’t be tomorrow. Without trust, there can’t be a two way loving relationship.
L sent me a message today. I’m too tired to really respond or write about yet but if it isn’t a lie then she handled it in the worst way:
“ On Thursday when I got home and checked the mail, his license plates had arrived. They were the last things I had that were his. I called him and told him they were here, he came by to pick them up, and you decided at that very moment that was the perfect time to do some snooping. Congratulations- I’m sure you must feel very satisfied with yourself (I’m being sarcastic). Yes, I had a migraine, and yes I picked the easy way out instead of driving all the way to a police station to give them back to him. After the way I vowed to resolve things when we spoke earlier in the week, I can’t believe you would throw things away that fast without even asking. I wanted to be with you, I have and always will love you. I was so good to you for so long, I tried so hard, I am so broken and so upset by everything happening in my life right now, but you don’t care. I still believe that we should be together, but we are so disfunctional together that maybe that will never be possible. I’m sure you don’t care.”
The thing is, I did ask and she didn’t answer. She put “I think you should stay away from me” in the conversation long before any explanation. She’s waited four days or this email. She did promise never to see him again. The exchange should have taken a few minutes yet somehow she was out of touch for hours. I know she is weak but she had no strength at all to control the situation or to keep her promise to me. As for being so good to me, it feels like in the past few weeks she has paid no attention at all to my boundaries or my feelings beyond short momentary bursts that she quickly rescinds and counteracts. I do care and I did react in the moment, making this all the harder to believe in.
Maybe she is hurting and maybe she is weak. If so I feel sorry for her. But she has been lying and deceitful and hurtful for weeks. She keeps him in her life. There is always one more “last conversation with psychoex.” I have been through four times with her seeing him in person and being absolutely done with him. When will it stop?
I want the answer to be something other than “When I remove her from my life.” That future doesn’t seem bright anymore.
Months ago, during one of the brief good times, L put a little blue penguin sticker on my DVD player remote.
Today as I watched a movie I kept staring at it I kept thinking of those good times that I really believed we could have again. Remembering those good times is painful and reminds me of how she’s thrown that away so in peeling off the sticker and cleaning the glue off the remote, it almost feels like peeling the band-aid off a still bleeding wound. After I finish journaling the last conversation I’ve had with her, I want to go through my memories and take ownership of the good times without feeling the need to go back to her and her mind games. I want to remove the taint from my life, which is perhaps best illustrated by this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comic:
I already had written about how she has twisted our memories in her head, confusing me with her psychoex, but I hadn’t even begun to realize the potency of the taint that was spreading in her memories of me. On Monday, I had asked if she had worn a shirt that we had bought together on a date with psychoex. It was a needy question and I was in a needy place. Later she told me that she heard, “You whore. Did you where that shirt for him? What a b*tch!” The disconnect was frightening. This explains her strange attitude towards me, but I worry for her that this is how she interprets things. In the past, her depression had done with things people say to her but not to this detail or extent. Where she used to feel like she was being judged, she now is inserting words in her memory that were never there. This makes me wonder what sort of road she might be heading down.
Regardless, since she let that rule her life I wonder if there was anything I could do? But the true questions, the ones that the Getting Past Your Past post I referenced yesterday was forcing me to ask, were leading me away from worrying for her. Where is my dignity? Why do I want this person? The answer to the second was simple, I love her. The answer to first was murkier.
A few hours after I saw psychoex’s car in her driveway I was at my friend’s house talking about what just happened when she called. “I saw you in front of my house,” she said, “I think you should stay away from me.” Her voice was imperious and judgmental. The therapist had told me that, in being caught in a lie, she would try to twist the blame on me so it would be better to end things without telling her that I knew she had been going behind my back. That was no longer an option it seemed.
“Funny,” I replied. “I was thinking the same thing.” If it had been an emergency, if he had broken into the house, even then I could have believed in her. But her voice made her feelings clear and always has, as much as she tries to deny them. I hung up.
She called back a little later. My friend said don’t pick up though I didn’t yet have the willpower. “Why did you take a photograph of his car?” she asked.
“To remind myself that you’re a liar.”
She denied she was a liar, just like she felt that sleeping with psychoex while thinking about getting back together with me was a sort of cheating, which felt a little like this:
That was when I lost my temper, though both my friends and my therapist wonder why I didn’t lose it earlier. Just hours earlier I had sent her a link from the Art of Intimacy about doing fun things together instead of looking for other people and she had told me how she liked the idea and wanted to keep it up. That disconnect, the space between her promises, her words of love, and her behavior, was too great now to bear. “You’re a liar,” I said. “You told me you had a migraine and couldn’t see me tonight because you were going straight to bed. You told me that you were going to call me after work and you didn’t pick up the phone. You told me you would never see him again and if he came to your house you could call the police. Instead he is in your apartment with you right now. You are a liar.”
She interrupted to say something similar to “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
“No you don’t. But you’ve lied to me repeatedly for the past months and I don’t need to take it any more. You insult me for getting therapy. You abuse my trust then chose to give your time to him. You use me then ignore me. I hope you get heIp and someday have a happy life, but as it is you can not be a part of mine.” I gave her a few seconds to respond, then I hung up on her. My friends in the room actually applauded.
Our relationship was dead. Her lies had mortally wounded it, but I had put it out of its misery. There is no blame, the failure is both of ours. My only victory is that, at the end, I wasn’t a monster and for the past month I both respected her and learned to respect myself.
Honestly though, the guy in the comic is probably playing stupid on purpose instead of confronting the true failings in his relationship. He’s focusing on the game, the unimportant question, when he should be realizing that the relationship is doomed. When L started playing these games with me, I focused on the game rather then the true statement she was making: that she was unable to be with me at this time or possibly ever.
It took a rather dramatic series of lies for me to come to this realization. We had an ugly argument on Tuesday, leading to her having breached every boundary that we had discussed when we had first gotten back together. These included her hanging up on me, cussing at me, and shutting me out for long periods of time. Most disturbing was that on Monday night she had called and talked to the psychoex. It seems he had a nervous breakdown because he had left a stuffed animal of his at a hotel after she kicked him out. He later found it the next day. The fact that she was calling and comforting him after calling the police on him bothered me and did little to lead me to trust her more.
On Thursday, I asked her to dinner and L couldn’t since she was having a migraine AND her period so she wanted to go home and go to bed. This weekend she wouldn’t be able to see me because she was going to spend it with her father and stepmother, who she recently has been trying to avoid since they cause her so much stress. We were going to talk on the phone before she slept and, when I couldn’t reach her for a few hours, I grew very suspicious.
While not the brightest moment of my life, I gave in to those suspicions and just drove by her apartment to find psychoex’s black camaro parked outside and empty. The same psychoex that abused her, that she called the police on, that she promised she would never see again. The one we had promised not to let into her life no matter what he pulled or breakdowns he faked. I suspect she let him in to the house after something like this occurred:
I put two and two together and fought back the urge to confront them, instead calling my friend K and my therapist who talked me down and had me go over to my friend’s house. I couldn’t fathom the doublespeak, the lies, or the fact that hours ago we had talked about how to reaffirm our relationship doing fun things. But her statement that she wanted some time away for the weekend and the suspicious circumstances echoed the Panic Weekend and her other vanishings too much for me. Before I left to see my friend, I took a photograph of the car to remind myself never to trust her again.
No longer could I concern myself with the question of “how could she treat me like this?” The real question, the question everyone Susan at GPYP to NKartist to pretty much everyone else online and in real life I have conversed about the situation, the question I should have asked from the beginning but didn’t want the answer to was now forced into my brain. “Why am I still trying?”
Well at least one situation is resolved. The police made L come over to confront her psychoex face to face in front of them. I guess this gives them clear grounds to arrest him the next time he sits in his car outside of her house for hours or harasses. They stood with her and the whole interaction took less than 15 minutes.
I’m really proud of her for calling the police and facing him. I just really hate having this drama and my life. Part of me feels like she asked for it by letting him stay with her but part of me also realizes that she is the victim of someone who found her weak points and knew how to put pressure on them. Sometimes I wonder if that is any different from when I left her and she kept trying to win me back or when she left me and I did the same. Perhaps the key difference is that I respected her boundaries and primarily kept it to replying to her emails instead of sending my own. I don’t know.
She still slept at my place last night, albeit on the couch. We had a mostly pleasant evening with special guest stars including the new Wendy’s Strawberry Frosty Shake and a dvd of There Will Be Blood. She also took back the stuffed animal I had won for her in Japan. I didn’t want it back in the first place and regardless of how we end up, it would make me happy for her to have it.
It was still a nervous night for both of us in interacting with each other. Yesterday before coming over she stated she “didn’t want to be running from one ex to another” which I found very hurtful though it is one way to look at her coming back to me, especially considering that she didn’t take me back till he had moved in with her and been there a few days. She still maintains it was all platonic even though he didn’t want it to be that way. I’m having trouble believing that.
At one point we were cuddling and I became very emotional about the idea of her leaving me again. I still feel like she is going to walk out on me at any moment for any reason, something tiny I do that leaps out in her brain and latches on to her thinking till suddenly I’m a horrible person in her mind, something unsafe. Unlike before though, she was willing to comfort me and confirm this wasn’t the case.
She said she had a major revelation yesterday- that when I’m telling her about things (at the moment I was explaining how you can set up email forwarding on gmail) I’m not trying to tell her she’s stupid or talking down to her, I’m just showing her how to do something. She thought it was a major breakthrough. I do too, if it sticks.
Ultimately I don’t know how the relationship will go but regardless someone I care about has found the strength to stand up to a stalker. That has to be a good thing. Since I helped her find that strength, I guess I should consider it a good day to be me. Since I took things slowly yesterday with her, I think I can still respect myself and the idea of taking things at a comfortable pace instead running at the breakneck speed of fear. At least in the moment, everything turned out alright. Can I ask for more?
L recently noted that the weekend always brings psychoex excitement and the business last week felt like getting a second weekend when it finished up exploding on a Friday instead of a Sunday. Tonight L is going to be crashing at my place because psychoex has called and stated that he is coming to visit under the pretense of picking up his contact lens prescription at a local mall. He’ll be stopping by her place whether she likes it or not.
I offered my place as a refuge since I personally feel no one should be subjected to stalking and should have a place to feel safe. I know he is insane and I know that regardless of how she views the situation he is a danger to her.
I’m sitting here listening to her asking the police to drive by her place to make sure he isn’t there. I want to make sure she says certain things to get the police on edge so they don’t try to convince her to see him or brush her off. I just hope the rest of this night is boring.
In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey pays to have a painful relationship scrubbed from his memory but in the middle of the process he realizes the value of those memories and fights inside of his mind to retain any vestige of his time with Kate Winslet. After talking to L extensively this weekend, it feels to me like someone has gone through and thrown mud on every memory we have together. She claims it is me. We spent the day Saturday and a few hours Sunday trying to create sunny memories with some small degree of success.
After L decided that she wanted to be back together and the psychoex was out of the picture, I found myself in the oddest position. Without a doubt I was willing to help her get rid of the psychoex- he is dangerous and she is someone I care about. But now I am faced with picking up the pieces after this debacle and deciding what to do next.
We went to the a park by the river and ate sandwiches while watching oversized squirrels chase each other around the trees. We talked, laughed, smiled, and touched while periodically her or my hurt would spurt up like old faithful. We’re working through each other’s issues but there is a key question I haven’t resolved in my heart- will she respect me over time?
I’ve been reading the Getting Past Your Past posts which all suggests that she will leave me again and that she will have difficulty. The therapist has counseled me to be prepared to enforce my boundaries and insist on both her getting therapy for her issues and respecting me. After all the wrinkles and flip-flopping of the past month, our relationship resembles less a love affair and more a political campaign. It isn’t the way I want to live and I wonder if we can change.
Two key questions really come up:
Can I trust her after all of changes and mistrust?
Can we build something happy with the two of us together?
But the real question may actually be do I want to put in the effort. I started this blog a month ago to detail the effort of putting together our relationship through couples therapy and the couples therapist has pointed out that, after all this time, we are starting out at square zero. When we are together and positive I feel wonderful and our wounds seem to be healing, but should that be something to go through?
As much as I long to hold on to the happy memories and focus on the positive, after the choices she made this month I have to protect myself. As one friend said, “It isn’t your love that is in question, it’s the effect it has on your well being.” So I want to follow the day and reach for happiness, yes. But do I do that with her?
Yesterday she told me that, in her mind because of my actions in the fall, I am so much worse than the man I am referring to as psychoex- a controlling, narcissistic fellow with a nasty verbally abusive streak. For whatever reason, perhaps the overlap in time of her seeing both him and I, she has tangled us together in her mind. Until she chooses to sort me from him and realize my positive traits, until she chooses to reach for the bright side and try to work through her happiness I can’t see this going anywhere.
“Reach for the bright side.”
“Follow the day and reach for the sun.”
Light & Day by the Polyphonic Spree
(theme form Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
As of five am this morning, L had managed to eject her abusive controlling ex from her apartment. The decision now is whether I am willing to step past all that has happened in the past month and stand by her side. I have made a choice, but that does not lead to a decision.
After two days of fuzzy deadlines, last night found L finally forced him out of the apartment. On Wednesday she gave him the ultimatum that she had told me was going to be given on Tuesday: “out by tomorrow.” When he made no move to begin packing she kicked him out and promised I could come see that he was gone around 11 pm, except he “lost his debit card” so she gave him gas money and helped him find a hotel.
We were going to reconnect at around midnight to talk. Instead, I once more entered the black box of silence that she seems to like to live in as she sent me a one word text telling me that she was, “Finishing.” An hour later another text told me they were “talking.” At three in the morning she finally called and told me that he had played the “I’ll kill myself if you leave me” card, which in my life is so over drawn that I think I’d be cold and callous to anyone who told me that. I may have been callous in this as I sent her a text saying, “I don’t care what he is saying, it is time to make a choice between him or me.” When she came back we spent the next few hours talking though at the moment nothing is resolved, I’m unsure how to react to this situation.
As always, there are more complications. Two nights ago I decided that I would put on my detective/stalker/frustrated-by-being-lied-to hat and hung out with her roommate, who she is currently at odds with. While at the moment I chose not quite to believe anything but the actions I witness, at one point I was when the apartment staring at the empty couch where L’s ex was supposed to be sleeping. She swears that he never slept with her and spent each night on the couch. Her explanation was that he may have been in the bathroom, sleeping on the floor, or staring at her sleep. She swears she is telling the truth though that empty couch was such a powerful visual that I sank to the floor and wept for a moment before leaving. I chose not to confront her in the moment. I know being there was wrong but I am so sick of living in darkness.
L has made so many choices that lead her to spend time in the shadows of deception, not always lying but often laced with half-truths or important things gone unsaid. The first thing that should have clued me in was a month ago when I found out she had a second cell phone that she had never lost on those weekends when she vanished, she just didn’t tell me because it was primarily for communicating with a boyfriend she had while we were broken up. The past few months are rife with fuzzy deadlines, mixed messages, and tangled stories. I love her but I refuse to be a part of this web of obsfucation that seems to be such a part of her life.
I love her but I have made a choice, though it does not lead to a decision. I’m meeting with the therapist in about thirty minutes to discuss how to implement it. My choice is to stand up and live in the light, to no longer welcome these shadows of confusion in my life. The decision to make is whether that is a journey she is willing and able to come along on. The decision is also whether I can trust her to stand up for her self, her love, and her life and complete it.
I don’t usually like to quote someone else for my title, but after meeting with L yesterday I can think of no better words to describe how I see her. Yesterday, after vacillating for a month, she decided that she wanted to be with me for real. Yet, as usual when we try to get back together, there is a wrinkle.
In agreeing to talk to her, even though I really made the decision to let her go on Sunday, I sat down and carefully looked at my boundaries. I thought out my standards and I had a long cross country discussion with the therapist (she’s currently in California on vacation- I think she needs to take another one after helping me). I reread some posts from Getting Past Your Past. I decided to focus on this list from Susan’s article on five platitudes which I hope she won’t mind if I repeat here:
You get what you put up with.
Hungry people make poor shoppers. In this case meaning if you’re hungry for love you may chose poorly.
The “one” will never stop loving you. I had trouble with this one since I know that I’ve left her, but maybe that meant something too.
In order to find the right person, you need to be the right person. One thing I’ve been focusing on is becoming a better person than I am.
Love is an action. It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do.
So, in looking at that list, I decided to focus on the final one. I know that since L and I first decided to get back together I have been doing that action but had she? At times, yes. Though in a way she has left me three times in the past month. I went into the the discussion open minded but cautious. I couldn’t give her a leap of faith but maybe there was room to let this grow.
Then came that wrinkle I foreshadowed. Her ex, the one she had seen for a few months in between us breaking up and getting back together, had reappeared last Saturday. With no job, no place to stay, and a pocketful of sweet words, he has been crashing on her couch for three days. She denies that he is dangerous, but everything she ever told me about him paints the picture of an abusive and ugly situation. He seems to be one of those people that, if she were trying to build boundaries and find herself as a person, would keep crashing those boundaries just so he can control the situation.
I want to support her in this challenging time but even she sees that it is bizarre. I’m not sure I can handle being with someone who would welcome that sort of stress back into her life without the ability to say no. She says that he is going to be gone by today then we’ll talk. She needs to tell him face to face and hope he’ll leave- something I think is incredibly dangerous. I had hoped she would involve the police (since he basically followed her to find out where she lived) or at least have a friend around when she did it, but she has chosen her path and there is nothing I can do to alter it. I can only decide if I can be around to help pick up the pieces after this piece of self-inflicted misery. I hope she finds the strength to start building her boundaries. All her life she has let people, even me, walk on her in ways that are inappropriate. I tried to help her build them but in the end, those boundaries are something you can only build for yourself.
On to the song: Girl by Tori Amos
“She’s been everybody else’s girl. Maybe one day she’ll be her own.”
Everything Will Be Alright – A Journey To The Center Of The Self 