2/20/2011

She is asleep in my bed, insisting upon my cuddles. That would be enough for most people. But I am miserable. Tonight, I had to run to the bathroom of a diner to ball my eyes out, complete with barely subdued flailing and stomping, after telling her that I love her. And I do. All I want is a continued chance at a future with her. But she stacks the deck against me. She tells her empty friends that she is going to break up with me and they urge her on, because new is always better and they want to get into her panties. She feels around it with her parents, so they will give her the answer that nothing real can apply before one's second doctorate. She doesn't talk to Clio, the only person on campus whose opinion should at all matter to her, for fear that... I am not sure.

I don't know how often I can keep battling and winning against her issues. I only need to slip once to be executed. This has been going on for months, since October. I win for a while and she can love me, but the moment she returns to Bard, I become something she might not want. She keeps a thumb of the scale, thinking that wander fucking will bring her to the realizations she needs instead of being her running from something real.

She half makes plans for our future and half lets me know that she might leave me at any moment so she can fuck strangers. It is the stupidest thing I can think of and is so far beneath her that I am surprised this is how she is projecting. Against actually something of worth, something that has built her, she wants vapidity.

We come to depend on other people. Our relationships exist in opposition to constant hermitude because there is some native lack. I cannot kiss myself (at least not in a satisfying way), I cannot talk to myself and learn much, I cannot share the sour and sweet unless I have someone beside me. Most times with most people, the statement of dependence, the expression of a need beyond wanting, passes in silence because it has no need to be stated.

I try to keep my relationships from involving too much dependence from my end. In the midst of conversations with Suzie or Clio, I will stop and apologize because it occurs to me that I may be burdensome in figuring out Melanie's mindset. I don't want to be the burden to the degree that I will

The brain does not exist in an impenetrable jar. So many decisions are based not on logic or even emotion, but hunger and hormones, where the second hand of our biological clock points because we are menstruating or haven't slept properly the night prior. Yet we are inclined to think these moments of deviation, these negative stimuli, are who we really are. People own their most dreadful hours but refuse to concede that they might be most themselves when they are happiest.

Even writing this, I know this is not how I feel by virtue of the fact that this is not how I want to feel. I lost sight of that to herbs meant to counter balance depression before and won't now. I am physically spent, still suffering the consequential chemical imbalance brought on by the sleep debt accrued Friday night, losing rest to my anxiety and the atrocious and ear-splitting music in Melanie's dorm.

Why would I want to own how I feel right now, make the wrong decisions by assuming this is a persistent state rather than something that could be banished if only I could manage a full night of natural sleep? To pretend this is real rather than a psychological cold is daft. I won't allow a deviation to market itself as the constant by taking over the steering.

It isn't fair that she makes me feel this way, but my only recourses are to talk to her about it if I assume she doesn't know (and I believe she does), persist in silence (making myself more miserable until I explode), or leave her. I cannot leave her, robbing me of much of my arsenal. But, as Suzie said to me last night, if you are at the point in your relationship where you are thinking in terms of leverage, it is too late. I don't want leverage, I want love, the love Melanie and I have shared, the love that had grown consistently until she set foot on Bard this year.

I know that, when I am with her, my questions shrink to nothingness. Had she not had her freakout, I would be delighted. Her behavior toward me has been consistently fond since early Saturday morning, when I read the letter she had no intention of sending me, when I told her that I discarded her binary choice of either sleeping with people who don't care about her and being with me and only having couple friends. Perhaps, at this juncture in her life, she needs to have these crises. Perhaps, as Clio suggests, I should not take them so seriously, but I do. When I see her slipping away,

I told her that I saw the dimension forking off where she left me and she seemed to understand. I kept my eye on it as I fled to make sure it didn't intend to circle back.

I cannot stand the idea that she has plans to break up with me, as though I am suppose to nuzzle against her knowing that she plans to poison my food. She understood that breaking up with me Valentine's weekend would make her a monster, which isn't to say that she didn't explain that she wanted to and wouldn't, that she planned to do it the following weekend. And I am suppose to continue to endure this? Yet, when I was near her age, didn't I always have Emily's execution slip in my hand? But that was different; I didn't really love Emily as I should have. As far as I can tell, she fairly adores me whenever she isn't actively freaking out.

She wants the good noted without the bad being sorted through. I understand that this cannot be the case in public, I am not an idiot.

But I do feel more myself with her, no matter how insecure I become when I am out of her presence after one of these upheavals.

I feel immature even going through this again. I got it out of my system years ago and it is cringe-worthy to have to be on the other side.

Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled and gifted. He is capable of crossing one eye, raising one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings. He likes when you comment.