It’s A Hard-Ache

Moon Over Ocracoke used by permission of Jim Dollar Photography

We’re standing in the bathroom that we’ve shared for two-and-a-half years.  Our arms are wrapped around each other and tears are running down our cheeks.  “I think it’s easier,” I say, “when you don’t like the person anymore; when you’re mad at them and they’re you’re enemy.”

“It is!” she says.

“This is supposed to be a healthier way,” I say.

“That’s what they say,” she replies doubtfully.

“It doesn’t feel that way, does it?”

She doesn’t answer, but doesn’t release her hold on me, either.

“It’s just hard,” I say.

She nods agreement.

She’s never had a lot of words.  I guess I ought to expect that sort of thing when I become involved with introverts.  I’m drawn to all sorts of people, but introverts provide a special challenge for me.  I used to be an introvert myself, so it’s not as if I don’t understand them.  It’s just that I’m tired of NOT talking about things.  Most of my life has been spent NOT talking about things, and I find it an unhealthy practice.  I’ve not yet honed my telepathic skills, so I have to have people tell me out loud about themselves and what they are thinking.  Sometimes, I can FEEL what they are feeling, but I don’t know WHY.  That, I need information for.  Shockingly, I’ve discovered recently that not only do some people not know why they are feeling something, some people don’t know that they ARE feeling something.  Seems strange to me.

In bed at my new home, I think about what I’m feeling.  I’m thinking about the romantic relationship that has just ended, and my mind suddenly begins to meld from one woman to another and I recognize the similarity in scenes.  Pain hits me, deep in my gut.

“It’s just hard.”

Denise, the last time that I saw her alive.

“I’m sorry!” she’d said, tears streaming down her face.  “I’m sorry!”
She’d come in, being an ass.  Showing her ass.  Cursing and slamming things around.

She had ignored my granddaughter, who she usually adored and who was trying to get her attention.  “Honey, Denise is just upset right now and she’ll talk to you later on.” I’d said, believing it.  “Why don’t you go inside the bedroom with your Mommy and Daddy.”

Denise was packing up her things, not talking.  Just cursing, throwing out accusations.  Lashing out at everyone and everything around her.  Typical, overwhelmed Denise.

Her tirade finished, ready to walk out the door with the last of her belongings, she’d leaned in to the chair where I was sitting and tenderly kissed my cheek, the tears falling from her face onto mine.

“It’s just so hard!” she’d said.

Straightening up, she’d turned her wet face from my view.  I could feel the shame coming off her.  She was ashamed that she was crying.  She was ashamed that she had shown her ass.  She was ashamed for her very being.

That vision of her was the last one that my eyes would see of her physically “alive” self.  That kiss was the last one that I ever got.  Less than two weeks later, she was lying in another woman’s bathtub with a bottle of liquor in one hand, a shotgun in the other.
“It’s just so hard!”

This ranting is not about My Denise, though.  Hers is a complex and tragic story that deserves it’s own, dedicated stage.  This ranting is about endings – and beginnings, and how we deal with them and what they mean.  Specifically, how I deal with them.

My first ever ending of a relationship was when I was a very young girl of about eleven.  We never really even broke up.  He’d been avoiding my glances and seeming unhappy.

“Hey!” I’d queried.  “Do you want to go with me or not?”  He and I had been “going together”, which really hadn’t meant that we ever “went” anywhere.  It had just been a declaration of interest, and a public pairing up as boyfriend and girlfriend.  We never even sat next to each other, held hands or kissed.  We’d just looked at one another shyly with big-ass grins – and I had giggled.

“I don’t know, Deneen,” he’d replied.  “I just don’t know.”

I had turned away in disgust, knowing that “it” whatever “it” had been, was over.  This was the first in what would prove to be a very long line of breakups in my life to come.

I’ve left three husbands with whom I took vows, and divorced one to whom I’d never actually been married (thank you, Georgia common-law).  I’ve left two wives, two have left me, and I’ve parted with another who was never really ever “with” me for either of us to leave one another in the first place.  All of this is complicated by the fact that I’m unsure about whether or not I’m using correct gender descriptors in order to categorize these relationships since some of these people were transgender – which has nothing to do with anything except that I like to honor the gender with which people identify when I speak about them.

At the beginning of any of these relationships, I was always “in love”, and always thought that it was going to last forever.  Somewhere along the way, communication always broke down and it always broke my heart.  Even when I was the one who was leaving, it was my broken heart that had forced open the door through which I made my exit.

I have this extreme envy for people who live their lives with the same person for years and years and years.  Working in cemeteries as a Family Service Counselor, I encountered a lot of older people who were putting to rest partners with whom they had spent their entire adult lives.  They had only ever loved one person.  One person as their lover, their companion, their confidant, their rock.  The deepest part of me thinks that this is what I was meant for; built for.  I’m not sure whether or not this is something that each human being feels.

In our society there is a lot of talk about the people in these dedicated, monogamously bound relationships.  We call them “Soul Mates”, and we spend a lot of our time looking for our own “One”.  I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that most of us must have lots of “Soul Mates”, and that it’s possible that there isn’t just one “One”.  That’s how it’s been with me.  It would be easier if the traditional view were accurate, and if I’d gotten to live it out.  Sometimes the easiest thing is not the truth of the matter.

I’ve been “in love” many times in my life.  I’ve been in love with women.  I’ve been in love with men.  I’ve been in love with more than one person at a time.  Still, I’m not even really sure what it means, this “in love” thing.  Every person that I have feelings of love for, I feel differently about.  I’m not sure what the difference is.

At times past, I’ve thought that the love might be based on feelings of whether or not the relationship was one of monogamy – but I’m now convinced that relationships aren’t any deeper or better just because of monogamy.  As a matter of fact, I’ve often seen relationships where I’ve thought that the opposite was the case.

Whether or not people have open relationships have to do with the people in the relationships, not some universal rule regarding how relationships should, or should not, be, or some unbreakable law of how romantic love works.

In just getting out of yet another relationship, I’ve had a lot to contemplate, and a lot of inner peace to which I’ve needed to grab-hold.  As often happens when I am faced with tumultuous times such as these, I was sent a vision.  This vision was about the correlation between our fear of death and our fear of the ending of relationships, also a death, with those who we think are “The Ones”.

I don’t think that when our physical bodies die, we lose our connection to the consciousness that inhabits us here on earth.  I think that when we die, we join other consciousnesses, and that our sense of self expands and grows outward to encompass MORE than this one life.  We don’t lose anything.  So it might be with relationships.  It may very well be that there’s not going to be any single person who completes me, but that I have a network of people who perform different tasks and fulfill different needs in me.

What I was shown is that I’m lacking nothing if I can but mentally combine my relationships with all of the people who love me.  I don’t have to have everything in ONE person, no “One” in my life.  Even My Denise was not THAT for me.  Yet, I find that I never walk alone.  There are always people with me, and I’m not just speaking of the ones inside of my head.  I have in my life the most amazing people, and I have more love sent my way in any one week than many people have in their whole lifetimes.  I’ve gotta’ be okay with this walk that is mine to do, even if it means I don’t have a “better-half” to lean on.

At times, I am too much for any one person to handle.  I am so changeable, and I am so complex, and to most, so incomprehensible.  I must be content to focus on the big picture of all that I have to do, appreciating the connections that I have, and not long for that constant companion at my side.  Apparently, I’m not built for that, in spite of what I said earlier, and in spite of want to believe about my deep self.  The good news is that I don’t have to be.  A minister friend of mine is fond of saying, “Some of us are built for singleness.”

Perhaps I’ve missed my calling and I need to accept that the pieces that I need in a companion are represented in a myriad of people in my world and always will be.  Maybe I could give up on the whole idea of a partner and spare myself some pain because, when I’ve invested in it, thrown myself into it and it has all fallen to pieces, and I have fallen on my face again, it’s hard.

“It’s just so hard.”

When I’m hurting, I always reach for that connection of what-ever-is-beyond-me.  I carefully recognize the beauty of nature, and I spend a lot of time looking for metaphors to remind me that creation and destruction are all a part of the same force.  Death brings about negative feelings in me, and though I intellectually realize the necessity and balancing aspect of it, I’m still uncomfortable with it.  This includes the deaths that come with the ending of relationships.  One mourns the death of self, in bringing to a close the person that the other person helped us to be, whether that was a better or worse self.  One mourns the passing away of the future life that one has dreamed up, the breaking of the ties to an established “family”.

When I’m in the emotional waters of these changing tides, I find it comforting to visit settings that connect me to the natural world, and the power of the forces beyond myself.  Beaches are one of the great places that I’ve found on which to meditate, contemplate and open myself up to clearer meaning.  Standing out just beyond the break point of the waves that are crashing to the shore, I get this huge connection with God and all of the workings of the larger Universe.  In the midst of the forming waves, allowing them to lift my body and take me where they will, I become one with the pull of the moon upon the earth.  I feel the power of that connection inside of me.  My mind begins to ponder the wonderful scientist that God is, and I think about the most popular theory about how Earth and Moon were formed.  It is believed by many that these used to be two different bodies who were set on a course from the very beginning to get in the way of each other.  That destined impact decimated both, making them molten and malleable, all the way from their deep, hot cores to their liquefied crusts.  What kind of worlds were they before their fateful meeting?  What could they have accomplished, what life would they have brought forth if only they had been arranged in different and safer seeming orbits?

Once those two heavenly objects crashed, it impacted the entire solar system.  The Sun no longer had two different and separate things, but one larger planet and its satellite.  When the debris from the devastation settled, all of the plumes of material that had been flung out away from the major impact became the moon.  When I first learned of this, I thought, “Poor Moon!  What must it be like to crash into something and have layers pulled away and stolen so that one is reduced to just a small little body, trapped into the orbit of one’s destructor!”  Looking up at the moon, so tiny in comparison to the Earth, it is easy to think that the moon lost in the collision; that the bigger, badder Earth won the battle and maintained its form and recovered.  That’s not at all what happened.

The moon is made up of parts of both worlds.  Earth?  She is the same.  The moon’s influence is not at all small on our planet, either.  Some scientists believe that Moon’s influence on Earth may be the very thing that caused life here to evolve so easily, creating unique environments brought about by the tides that rock our oceans.

When we experience changes, even catastrophic ones, it’s good to bear in mind that the ending of a thing truly IS the beginning of another thing.  Once we’ve entered one another’s spheres, there’s no going back and being what we once were.  We are forever altered.  We are forever a part of one another, and that effect is eternal.  So, there actually is no “leaving”, but a “growing”.  Knowing this doesn’t make it easier, and I don’t plan to stuff my pain and mourning over that back into my inner self, nor do I plan to ignore the effects that another person has had on me – good, or bad.

That day that Denise had left her teary kiss on my cheek and walked out of the house that we had shared, I’d went into what had been “our” bedroom and found her robe lying, neatly arranged, on the end of the bed.  It was a dark-blue, terrycloth men’s robe, that wrapped around to close in front with a belt.  She and I had once shared our lives with another woman who had competed with me for Denise’s attentions, and the wearing of Denise’s robe had been one of the “prizes” that she and I had vied for.  In spite of all of Denise’s showing of anger, and all of her acting out, I knew that, in her heart, she still loved me and wanted to intentionally leave a piece of herself with me.  I had picked up that precious robe, cuddling it to me, and cried.  I still have it today.

In my now-life, my ex-partner sits, sorting through our laundry, still all intermingled in the same basket.  She looks small and hurt and vulnerable.  I pray for God to send someone to love her and take care of her and to be compatible with her in the ways that I could not.  She is deserving of someone who can better deal with her quietness.  Who is not so demanding.  Someone who is not mentally ill; who doesn’t scare the hell out of her or make her feel incapable.

I’ve turned to walk away, but I think better of it and say to her, “I’ve left Denise here with you.  Her ashes are still here, so maybe she can help watch over you while I’m gone.”

“Why haven’t you taken her with you?”

“I’m just going to leave her here with you a little while.”

“Ok,” she shrugs.

As I walk away, I glance back at our bed and notice my own robe lying there – a floor-length, light-green colored, feminine thing with pink flowers embroidered into the large lapels.

I step around to retrieve it, preparing to bring it to my new home.  As my hand reaches its terry-cloth softness, this feeling of sadness washes up my fingers and through me as I think of how my partner used to form it into a pillow shape and hold it against her body on nights when she found herself alone.  Nights when I was off traveling or playing rescuer.

Glancing through the door of the bathroom, she’s still busily sorting laundry, unaware for now that I’m even still in the room – but I know that she’ll be aware later that I’m not.  I gently place my robe back on the bed and, turning away – walk out the door.

“It’s just so hard.”

Here are some links for those who are interested in reading more about the theories regarding the collision of Earth and Moon:

The Day The Moon Was Made

Earth And Moon Interactions

If We Had No Moon

Wikipedia’s Impact Hypothesis

With Special Thanks To:  Jim Dollar Photography

For:   Allie