The tragedy of an old habit

I almost married this guy named Casey awhile back. He broke off the engagement after I had gone thousands of dollars into debt buying catering contracts and booking reception halls. He grew frustrated with, then shocked and appalled by my increasingly crazier schemes. Eventually he was broken, so he moved out of our apartment. The relationship should have ended long before that, and not just for the sake of my credit report, but because we had lost hope. For years it's been hard to put my finger on exactly what went wrong between us, but I gained some small understanding today.

I was feeling anxious about leaving the house this morning. I was supposed to go to a meeting to begin a new volunteer project but something inside me kept saying, “They don't really need me for this.” I just needed a personal day, something I hadn't had in a long time.

I approached Aaron, my current boyfriend, and told him that I didn't feel like going. I don't know if I was trying to reach out to him or if I just blurting that out hoping to bait him in telling me I didn't have to go. Whatever it was he screwed up his face in frustration and blew me off, going back to what he was doing on the computer. That was the last thing I said to him all morning. He left and I stole a personal day and skipped the meeting about the volunteer project, only now my anxiety was compounded by guilt for ditching out on the meeting and worry about disappointing Aaron.

We met up later to get groceries, awkward and silent. The explosion came when we left the store and argued over who would carry the groceries, if I would bum him a cigarette, where we should stop and smoke and god knows what else. We fought and walked all the way to the bus stop and lit up.

“Can I talk to you about something?” I asked him hesitantly between puffs.

“What?” he asked cautiously. I reminded him about that morning when I had told him that I didn't want to go. He said, “Well, why didn't you want to go? I don't understand.”

More of the same attitude. “Well, the time for gaining understanding has passed,” I said.

“What does that even mean?” he said still with his face all twisted. I thought for a solid thirty seconds about what to say. I thought about Casey and what a dysfunctional couple we were. Two separate relationships had evolved between Casey and I, our actual relationship and the relationship in my head. In our actual relationship there were ups and downs,
misunderstandings and reconciliations. In my head we had great debates about life and we resolved many things that never happened, that couldn't possible happen in real life. I wanted to catch Aaron and I before I couldn't be understood by him at all.

“It means that I don't feel,” I struggled, “trustful enough of you right now to be vulnerable.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means" I struggled some more, "that I just sit here and be quiet.”

We sat in a very frustrated silence until the bus came. We didn't make an attempt to sit near each other on the overcrowded bus. I sat in the back facing the rear and he sat down in front watching over the driver's shoulder.

I stewed over the impossibility of calmly telling him what the fuck was going on. In my head it was so easy, I could lay it out nice and clean like clean sheets on a bed. Then it occurred to me that the battles in my head are my own, I wouldn't want him in there anyway. He would be lost, and I doubted if we'd have any chance of reconciliation afterward. There was no Aaron in my head, and there had been no Casey in my head years before. They were fragments of self-doubt that I'd been wrestling with for years. All I had was Aaron, Aaron in real life. My task was to be patient and hope that love was its own reward.

When I looked up I could see the “Poetry in Motion” poster above the windows on the bus. It was the poem that Aaron once told me was his favorite of all the bus-poems. It was by Primus St. John. It said:

“I believe in myself slowly.
It takes all the doubt I've got.
It takes my wonder.”