Bookmarker tag: topic/heartbreak (31 notes)

'And then all of a sudden it's like he suddenly wasn't there.'

'At this point she'd bring up how I seemed suddenly distant. I would explain in response that I had gotten, suddenly, over champagne, an idea for a truly central piece on the application of state variable techniques to the analysis of small-signal linear control systems. A piece that could have formed the crux of my whole senior year's thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months.'

'He went to his Dad's office at the University and I didn't see him for two days.'

'She claims that's when she began to feel differently about things. No doubt this new Statistics person comforted her while I spent two sleepless, Coke-and-pizza fueled days on a piece that ended up empty and unfeasible. I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy. She practically had her forearm to her forehead. It was distressed-maiden/wronged-woman scenario."

[...]

'She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realising that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet.'

[...] he didn't want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he'd been living in.

[...] Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly clasutrophobic; a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

We returned to New York determined to make our own Sicilian-style spaghetti with fried eggplant and tomatoes, a dish so delicious that we wanted to eat it twice a week. Which we did, for several months. And here was the thing: I didn't get sick of it slowly. I got sick of it suddenly, radically, and permanently while eating a plateful whose first bites I'd enjoyed as much as ever. I set down my fork and said we needed a break from fried eggplant and tomatoes. The dish was perfect and delicious and not to blame. I'd made it poison to me by eating too much of it. And so we took a monthlong break from it, but Anabel still loved it, and one very warm evening in June I came home and smelled her cooking it.

My stomach heaved.

"We overdid it," I said from the kitchen doorway. "I can't sand it anymore."

Symbolism was never lost on Anabel. "I'm not spaghetti with eggplant, Tom."

[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

[...] I have frequently tried to get my husband to listen to the National, but before this, it had never stuck. His only comment last summer, when I put all their albums on shuffle on Spotify and played it in the car was, “Is that guy going to apologize again?”

But last week, he texted me that he couldn’t stop listening to “Day I Die” on repeat, compared the band to the Cure, and then went face-down in the band’s back catalogue, texting me a running commentary of exclamation and discovery and new love that I remember from seven years and two albums ago. Then, I was just barely 26 years old when High Violet came out, and I had just gotten out of a very bad relationship. On the other side of that breakup, the world felt saturated with oxygen, like an abundant holiday table when you haven’t eaten all day, everything for grabbing. I was so profoundly, disgustingly grateful for the world, for each next day, for each new thing. I listened to “Bloodbuzz Ohio” for the first time, and I wanted to put myself inside its majestic, wallowing, self-mocking sound, the floor-dragging baritone of the lead singer whose voice sounded like a car driving with the brake on and the unreasonably optimistic backbeat pulling it forward all the same.

Something about the National has always felt like an escape, which is at face value an odd thing to say about a band whose subject is mainly sadness and anxiety. It’s both easy to and fun to make jokes about this band being the saddest band, the saddest dads, a band full of sad dads who really love being sad. All of these jokes are accurate: The National is a band whose form and content is sadness. But the reason this band’s music seemed to act as an opening of a pressure valve on my own sadness and anxiety and that of my friend is that it’s about sadness rather than grief. Their music is the difference between the two, the luxury of sadness versus the hard edges of grief.

Sadness spreads like a stain, sadness feels bodied and over-sensitized and ringing, like the first time you got high when you were a teenager, when you lay down on the carpet and nothing had ever been better or more important than the carpet. Sadness often acts as a temporary escape from grief. There are lots and lots of things worse in human reality than a broken heart or an unfaithful lover, and all of them are absent in the National’s music. That’s so much of what’s wonderful in it. Its sadness is a reckless, obliterative escape from the larger griefs of the world, focusing in on the overwhelming, petty, selfish concerns of the privileged heart. This music is enjoyable, squishy, and opulent in all its bad-hearted moping. Nothing in this music howls; everything oozes, everything has another drink and swoons into bed, sad and horny.

When the kids are sleeping, we sit and stare at each other again, this time from different chairs in the living room. I say that deep down, I think it makes sense to separate, but I don’t want to because it’s too horrible. I say I won’t let myself be unhappy for years upon years either. If something, or everything doesn’t change, I have to end it and we have to find a way to go on living. I make him promise that he won’t fall apart completely, that he will be there for the kids. He puts his head in his hands and nods. “I know, I know,” he says.

“Maybe we can go back to therapy?” I suggest, and he likes this idea. I say that I’m not sure it will help because I’ve already told him everything I know. I’ve already cried and begged for a marriage that works and for fleeting moments, when I’ve unloaded all I can, it does. But then he forgets to call again. And I’m slamming the oven door, putting his cold dinner back in, and taking the kids up to bed alone. I’m screaming into the phone when his voicemail picks up, but never leaving a message. He looks at his phone instead of looking at my face, a tiny act that is not meant to cut me. But it does. And then, without my even noticing, everything falls back into its misplaced place. It always reverts, and part of me knows it will keep reverting until it’s so ingrained that all I can remember about my life is how to be someone’s angry wife.

Marshall and I found a bench on the sidewalk, old and abandoned. We brought it home, where I sprayed it with Simple Green until it was almost white, then tied two blue-patterned cushions to it.Seven years of marriage and our home is coming together in bits and pieces like the bench, or the curtains I sewed even though I can’t really sew. At the same time, it is all falling apart, in monstrous, heavy clumps. An avalanche. A tidal wave. I don’t know how much is left to rebuild.

Before Marshall fled the house tonight, before I began pacing, before I drank the wine, we sat on the porch. He stared at me, waiting for signs of life. I sat hunched on the new bench, staring at the floorboards. It had been days since we’d spoken to one another, except for me saying, “I’m having trouble being in this house with you,” and “I can’t talk. You won’t like what I have to say.” So we stayed silent instead.

But tonight he sat on the rocking chair next to the bench. The breeze that blew between us was warm. And I thought about how it couldn’t have been a more perfect summer night if it weren’t for this rot between us. He stared at me until I had to look at him.

There is no right or easy or good way to say that maybe you don’t want to be married. So I spit out tiny fragments of sentences followed by quiet sobs and shallow breaths that rattled in my chest. I talked about being a better parent when I’m alone, about disappointment, about resentments that have been coming and going then jolting me so hard that I know, at least in that moment, I’ve given up.

It was like those moments in your most intimate relationships when you look over and are startled to remember: that other person is not you and is not yours to define. He or she suddenly seems to be some alien whom, inexplicably, you have decided to trust. Even as the two of you lie wrapped in each other's arms, you know that he or she can exist without you, and does just that now and again, in moments, and sometimes over longer stretches of time: sheds you. Yet you continue on, together. And that, too, I think, is an imperative of love.

A couple’s ambivalence can be held between two people: we both feel a little of each side, but one person is yes, and the other one no. When we first started dating, we said, We’ll date for a long time, and then we started on that long time right away. Back then, we thought maybe we would get married on our fifth anniversary. That was tonight, and neither of us brought marriage up. This is part of why I was silent, but I gave myself away by crying. When we left the restaurant, I still hadn’t clearly said why.

My friend Timothy has a genius way of teaching his students to write. He assigns them three hundred words about something or other and writes alongside them, in class. One student writes a particularly lame essay. It’s written very neatly, sentence after sentence with no cross-outs. Unrevised sentences are like molecules of ice; they form a suit of armor by being recited, one after another, holding experience in. Timothy shows the student his own copy, which has a million cross-outs and carrots and a doodly diagram in one corner. “Make it look like this,” he says, waving his hand around his own piece of paper, and the student automatically becomes a better writer. The stiff bonds holding the sentences in neat order are dissolved, and the student’s writing flows like water to fill the cave of the reader’s imagination.

I keep going back and revising this story, hoping that the tensions that hold us still in our relationship will dissolve. I walk past the restaurant a couple weeks later to see the orange color of the light again. If I can understand the things in myself that make me prefer silence to talking, I think, things will change of their own accord. This piece of writing is not meant to preserve a moment for posterity, but to take a memory of a dead moment and make the timbre of that experience speak through it, like a microphone.

Her objection is to Polytope's strategy for getting people to spend that time. Blue Gamma's strategy had been to make the digients lovable, while Polytope was starting with unlovable digients and using pharmaceuticals to make people love them. It seems clear to her that Blue Gamma's approach was the right one, not just more ethical but more effective.

Indeed, maybe it was too effective, considering the situation she's in now: she's faced with the biggest expense of her entire life, and it's for her digient. It's not what anyone at Blue Gamma expected, all those years ago, but perhaps they should have. The idea of love with no strings attached is as much a fantasy as what Binary Desire is selling. Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.

The phone was ringing. Now there was a huge mangled stain on the sidewalk, with still-moving parts, long, wispy antennae swiping around for signs of its own life. A second ring of the telephone. Mythical Chris Kelly. Third ring. I was rehearsing what I would say. An explosion echoed from down the block. An M-80 in a garbage can. The key sailed from a window, inside a tube sock, and landed near the garbage piling up because of the strike.

A voice came through the phone: “I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

It was true: I didn’t move here not to fall in love. That night, I watched from my roof as the neighborhood blew itself to smithereens, scattering bits of red paper everywhere, the humid air tinged with magnesium. It seemed a miracle that nothing caught fire that wasn’t meant to. Men and boys overturned crates of explosives of various sorts in the middle of Mulberry Street. They hid behind a metal dumpster as one lit a cigarette, gave it a short puffing inhale, and then tossed it onto the pile, which began to send showers and sprays and flashes in all directions. A show for the residents of Little Italy, who watched from high above. No one went down to the street, only the stewards of this event. My neighbors and I lined our rooftop, black tar gummy from the day’s heat. Pink and red fireworks burst upward, exploded overhead and then fell and melted into the dark, and how could it be that the telephone number for the only person I knew in New York City did not work?

I had asked Giddle if she knew an artist by that name and she’d said, “I think so. Chris. Yeah.”

We were on Lafayette, outside the Trust E Coffee Shop.

“I can’t believe it,” I said excitedly. “Where is he? Do you know what he’s up to?”

She tugged the foil apron from a new pack of North Pole cigarettes and tossed it on the sidewalk. I watched it skitter.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s around. He’s on the scene.”

The wind blew the discarded foil sideways.

“What scene?” I asked, and then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don’t already know, I can’t spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there might be reason to doubt everything she said.

Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.

Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

Flushed from the hot bath and sleepy, I looked out the window. Two kids leaned against a car, an Italian boy and a Puerto Rican girl who lived in my building, one of the girls who practiced dance routines in the breezeway. She was on roller skates, and as she and the boy talked, she rocked silkily from side to side on her skates. Sandro was gone. I didn’t really expect him to stand there all night, and yet, at twenty-two years old, part of me was buoyant with silly fantasies, capable of disappointment that he had actually gone home.

I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie’s studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.

“The woman toweling her hair. She… it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”

“It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”

I bit my lip.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

I don't remember the last time I saw the ashtray we made in Brighton Beach, but I think it was right before the breakup. Neither of us was crying, but the touches between us had become rote and glazed, we already knew. It was spring, and the exhaust fan blowing the cigarette ash out your living room window was half broken; it spit back sooty chunks. I was sitting on your lap. Ash all over your pink shirt. The yellowing cigarette stub in my hand. It was all turning my stomach. But I looked down at us on the ashtray, smiling and plump, the plaid of your scarf in its bright primary colors, my hair in two sensible braids, and the way my heart sweetened seemed true.

Whatever, reality can never be objective. [...]

"If I was flirting, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't realize I was."

"Okay."

Her "okay" was so flat, so distant, so blaming, that it actually did make me angry, and so I said nothing else. Instead I fought the urge to say something mean under my breath,not that I could have come up with anything, and stared through the open window until I believed I was asleep.

I was so intent on watching her eat that I barely touched my own food. After a while, I got up and turned on the radio and there was that song again, the one we’d heard coming home the night before, and we both listened to it all the way through without saying a word. When the d.j. came on with his gasping juvenile voice and lame jokes, she got up and went to the bathroom, passing right by the bedroom door without a thought for the cat. She was in the bathroom a long while, running water, flushing, showering, and I felt lost without her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, wanted to extend a whole list of invitations to her: she could move in with me, stay here indefinitely, bring her cats with her, no problem, and we could both look after the big cat together, see to its needs, tame it, and make it happy in its new home—no more cages, and meat, plenty of meat. I was scrubbing the frying pan when she emerged, her hair wrapped in one of the new towels. She was wearing makeup and she was dressed in her Daggett’s outfit. “Hey,” I said.

She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he’ll give me a good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.

In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely.  Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one understood me, and I understood nothing.

But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn’t made them up.

Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost.   When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.

You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them and give them a good life too. But my parents were no longer around.  You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.

Why won’t you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to write.

[...] She found herself wondering how they had got here. There had been, she remembered, once, an intimacy – one that had existed in the very space they now used as a forum of harm. She remembered how they used to text each other at parties, even when they were standing side by side, maintaining a closeness right under the gaze of the people they were speaking to; how, for a long time, they’d sustained a cautious flirtation over Twitter, each of them thrilling a little at what was both concealed and suggested in that tentative public affection. When, she wondered, had a channel of affinity become a vector of hostility? Text messages and tweets had become open-ended, all-night conversations in bed. Then the bed had become a place for sleeping, and the dinner table a place for talking about what happened online, until finally the internet was a place to work out what happened at the dinner table, in bed, between minds that now couldn’t reach each other. Now, here they were, yards apart in a public place, dealing each other deeply private, deeply personal wounds.

It was the longest abstention of his adult life, excepting the five years when he hadn’t drunk at all, five years that had included (it was true) the period when he’d courted and married Mimi. But the present abstention had come a year too late. A year ago, without warning—or rather, after a warning that had seemed no different from the thousands of other warnings Mimi had delivered—she had stopped loving him. It amazed Anthony how distinct that feeling had been, like someone leaving a room.

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

She returned to her husband.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.

What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?

She climbed back into her house beside her husband, and I retired to the zinc bars.

I’ll be looking at the moon,
but I’ll be seeing you.

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.

Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

That is the story! Who could live up to it? Not me, certainly. In the years between meeting and dating her, I had lost my heart a few more times, and I had learned the miraculous healing powers of irony, of laughing at your old selves so you could take the current one very seriously. Every several months, like a computer emptying a cache, I trashed my old selves. Ashley forced me to take seriously the sharpest and deepest experience I’d ever had of falling in love, an experience I had spent years ignoring or deprecating. (“Ah, to be emo again.”) It undid me. A man who is being undone is not always fun to be around. So many of our entanglements, in our twenties, are about the joy of being intimate, being intense, without having to be known; was I ready to be done with that most delightful form of self-harm? It’s a miracle that I didn’t break up with her in that first year—not because she was wrong but because she was so right that if I stayed with her, I would have to start to care what happened to me, and then to the embarrassing series of silly men that I lived in flight from having been.

[...] anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view. If he were to be a real scientist about this, would he be able to find empirical evidence that Rachel had a point in rejecting him? That Rachel was right to hate him this much? Yes, right then, for the first time, he could see it. He could make his way across the abyss, and just for a minute, he could see that he was the same vile, fat, needy piece of shit he always was.

[...] This was fair? That he would smile and take it up the ass during mediation so that they could present their children with a peaceful and amicable thing, and then the minute it was almost done, she would do the worst thing she could possibly do—a thing so bad that it wasn’t even close on a list of horrible things she had done prior to this? That was fair? If it were fair, and you weighed Toby’s sins against his punishments, you would find that he’d gotten some real kind of raw deal. What did he do so wrong but be devoted? What did he do so wrong but try? But love? But come home on time? But figure that his wife would be a partner to him the way he was to her? But maybe throw a few glasses and maybe say the wrong things?

God, he was so tired of trying to figure out how it had been wrong, what the micromaneuver that set Rachel free from him was. She had abandoned him. She’d been cruel to him. She had denied him love and respect and self-esteem. She had diminished him to become someone who nearly disintegrated into suspicion and then sorrow at the mere affectionate touch of someone. She’d been cruel to their children—their children! She’d left them! She knew what it was to be without parents and still she’d left them!

“I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say.

That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.

At some point, she accepted it. It was up to her to make the kind of living that would allow them to participate in the life they’d signed up for. He accepted it, too. He pretended to be apathetic to the money, but you should have seen how he liked the car. You should have seen how he liked the club—the pool on the rooftop, way above the city, both metaphorically and actually. So Toby adjusted his schedule to be home a little early to relieve Mona, the babysitter. He stood back and allowed her to try for this big thing she wanted to do. She did it, not out of bravery, but out of two parts no choice and three parts because to see Matt Klein again would have been to commit a failure she couldn’t have come back from.

So she did her work and Toby made the noises of someone who was stepping back, but he didn’t really do it. He came home on time, sure. He made dinner when Mona didn’t. But he didn’t adjust his expectations of her, or leave room for how tired she could get or how harried or busy. He loved taking those long walks. No matter how late they were, he wanted to walk. Across the park, across the city. She kept trying to explain to him that time functioned in units. For all his love of physics, he never quite grasped that one: If you use this time to walk to dinner that is thirty-five blocks away instead of letting me finish this email in a cab on the way there, I will be finishing the email at the table. The email isn’t optional. The email is the entire thing.

[...] Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was.

And still: “You’re always angry,” he’d say to her. And then finally she could admit that she was, particularly after those therapy sessions where she saw just how disgusted both Toby and the therapist were by her annoyance at even having to be there. As if you had to celebrate going to couples therapy! As if you had to rejoice over the time and money you were spending not to make things better, but to get them back to bearable. It always struck her as ironic that the revelation of her anger would come not from the therapy itself but from the fact of it. Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.

[...] I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to a technicality they don’t deserve.