Visible

4:38

that’s a good title.

I miss loving and being loved.  Even what Daniel and I had before, that thin residue, was better than this.  I miss directing love, genuine love to someone.  I am trying to be kind, to cook food he likes, to offer compliments and support, to enact caring.  Sometimes it connects, and he gives me a hug.  And I realize how infrequent that is and how much I miss it.  As for being loved, well, I’ve been living on rations for a very long time so that’s oddly less painful except I’m crying as I type this.

I am tired all the time, and today in yoga, when I was struggling, I realized that I’m wearing a suit of armor all the time, the tension of secrets, of tasks, of sadness, of fear and fear and fear and fear and fear, so I am weighted and tight.  There is no flow.  This is new.  Until the money came in at work (but only through the end of the year), I had periods of outright joy.  It doesn’t make sense that this all goes together, the relief and the encasement of anxiety and fear and sadness, but it does.

I’m shredding hundreds of pornographic polaroids Daniel took of me between 1994 and 1999.  Once we moved into the house together, it stopped — a harbinger of things to come.  Plus, it got harder to get Polaroid film.  I bought him a Fuji instamatic, 10 years ago maybe and we never made it through the first pack of film.  Because he’d stopped by then.  Can I convey how gorgeous I was in the 90s?  No, I cannot.  I was gorgeous.  I don’t usually photograph well at all, but all those photos are stunning.  Daniel never took a bad picture of me.  He capture me as I truly was.  And now all that beauty and sex is being shredded.  I shredded photos once before, a few, when Daniel stopped having sex with me the first time.  That was analogous to cutting myself, it was a way to express the pain. Now it’s protection against blackmail or other kinds of ugliness.  He won’t notice until he wants to wound me.

He fussed at me again, and I am undone.  I told him too many times to walk the dog (twice).  I asked him to go to the grocery.  I asked him to take the dog to the vet.  The proportion of asks/commands, he says, to him and to Milo, he says, is very high.  Fuck him.  And he’s welcome, by the way, that I tried to fix the cable in our bedroom.  Our bedroom.  That’s another phrase that makes me sad.

Why didn’t my therapist suggest that Daniel (and others) are narcissistic?  It would have given a name to the pain, and made things make sense.  But I might not have changed my behavior or left anyway.  I find it hard to leave now, leave a man who loses his temper — that’s an exaggeration.  He didn’t lose his temper.  He expressed strong displeasure.  A man who fusses when I ask him to walk the dog.  And when he fusses, even a little, I get so scared.  I get scared there will be more yelling.  I get scared I will get the silent treatment or the force field of anger.  METAPHORICALLY only, when he raises his little finger, I fear a crushing blow.  METAPHORICALLY ONLY.  Just verbal aggression here, not physical.

I know all that I know, and I am still STILL undone by his casual displeasure.  I am gutted actually.  It’s the opposite of building up resistance.  I have absolutely no resistance.  I think it’s because there’s no tempering of interest or love.  I’ve written this before — no protective layer, no cushion of affection (or belief in affection.)  Just bone on bone, grinding.  Just the knowledge of how much rage and hatred he can and will direct towards me.  He’s trying to keep a rein on it, but he hates that we both know it’s there.  Maybe.  I don’t know him — how could I possibly presume.

And all this when I was feeling soft towards him.  Sometimes I think I’ve ruined my life, my self, my soul.  But yesterday at synagogue, at the early service that I never go to anymore but went to yesterday, I had a lovely talk with a friend and thought, “I know her because of Daniel, and I had some really amazing things happen, and it’s all okay.  It wasn’t a total disaster.  There were beautiful moments with him, and beautiful moments that happened because of him, which I wouldn’t have had any other way.”  But now I feel defeated and crushed, just before Milo’s birthday dinner and I’m typing this utterly maudlin blog post that was so much better in my head.  And I worry that’s what my future life will be: so much better in my head before I start living it.  But there’s nothing here with Daniel.  Nothing at all between us that is good anymore, except Milo’s whole entire life.

4:56