And then the fight happened.
Kim, whom I had been joyfully and frivolously calling hashtag-girlfriend, had had a very rough morning and day the previous day. While she was hunched over her laptop, visibly tense and upset, I lay next to her in a haze of opiates and sleepiness, worry and far-off pain. I tried to think of what to do to help.
A week or two prior to that, we'd come home... home, as I still automatically call it, together. From a couples counselor. And true to form, coming out of the session felt great, for me. I had felt heard and validated in a way that had become increasingly absent from our toughest talks. I have this sharply directly correlative internal relationship between how small I feel, and how unsafe I feel speaking my mind, when I'm in a close interpersonal relationship. Such as having a boyfriend or girlfriend. Or a spouse. Having a counselor in the room to echo my sentiments with more assurance, in probably clearer language, has always been a help to me with a partner.
But Kim had felt attacked and demonized, and I didn't understand that until hours later. Until long after she'd curled up on the couch, and told me to comfort her or leave her alone, but not to ask her any questions, in response to my asking if she'd like me to run her a bath and make her a cup of tea. Without any real idea what else to do, I put on water for tea, and went to change. She told me later (again) that 99% of the time, when she's stressed or upset, she just wants a hug. A real hug, to be held. But that night, that wasn't in my array yet. It wasn't an option to check for, simple as it seems. I have a whole host of other issues around touch-as-affection, but that's another post.
So I learned that night: hugs are the 99% solution. Priority option. When she is distressed and I want to help alleviate that, hug her if I can. Touch her in some affectionate, platonic, connected and present way. And when that morning arrived with its bad news via the internet, I found that sitting up seemed like perhaps too great a challenge, in my drugged and weakened state, but she was within arm's reach. So I reached out and gently lay my hand on her lower back. I'm here. I love you. I hoped to say.
She shifted away from me.
I had no idea what to do at that point. Thinking that if a hug or some kind of physical expression of presence and love didn't work, if the 99%-of-the-time solution didn't work, I was pretty sure tea wouldn't, and I was positive that drawing her a bath would be an actual bad idea. Not just not helpful, but actually bad.
I thought again on what to do to help her. She was still hunched over the computer, muttering to herself and tabbing back and forth now and again. I thought, maybe I should just ask her.
"Baby, what's wrong?" I said. My voice was thin and weak, a voice to match my body, thinner and weaker still for the state I was in.
"Don't talk to me," she answered sharply.
I get very anxious when I believe that my romantic partner is in any way distressed by me, or by something I've done. At this point, I'd completely lost sight of the fact that whatever I was doing was a trivial annoyance, compared to whatever news she'd woken up to. I flew into my high tower of great anxiety, surrounding myself with the constant grinding and creaking of its accusing gears.
She set the computer aside, eventually, and talked to me about the problem. I didn't know how to react, or what to do or say. Every choice I'd made so far that morning had been wrong. I froze, and said nothing. She became upset that I was ignoring her talking to me about what had upset her. Her becoming upset with me for doing that compounded with my distress over her being upset with me for having touched her, or asked what was wrong, and I came apart.
She left for the day, for work, and I mostly laid there, crying or sleeping by turns. I was still recovering from my surgery, I still had heavy-duty pain medication, and I was a nervous wreck about how upset my girlfriend was with me. When she returned home, the tension from that morning came with her. It was like re-inflating a giant carnival bouncy house. Before, it had been in the room, still, but flattened out and nearly ignorable. When she came back, it filled the space between us. And our bitter doors.
She talked about her PMS at some point, reminding me that she had learned how it often alternates with each ovary in terms of specific symptoms. That she has one relatively normal ovary, and one crazy-bad-angry ovary, and that it was looking like this was a crazy-bad-angry ovary month. And that helped a great deal, but I was still physically locked into a high-anxiety state. She asked to be mostly left alone that night, and I complied.
I had felt very far away from her, so, when we finally laid down for the night, though I was curled up facing away from her, I reached back to touch her again, just for the bare, simple contact. She shied away again, told me not to touch her. She explained later how, when it's bad-ovary time, she's hypersensitive to everything, and that touch, along with most other sensory stimulus, is painful. But at the time, I lacked the benefit of that perspective. Even though she'd likely told it to me before. What I felt most was cold and alone, and like that was my fault. The tension remained in the room, shoving us apart, pushing me down.
She left again for work the next day, returned home, and felt less tense to me, in the air, but still with a sort of spiky edge to her speech and movements. She at one point asked me if I could find her a good picture of a girl not wearing a top, but in overalls, and I said that that sort of outfit seemed like a bad idea, and that if a girl was dressed that way, it was probably for porn of some kind. She seemed displeased with that answer, so I Googled it anyway, and showed her what I thought she was hoping to find. She made an exasperated sound and said she would just do it herself, and I felt again like I'd completely failed to be of any use to her at all.
I remained on high alert, unable to focus for that, and even more so for the drugs in my system to point my mind away from the pain. Because of the constipating effects of the oxycodone, I was on a very high-fiber diet suddenly. Because of the stitched effects of the surgery, I was instructed to not push or hold back bowel things, as much as possible. I was a very gassy antelope, which is, as an aside, one of the trump cards for me in Cards Against Humanity.
So it was that, though she later actually told me she had been in a good mood, key word "had," when she came to sit by me to show me a drawing she'd been working on with her new HitRECord account, I farted because of the motion of sitting up, and felt impossibly even more sheepish and ashamed of my presence by her. She made a disgusted face, and I apologized.
She showed me her drawing, a tinkerer character she'd dreamed up and illustrated, in overalls. And the gears someone else had drawn, which she had incorporated into her piece, her own first example of the intent of HitRECord and collaborative creativity. I made a sort of fleeting, uncertain, wincing smile and tried to think of what to say. But I was too slow.
"You know what, just never mind," she said curtly, returning to her chair. I rolled back onto my side, near tears, anxious beyond measure and confused besides. Not long after, the actual fight started. She called me a shitty girlfriend, at one point. And every adage about how many failures are necessary in order to find success flew from my mind. I had never been anyone's girlfriend before. And here was the grade on my first attempt: shitty.
I told her I was done. I could not stand to keep hurting her just by being with her, hurting her in some way that I did not even understand, and therefore worried I would never be able to fix, or even improve. Something so fundamental to who I am that I could not see it.
She went off to her room, while I cried on the futon. Eventually, against my best friend's urging, I went to try to talk to Kim again. I asked her why it was so easy for her to believe I did not love her. And she told me, and I heard in her the echo of everyone I'd ever been with. That I'm so flat when it comes to expressing love that she's honestly not sure whether I care about her at all. And while that gave me an idea of what the problem was, though I still couldn't really understand it, it made a darker point. This wasn't just what I was, it was what I had always been. It wasn't something I could blame on the Jason Construct. It was Sera, clean through. And that made me feel deeply hopeless about ever being able to change it.
At some point after I'd finally fallen asleep, alone on the futon, I was startled awake by her stroking my arm gently. Sitting beside me and touching me lovingly. What I'd hungered for for days. This simple expression. I burst into tears, and turned away from her. It was already over, I thought. She would never touch me this way again. She got up and left. Later, she would ask me if I'd not heard her. She had said, "I'm sorry," but I didn't hear it. I don't know what hearing it would have done, for sure. But it would have almost certainly helped in some way.
She's emailed me just now, between the time I started writing this, and here. It sounds like things are going to be okay. Or at least not horrible. I think. I hope. I wish. Oh, how I wish.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to explain that what I'd been trying to set up between us all along was what most people refer to as "a break." As opposed to "a break-up." So my calling it a break-up was a huge part of the problem, a tragic comedy of communicative errors that nobody would believe if it was the plot of a sitcom; it was too perfect in its awfulness. But my intent from the start had been for us to have some big space between us, space to go work on our own problems, space to lick our wounds and come back and try again.
Since I met Kim, I've had literally zero interest in even thinking about being with anyone else. With even looking. In the past, especially whenever I'd fight with my partner, I didn't engage in much introspection. What was the point? I hated myself anyway. I'd ignore the problems, get lost in MMOs, and flirt up a storm with other women. I would imagine happy, problem-free, new relationships with them, as if such a thing could ever exist.
These days, I turn all the criticism harshly on myself. And with my very shallow depth of perception for emotional examination, I lose sight of just how big (or not) a problem my problems really are, in whatever context. I get incredible detail on what I'm looking at, and zero perspective on anything else. In the context of being a problem for a girlfriend, for example, I can be absolutely ripping my own heart out over having injured my partner in whatever way, while they are actually complaining to me about a problem that is, say, 10% of their net life stress. In other words, nothing to break up over.
But I was far too close to the problem. As the problem was, and is, literally inside me. At least, I should say, that's how it seemed from where I was looking, which was inside myself, at the inside of myself. When she left for work the next morning without a word to me, when the sound of the door shutting behind her was what really woke me up, I burst into tears again, and the song that had started writing itself the night before finished vomiting itself out of me.
I was beyond certain that I needed to be gone by the time she got home that night. I made small tests of how I could do without my pain medication, so I'd be clear-headed enough to safely make the drive. The drive that would be about two hours long by the time I'd be able to attempt it. I took down some of my things, in small loads, since I am supposed to refrain from lifting more than 10 lbs until March. This wore me out, but more worrisome than that, made me hotter than I felt it ought to have. I stopped moving my things, then started again, then stopped and started once more.
By about four o' clock, I was standing in the doorway between her kitchen and living room, my head tilted all the way back, wincing, whimpering, begging the pain to stop. "She will be angry with me still when she gets home," I reminded myself, still unaware that she'd apologized to me when she woke me in the night. I made my way out one last time.
When I was nearly to my car, I realized that I still had the keys she'd given me. I didn't want her to worry I'd just show up crying one night or anything, so I knew I had to give them back. I started crying, and shuffled back towards her place. I went down some stairs to make sure I was giving her back a building key, and not my key to my place. Then I laid the keys out on top of her laptop, so she'd not miss them, said good-bye to Widget, and left.
She had just gotten out of her own counselor's meeting when she texted me, letting me know she was on her way home, asking if I needed her to pick anything up. At a dead stop in the middle of Mercer, I texted her back. I had already left, I said. She asked what that meant, but before long, my lane moved again, and I was on the freeway, unable to answer her anymore.
By the time I realized how grossly I had misread everything, and how badly I'd decided at every possible turn, we weren't talking to each other. She wrote how, from her perspective, she'd found out I had dumped her when I referred to her place as "my ex-girlfriend's apartment" on my public figure page. We had both been so sure of the other's message and intent. And we had both been so wrong.
For the past couple days, since coming home early and running out of pain meds while grossly over-straining myself, I've had bad pain feedback loops. I'll have some nerve pain from the surgery fire off, and start crying. Then, my brain, being helpful as always, tries to make sure I am crying for a reason, so I'll start thinking of Kim again. And start crying harder. I'll be convulsing with sobs, which set off more nerve pain. I am out of heavy-duty pain meds, and methodically burning through my small and previously recreational weed supply. It doesn't do much for the actual pain, but it does help keep me from focusing too intently on anything.
Even when I thought to myself, I wish I'd never done any of this, I wish I hadn't been in such a rush to get my surgery, I wish I'd just waited until things were better between us, I would remember how just the other week, Kim and I had been trying to remember what old adages there were around wishes. The futility of them. And with the warmth of the memory, I'd start sobbing again.
We had been driving home from another of my open mic performances, and all I could remember from expressions around the futility of wishes was, "If wishes were _____, ______ would _____." She could find nothing, when she finally pulled out her phone to Google it. I found the expression a few days later, in a book I'd been reading. I was at her place, of course. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!" I shouted.
Those kinds of exchanges between us were achingly recent, but felt, until just a little bit ago when she emailed me, like they were as far as they could be. Like they'd never happen again. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Yes, I suppose I will. Lucky girl.
