Thursday, June 3, 2010

Mourning Has Broken

They say the rule of thumb for a breakup is that you grieve one week for every month that you were together. After that you should be ready to move on. During those weeks you get to cry at the slightest reminder, eat more chocolate than is really good for you, brood and sulk, blow hot and cold, praise your sweetheart to the heavens or curse the scumbag to hell, and you have every right to expect your friends and family to treat you with forebearance and compassion, listening to your rants nonjudgmentally and keeping you supplied with fresh Kleenex.

Two and a half months after the love of my life ordered me out of the apartment we shared, I am turning this principle over and over in my mind as I stand at three in the morning at the counter in 7-Eleven, planning my suicide.

We were together nine and a half months, my sweetheart and I. Nine and a half months plus a nine- or ten-week mourning period comes out to a year. I'm supposed to be over her now, on what would have been the first anniversary of our coupleship. It's perfect. It's perverse. She couldn't have planned it better, really. It was the Ides of March when she threw me out, Good Friday (which would have been our ten-month anniversary) that she gave me as a deadline to have my things out of her apartment. I don't pretend to the status of Christ or even Caesar by any means, but the coincidence wasn't lost on me that the two worst days of my life were (in spirit, at any rate) the anniversaries of perhaps the two most notorious murders of ancient times, both brought about in part because of a close companion's betrayal.

I notice dates. I always have. "Diescience," I sometimes call it, this sensitivity of mine to the calendar; there isn't a single word in any language I know that means precisely what I need it to mean, so I must resort to neologism. It was one of the things my sweetheart chastised me for, my emotional sensitivity to anniversaries, but it was never strictly within my control. I might choose to brood, or not, but the inclination was there. I've lost track of the number of times I've struggled all day under a pall of apparently senseless unhappiness and vague unease, only to recall suddenly (perhaps not until the day was almost over) that it was the anniversary of some momentous personal event.

June 2, 2009, was a day I had been anticipating for months - for years actually, without knowing the specific date. The Sims 3, the latest generation of my favorite computer game, had gone gold just a couple of weeks earlier, and on June 2 it would be released to the public. I had preordered my copy (the collector's edition, thank you very much) months before. The release had originally been scheduled for the end of February, but was postponed over three months for various (and hotly debated) reasons. My anticipation grew as I counted down the days, and I woke that Tuesday with only one thought in my head: Sims, Sims, SIMS! All day I waited for my package to arrive. As evening settled, I had to accept that my days of anticipation were not quite over yet. (When it still hadn't arrived nearly two weeks later, I called Amazon and learned that they had sent me a confirmation e-mail I never saw. Their customer service rep apologized and made good the situation by sending it out that day with free overnight shipping.) All day I had been marinating in my excitement, and the flavor of the day lingered in my blood as disappointment. My best friend had promised to come over and cook a special dinner for me that evening; usually we cooked together, but she knew I would rather be simming! I told her my game hadn't come, but she made dinner for me anyway while I read in the living room under strict orders not to peek into the kitchen! When she called me to the table, there was a delightful meal laid out: stuffed pasta shells, garlic bread, and sparkling juice in plastic goblets. There were tears in her eyes as I took my seat, and when she began to speak I knew somehow, with delight and dread, exactly what she was going to say.

She told me she was in love with me. I wasn't sure I felt the same, but as I felt the years unfurl themselves before me I knew for sure I wanted her there. You see, I knew casual dating wasn't an option, wouldn't have been with her even if I were the casual-dating type. However slow we might choose to take things, she was asking for the rest of my life. If I said yes, there were only two possibilities: a lifetime with her, or the devastation of my heart.

Cut to a montage of the next nine months: the first kiss. The awkwardness that melted away as I lay in her arms, marvelling out loud, "It's you. It's you." The sudden feeling of rightness (I won't call it cognitive dissonance) that came to me the next day as I burned her a CD of love songs. The apartment, the first argument, the first recurring disagreement, the doubts, the reconciliations, the recommitments, the way her face lit up every time I brought her home an unexpected little gift.

And then it was over.

I have always thought of sadness as a quiet emotion. Grief unsettles because there is nothing quiet about it. For me at least, the physical sensation is easy to confuse with anxiety: a twisting, tugging, visceral ache, as if the intestines were tying themselves in knots. Much as I admire William James, I never placed much stock in his theory of emotion, but for the first few days I was sleeping on my mother's couch I thought it was anxiety I was feeling - so maybe he was on to something after all. It wasn't anxiety, though; all the practical matters were resolved in hours or days, but the ache lingered until I realized: I'm sad, I am sad.

My body rebelled, ceased to be mine. The thought of food made me sick; for several days I ate almost nothing, and there was one day when I didn't even take fluids, other than a single sip of lime juice to wash down my daily medications. I felt no hunger; the little I did eat settled on the floor of my stomach like a heavy little knot. I slept at an unaccustomed hour, and perhaps a little more than usual. The pain was worse when I was in the dark, or alone; I couldn't bear to turn off the light to sleep, or to take a shower if no one else was home.

I never asked her to love me. I never asked her to desire me that way. She wanted me. I gave her the thing she wanted. She helped herself to my life, to my time, to my habits. I had never thought I would be loved - that I could be loved that way, wholly and by choice, though I had always secretly desired it. I wanted to belong to someone, to have someone belong to me, to be chosen, to surrender my heart in trust. I gave her myself. It was she who wanted to love me, and she who told me, when I was no longer what she wanted, that I needed to go.

That's the hardest part for me, I think. I never expected to be loved and wanted for myself, and I thought she was my impossible fantasy come true - first as a friend, then as a partner. Little by little, though, she revealed herself to be displeased by pieces of my being, pieces I had never denied or sought to conceal. I thought she meant to take me for better or for worse, to support my continued growth as a human being, but I didn't realize my continued growth in the direction of her choosing was a condition of her affection. The first few months of last year were a time of active self-improvement for me, and I believed (and told her) that I couldn't have done it without her, at least not with the same degree of success. I believe now that it was never me she loved at all, but my progress. She liked to boast to friends about all the progress I'd made, even though some of the things she said embarrassed me. (My complete lack of domestic inclinations does make it all the more impressive when I manage to pull together a meal that involves actual cooking, and my put-together appearance is a real accomplishment for a woman who grew up utterly indifferent to fashion - but is it really necessary for a near-stranger to be informed that just a few short months ago I didn't know a potato peeler from a cheese grater, or that it hasn't been so very long since the entirety of my personal-maintenance efforts most days consisted of pulling on whatever I had that was reasonably clean?) I guess she thought my introversion, night owl tendencies, and disdain for sentimentality and convention would be next to go; she never doubted they were faults, but I never suspected that anyone who cared for me could see them as anything other than harmless quirks or even strengths, in need of refinement perhaps but ultimately immutable pieces of myself. I wondered how someone like her could love someone like me. She chalked this up to my low self-esteem. It turns out, I was right - someone like her really can't, really shouldn't even try to love someone like me.

What hurts is that I failed her simply by being myself, even when I tried for her sake to become somebody else. What hurts is that I never asked her to love me, and now it is I who have been weighed and found unwantable.

Despite my fond romantic daydreams, I never expected before last year that anyone would ever want to join his or her life to mine. It was painful to think about; it ought to be less painful now, because at least I can say I have been loved, however briefly, but in fact it is more painful, because this time I know exactly what I am missing. Part of me yearns to exist, freely, in constant relation to someone else, to be part of a unit of two. But it's not a need - it's a daydream I can indulge in or push aside as I will; it isn't real, and I know it. The independent woman I was before is ready to start up her life again on her terms. More than I ever wanted to belong to her, I now desire to belong unapologetically to myself.

Now, standing at the counter in the 7-Eleven, I conclude that sometimes conventional wisdom gets it right. And I decide I'm really not in the mood for a suicide after all. Filling my cup at the Slurpee machine, I decide to mix only a couple of flavors - the ones I really want. I'll enjoy a nice stroll while I savor my midnight snack, and then I'll head for home. I have things to do today. Now that summer is almost here, it's time for a short haircut that won't trap heat against my head and neck. I know the sort of look I want - feminine but not fussy, smart but not boring, just a little bit windblown. And there's a new expansion pack out for The Sims 3. It's called Ambitions.

I think getting Ambitions for my very own would be the perfect way to celebrate this special anniversary, don't you?