…And the Floodgates Opened

I’m feeling a little over-stuffed.  It’s an unusual and unusually satisfying feeling.  Over these many months of watching my waist size shrink and my ass all but disappear, I had forgotten what it felt like to sigh from fullness.   But suddenly, I eat.  I think I might have even gained a pound.

I’m not sure how it happened.  No, wait, that’s not true!  I know exactly how it happened.  After some deep soul-searching, aimed at letting go of anger and rage, I made some startling self-discoveries.   I found that I’d been lying to myself for a very long time.  I found that my anger had been somewhat misdirected, and much of it had been turned inside and directed at my own body.  It wasn’t that I hadn’t felt hunger; I had simply refused to acknowledge it.

By Monday, I had realized that much of the rage unleashed on The Colombian had been pent up hurt and frustration left over from a prior relationship.  He pushed the same buttons, and brought up those buried feelings.  The more and more he did so, the more I squashed down the source of those feelings.  But I can squash no more.  They are out.  I can see them, and I can deal with them.

On Monday night, I decided to make myself some dinner–dinner that resulted in lots of leftovers.  Yesterday, I ate those leftovers for lunch.  Last night, on our walk, the smell of grilled beef wafted over Church Street and caused my stomach to grumble.  Instead of ignoring it, as has been my recent habit, I went straight to the freezer and unearthed my own beef.  I ate cheeseburgers.  And I liked it.

Of course, my new “healthy” eating habits have been considered.  Very lean meats, whole grains fortified with vitamins, and green teas are now on the menu at Ina Hall.  I am still creating wholesome soups and eating my veggies, and using food as medicine.  But now I am eating more of it.  It is not enough to feed the pain.  I feel the need now to head it off before it begins.  Anticipating the need to snack, I have even baked banana bread.

Today I have had a healthy breakfast, a late morning snack, a wholesome lunch, a late afternoon snack, and now am looking forward to a good sized dinner.  Every bit of it has been medicine for me.  Now that I’ve begun to heal my soul, my body will follow.

But I don’t want to gain all the weight back.  I enjoy healthy eating.  I didn’t think I would, but I do.  The science and art of cooking for life is fascinating and fun.  There is no associated guilt, and no need to worry after a meal is over.  The hunger goes away, the body is nourished, and I can move on to the next thing.  If only the work on the soul were this easy.

I learned a few things from The Colombian.  I learned how to make soup, for one.  He taught me the basics, and gave me direction toward a more sophisticated assortment.  While we were dating, he reminded me that I love fancy food.  On our best dinner date, we ate at a restaurant so fancy, the portions were tiny and art-like.  It wasn’t what I would call healthy; but it was so slight, so rich, that I could hardly feel badly about it.  I savored every bite, and then it was over.  That is what eating should be.

The last thing I learned from him was that I am sometimes a monster.  I had known for years that hunger made me a little crazy, and that sugar affected my mood in a less-than-attractive manner.  But with him, I took it to extremes.  And it wasn’t all about the food.  The parts that were, though, I am on the road to fixing.  I suppose in a way, I have him to thank for that.  If he hadn’t been a giant asshole, I might not have known I had a problem.

In the coming year, I plan to eat.  I will eat often, and I will eat well.  I will eat when I am hungry, and I will eat when I am not.  But I will not eat so much that I go back to who I was before. 

Please pardon me while I go heat up some spaghetti.

Nice Guys Finish

When I met The Colombian, he reminded me of Married Guy. It wasn’t his physicality, or the words he used. In the beginning, it was the feeling I had when I encountered him, and then when we shared conversation, and then when we went on dates. It was that I felt pulled to him from my very core. It wasn’t an attraction of the heart, or of the mind, or of the body; it was a combination of all three, centered on the soul. I hadn’t thought I could feel that way again. My emotions had been switched off as an act of self-preservation.

Letting it Out

I have this ongoing problem.  I can’t control my mouth.

I know, I know…that’s a shock.  I’ve always been so shy and retiring.  But seriously, folks, I struggle daily with issues of anger and irritation.  Working with the public as I do has become a constant test of my will and self-control.  I’ve already lost complete rein over my facial expressions.  I’ve seen the response to my “Jeez, you’re an asshole” face, and it ain’t good.  One of these days, it will have me in trouble.

The emotional roller coaster that is my life in NY has got me spewing feelings at anyone and anything that will listen.  Living alone has made me tender instead of tough, and has increased my deep need to be heard.  I scream at bad drivers through the car window, and spit back hatefully at boneheaded comments on the television.  But I save the real gems for the people who surround me in life.  Those are my coworkers, my customers, and, of late, The Colombian.

How Daniel became a target is pretty easy to figure.  At some point, he stopped really talking to me.  He stopped sharing his feelings, stopped engaging in the difficult conversations.  As he withdrew, he became like one of the inanimate objects at whom I throw my darkest venom.  When he refused to answer my questions, or counter my negativity with argument, it made the anger and frustration grow. 

His tactic in the face of anger is to become stone-silent, and to let it pass.  (Always with a pissed-off look on his face, of course.)  But as I would begin to feel more alone in a conversation, I would start to panic, and my blood would begin to boil.  My raised voice only caused him to clam up that much more.  Sometimes I wonder if, had he known the reaction he was causing, he would have chosen to simply engage in the conversations.  In my mind, I picture myself growing more calm as he would engage in spirited debate.  I love debate.  I don’t have to win.  I just have to be heard.  And when I am heard, I am far more able to listen.

Now I sit here, more alone than I was before.  My body is full of mucus and rot.  I do nothing to quell the symptoms.  I do not take drugs, and I do not try to make it stop.  I need to let it out.  I need to let it pass.  This is how I deal with sickness.  This is also how I have also dealt with negative emotions in my life of late.  I have thought that by letting them out, I would let them pass.

Unfortunately, this has had the opposite effect.  The more anger and hatred I’ve spewed at Dan, the more angry he’s become.  His affection for me was murdered by my irrational outbursts.  And letting my feelings out has not made me feel better.  It has not helped me to move on.  It has made things worse.

My intellect knows this.  I see myself making bad decisions, preparing to say things I shouldn’t, to share feelings that hadn’t ought to be shared…and I can’t seem to stop it.  Something about his stony silence just sends my emotional temperature through the roof, and causes me to explode.  That he doesn’t react to it in any way only magnifies the feelings.  It is like being buried in a coffin of grief, so far under the earth that no one can hear my screams.  Only lately have I realized that it is a coffin in which I put myself.

That doesn’t make it any easier to escape.  I locked myself in it, and now I want back out.  It seems that the only way out of it is through peace and understanding; but which comes first?  The understanding?  Or the peace?

A few weeks ago, when Dan and I began “re-dating,” I had decided to just let the anger go.  I thought I could put it aside, start over, and be peaceful.  But he had hurt me, badly.  And the hurt didn’t go away when he was back in my life.  With no apologies from him, no conversation about what went wrong, the hurt began to resurface.  The ex-girlfriend began to resurface.  The questions about why he was so cold, why he refused to engage in the conversations, resurfaced.  And along with it came the opposite of peacefulness.  Out came the rage.

I’ve tried to seek Understanding first.  But understanding from whence the pain comes hasn’t done anything to heal it.  It only reminds me that there is pain.  Advice from others to “let him go” does nothing to heal what is wrong inside me.  I need the peace, and the understanding.  In order to move on, I need the pain to go away.

Sunrise at the Inn

There has to be some kind of a midpoint between bottling it up and pretending it is all okay; versus spewing rage and every complex emotion at him.  I can’t seem to find that midpoint.  There was a time when he would allow me to express my feelings in a constructive manner, and we would talk about what to do with that.  But because the “conversations” are now one-sided, the anger increases.  The need to be heard will not be met.

In a way, it may be acceptable that, because he is not a part of my life, I let fly all my emotional baggage in his direction.  There is no harm to our relationship, because we do not have one.  But my fear is that I am causing harm to him.  And as much as he hurt me, as much pain as he caused, as inconsiderate as he was to me on a daily basis, I don’t think that hurting him now is the way toward peace.  And I don’t wish pain on him.

Learning how to honor my feelings without sharing them is probably the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken.  The self-imposed coffin of silence is of my own making.  I choose to be alone, and I choose to talk to people who won’t hear me.  Understanding why I do will take more mental energy than I have today, when I am full of mucus and rot. 

For now, I continue to yell at The Colombian.  And he continues to choose not to hear it.  Whether I can successfully choose to quiet myself without his assistance is a question for another day–when I feel better, and not buried under mounds of dirt.

Warm Body Syndrome

There is something to be said for loyalty and companionship.  In fact, these are things we all crave.  Most people who get married, regardless of the reasons why they did, stay married for loyalty and companionship.  And those of us who can’t manage those relationships, who can’t muster the emotional energy to survive past the beginnings of a relationship, get cats.

Before he was my companion, he was Carter's

Carter has been my best friend for more than ten years.  I’ve told the miraculous story of how our relationship came to be, and how he has saved my life numerous times.  For years, he slept on my head at night, or in the crook of my arm, or squarely on my crotch.  I was his “warm body,” his source of comfort and heat, as he was mine.  Many times, I’ve cut my hair unusually short merely because I could not take another night of his yanking and pulling it.

His feline protege, Little Willie, has grown nicely into the role of Warm Body.  Willie’s early escapades in kittenhood had me worried.  No animal with that much pent up energy could possibly learn to be a buddy!  But Carter trained him well, bringing him to bed every night–before the arrival of Katie, of course–and planting him next to me.  As his body has caught up with his age, Willie’s talents for affection-giving and merry-making have grown.  For this, I am incredibly thankful.

Little Willie is the last one to join us in bed.  As I settle in for the night, Katie hops up for a snuggle, and plants herself at the foot of the passenger side.  Biscuit now cozies up next to me, which is new since his longtime illness has established itself.  And now I know, without any doubt, that just before I drift off into my fitful slumber, Willie will spring up out of the darkness to bury himself right on top of me.  Most often, he goes to sleep with his face staring directly at mine.

Willie is a huge fan of bathtime.  Each morning as I get ready for work, I open the shower door to find him waiting.  Screaming.  He wants to come in.  He wants to say hello.  He wants to examine the shower.  And he wants a cuddle.  The consistency with which he presents himself has become a comfort to me in my lonely days.  His jolly (yet needy) cries remind me that I am here to serve him, so I must snap out of whatever sad thoughts consumed me while the hot water ran over me.  He needs me.

Bath Buddy

Little Willie belongs only to me.  Other people seem to terrify him, and most visitors to my house never actually see him.  He did learn to love Patrick fairly quickly, mostly because Patrick is a cat person, and often travels here with his cat.  But others simply have to take me at my word that another cat exists at Ina Hall.  It is no wonder he fears people.  When he attempted to snuggle with The Colombian in the middle of the night, he was angrily asked to move.  (He was allergic.  Oh, and mean.)  Willie learned the hard way that just because I like a person, does not mean he has to like him.  He might have better intincts than mine, at that.

Willie is a complex being; but his most complicated days are still ahead of him.  For now, his curiosity and playfulness are what drive him.  For warmth, he could snuggle up to the much-warmer Carter, and perhaps fill Carter’s needs as well.  For companionship, he has a house full of playmates from which to choose.  He needs me only for food.  For that matter, he has become resourceful at finding food from the dog food container, or from the closed pantry!

This is how I know that Willie just likes me.  People think that only dogs are loyal, but I know differently.  Carter has always been a bit of a whore, cozying up to visitors and enjoying being loved even by strangers.  I’ve always known that, as attached to me as he may seem, he would wander off and happily find a new family if given the opportunity.  But Willie is only for me.  His tiny little million-miles-an-hour heart is mine, and his cries are for me alone to hear.

When I was a freshman in college, I enjoyed some late-night makeouts with a male friend in his dorm room.  Afterward, he expressed that he did not wish to repeat it.  He only wanted to be friends.  In truth, I didn’t like him either.  Another of our friends said that we had “Warm Body Syndrome,” a need to use someone familiar for physical affection and comfort.  I supposed I’ve repeated the same mistake a dozen times since then.  But Little Willie is more than just a warm body to me.  He is my Little Buddy.  He is the sunshine of my life, the glue that holds me together when I want to fall apart.  He is my loyal companion.  And he never leaves the toilet seat up.  I’d say it’s a winning marriage.

Venom, Gifts, and a Woman Scorned

Leading into the holiday season, I quizzed The Colombian about his holiday plans.  I felt comfortable doing so, having been invited on a Caribbean vacation with him, and having survived a dating “rough patch.”  He told me then that he didn’t really celebrate the holidays.  His family would come here, perhaps; or maybe he would just have guests at the inn and would serve their needs.

He had painful, but not uncommon, memories of disappointing Christmases as a child.  His family was not well off, and the gifts he received were meager, and practical in nature.  I was determined, then, to make this Christmas better than those before it.

But then we famously broke up.  Not once, but several times.  The vacation was (I’m assuming) canceled, and the Thanksgiving plans we’d just made were never mentioned again.  On my way out, I told him about the Christmas gifts I’d planned for him, based on what I knew of him so far:  a chunky, knitted scarf, one that would not be too itchy for his sensitive skin; a very fancy watch, because he loves nice things and is always late; the first season of “Newhart” on dvd (which I’d already bought), because he always jokes about the fantasies people have about Vermont inns; and a nice telescope.  He had wanted to be an astrophysicist as a child, and I knew he loved the stars and wanted to stare at them all the time.

He never said anything about all that.  When we began “re-dating,” I asked again about his holiday plans.  I was thinking of making dinner, and had wanted to invite him.  He said he’d have guests at the inn, but perhaps I could come there, at least for dessert.  I never asked about gifts.  I knew not to expect any.  He doesn’t celebrate the holiday.

But I do, to some extent.  While I have no family here, and no money to speak of, I still enjoy the small, warm fuzzies of the holidays:  baking, fudge making, and gifting.  I don’t give everyone gifts, but when I do, I like to make them significant.

To be honest, our dating had not been going so well; so there was no way I would be buying him a watch or a telescope.  And my weeks of scarf-hunting were less than fruitful.  I still had the dvd, however; and I thought a nice book would make him feel good.  While at the pet store on an errand, I thought to pick up some rawhide bones for his dogs.  A couple days ago, I stopped in to the local book seller to see whether anything caught my eye.  I selected a theoretical physics title about the origins of the universe.  I’d remembered it from my days at Farnes & Roble, and it was now in paperback.  I knew that he would absolutely love it!

He had dodged our Christmas day plans several times already, so I thought I would stop asking.  Instead, I decided to drop his small bag of gifts (along with some baked goods for his guests) by the inn on my way to work Christmas Eve.

He seemed thrown at my arrival, but not unhappy.  “You didn’t have to get me anything,” he said in awe, as he hugged me.

“I know I didn’t.  It’s not much.  And some is for the dogs, so don’t let them be alone with it,” I warned, feeling all warm and giving.  I was so happy I’d made a gesture now, even though our relationship status was rocky and now waning.  I wanted him to have a good Christmas.

As I began to leave for work, he called out from the kitchen, “Do you want to come over here tonight?”  I was floored.  This was way outside the boundaries of our non-relationship.  On the other hand, he did like to inject the last-minute plans in my days.  I already had plans in Loudonville, but it was snowing heavily just then, and my plans were thrown into question.

“Uh…I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know if I’m still going into Albany tonight….  Maybe?”  He was buzzing around to and fro in the kitchen.  He’d gotten a late start on breakfast.

“Okay, I’ll call you.  NO!  I’ll come in to see you at Graples.  I’ll come in later today and see you.”  I left, feeling happy and excited.  And if the weather kept up, I’d be feeling cozy and warm with my favorite Colombian and his family.

My day at work was stressful.  I was reminded that I absolutely hate working Christmas Eve!  I have no patience for last-minute shoppers, nor for their selfish questions.  The holiday itself makes me very homesick, and full of sentimentality for the holidays I enjoyed as a child.  This year, I didn’t even have a Christmas tree.  I hadn’t shopped for gifts, for anyone but Daniel and Patrick, and some small trinkets for Shelly Belly.  It didn’t feel like Christmas.  I wanted very much to be with Daniel and his family, as I knew it wasn’t his happiest day, either.

Late in the afternoon, I sent him a message to make sure we had plans.  I had to have him choose:  Christmas Eve, or Christmas.  The other would belong to Shelly Belly’s family.  But he messaged back, saying “Not tonight.”  His family had made other arrangements, and now he was committed to following them.  It seemed he hadn’t intended to tell me.

Beyond that, he said he needed to talk to me.  Seriously.  Freaked out, I immediately called him.  “What’s wrong?”

He was upset– “uncomfortable” was the word he used.  He had told me he didn’t celebrate Christmas, and he was uncomfortable with my giving him gifts.  He hadn’t gotten me anything in return.  He wanted to talk to me about it.  But not now.  “Listen,” I told him, “it’s really not much.  It’s a lot in the bag but it’s nothing.  Dog bones and the dvd you already knew about, and something very small.  Just enjoy it.”  He insisted we needed to talk.  He said he would call me before the end of my workday.

He never called.  At all.  At the end of the day, I sent him a message.  I had had several hours now to get myself worked up.  I couldn’t believe he was angry that I’d bought and made him gifts!  It seemed he wanted to give them back.  I told him I didn’t expect to see him again.  I was finished with being treated like an afterthought.  He never called when he said he would–NEVER–and now he had messed with my holiday.  Again.  I was done.

The thing is, the more hurt I felt, the more angry I became, and the more it became glaringly obvious that he didn’t intend to communicate back to me.  At all.  At the end of  the night, I decided on a whim to look him up on Racebook, a social networking site I frequent.  I wondered whether he had come back to it.  Oh, my friends, he had.  Recently.

He had spent the past several days building his Friend network, and sending messages back and forth.  (Some of them, when he “didn’t have time” to call me as he’d said he would.)  He posted photos, and wrote quite a few messages.  I was surprised, to say the least.  He never returns my emails, and claims not to enjoy writing even short messages.  But there he was, all happy and friendful.  Fifty-seven friends accumulated in just a couple of days.  And one of them was Melissa.

I couldn’t help noticing that there were several pictures of her.  So I clicked on them, to see the comments.  And there he was, commenting to her, in a rather flirtatious manner.  One of the photos was the larger version of her profile picture.  On the other side of the table was Daniel, smiling and affectionately holding her hand.  I might not have let it bother me, except that he had to comment on how hot she always looked in that dress. 

What was I doing?  My anger was growing every second as I realized that he had this busy, secret life about which I knew nothing!  How could I have been dating, sleeping with, and falling for this man, when I knew so little about his real life and NONE of his list of friends?  And I wasn’t on that list.  Didn’t even know he was back on Racebook.  He’d requested a friendship with the very crazy old ex, and not with me, his supposed favorite dance partner.  How could I have been so foolish?

So I did what any hungry, sugared-up, cold-stricken woman would do.  I flipped out.  Flipped out bigtime.

Within a couple hours, he had blocked me on Racebook, which I fully expected.  I deserved that.  In fact, I deserved, now, to be the object of some of his own anger.  But I couldn’t get over the freaking Christmas presents.

I woke up this morning to angry text messages.  NOW he wanted to communicate–only, not really.  He wanted to talk at me, say his piece, and then enjoy silence from my end.  It wasn’t going to happen.  I was back to hating him, loathing the way he’d treated me, and wanting my money.  (Yes, he still owed me.  And Christmas was the deadline.)  So I began making demands.

I had to go there for it.  When he finally came down from his apartment–which I’ve still never seen after all these months, by the way–I was pretty chilled out on his couch.  I had taken a hot bath, and gained some objectivity, and decided not to make a scene.  But then I saw the bag of gifts.  Still wrapped.  Not touched.  My blood began to boil.

If that weren’t bad enough, I couldn’t help noticing my large container full of fudge was still…full of fudge.  Not a piece, other than the couple he’d sampled, had been touched.  It was to have been a treat for his guests, and he’d apparently never removed it from the fridge, not in the solid week he’d had it.  I came positively uncorked.

A torrent of scathing words has never been spewed to rival what was unleashed on him today.  The words I used were not important.  It was the complete and utter rage and uncontrolled blast of emotion that will stick with him.  He was very cool and detached as he wrote out my check, receiving a screaming airbomb full of hatred and disgust from me as he did so.  Somewhere inside me, I couldn’t help noting that my acupuncturist would not feel this was a proper channeling of my emotions.  But I was sick, and hurt, and frustrated, and disgusted.  I knew this would be the last time I would ever see Daniel, and my rage only grew with his silence.

He called the police before I left.  I know he thought I was going to hit him.  If I may be honest to the general public, I’m not sure how I stopped myself from doing so–I was that mad–except that I knew he could take me in a fight.  (I may be mean, but I don’t weigh a buck-twenty soaking wet.)  On the way out the door, I dumped his bag of presents on a table.  What was I going to do with them?  And the fudge landed squarely on the parking lot.  All ten pounds of it.

I’ve known for quite some time that I needed to let him go.  He was mean, and cold, and not very nice to me.  As far as boyfriends go–and he never really was, it turned out–he was an awful one.  He lied from the beginning, conned me into doing things I never would have done before, kept me on the outer fringes of his life, and gave me only enough attention to keep me coming back for more.  It was not one of my finer moments in time.  And it wouldn’t have gotten me where I wanted to go in life.

All of that, I would have overlooked.  I would have put up with his mental abuse, his moodiness, his demands for “understanding” and respecting his boundaries, his dedication to his business–and really, to absolutely everything in his life–ahead of me.  But this one thing, this one, solitary thing, finally pushed me over the edge:  When I give you a gift, you’d better fucking say Thank You.  You can reject my heart all you want.  But no one, NO ONE, rejects my fudge.

Digging Deep, and Shoveling Yellow Snow

It has been a long week since my last post.  Tonight I take the time to write, only because I am too sick to get up off the couch and do anything else.

One of the major occurrences in our neck of the woods has been the arrival of mounds upon mounds of snow.  It came down fast and furiously, on a couple of less-than-enjoyable days.  (Tonight, as we prepare for Santa, a warm rain is washing much of it away.)  The first one after our major ice storm occurred on my second night of Latin dancing with The Colombian.  It was a late night, and the snow had covered the ground by a couple of inches by the time we retired for what was left of that night at Ina Hall.  I knew we were in trouble as I watched him dust the piles off his car in my driveway early the next day.

The second big snow came a couple days later.  I was at work, and decided to come home to walk/get Katie at lunch time, just as it began coming down in puffy, white blankets.  As I surmounted the Big One on Hill Road, my car lost forward momentum and I began to spin my tires.  No amount of fancy German engineering could defeat what Mother Nature had in store.  I finally landed in my own driveway, after backtracking and picking a safer, longer route; and there I stayed for the rest of the day.

I was already sore by then.  Too much shoveling, too much hard work at my now-intense job at Graples.  My neck was so stiff I couldn’t sleep at night.  Now here I was, again in the driveway, again with the plastic snow shovel, again fighting nature and the Hoosick Falls plow trucks, who insist on throwing a huge mound at the end of my drive.

Afterward, my muscles were screaming.  I had already been sore and stiff for no known reason.  Daily hot baths, teas, and hot water bottles offered little relief.  So I did the only thing I could think to do next:  I looked forward to acupuncture.

I was almost embarrassed to tell Marc how I felt.  In truth, I had every reason to feel crappy.  In defiance of his advice, I had not yet cut out caffeine, and was not regularly taking the supplements I had been prescribed.  I was eating more; but not enough to make a change in my weight or my guts.  But worse than my lack of dedication to the program was what I was about to describe for him in gory detail:  “This is going to sound crazy…but this soreness in my neck and back…it feels less like muscle pain, and more like–how can I say this–snot, great heaps of mucus, trying to crawl out through my skin.”

He told me that wasn’t strange at all.  I have sickness in my body.  That much has been clear for some time.  And now it is trying to work its way out.  “And when it does, it is going to be very ugly.  But you have to let it go.  You have to let it out.”  This day, however, my body was not ready to let go.

Unfortunately, neither was my mind.  Each time the needles would bring me to the cusp of total relaxation, just to the point where I could view my own thoughts without being a participant, I would snap myself back from it.  I was unwilling to go where the disease wanted to take me.  The mucus seemed to be settling in for a long while.  I left the appointment disappointed and disillusioned.

I considered the homework assignment I’d been given the previous week.  I was to examine myself as a child, and remember who I was back then.  Then I was to see myself in the future, and journal about this as well, setting pictures of the life I wanted to have a year from now, five years from now, twenty or thirty years from now.  I was to see my partner, my house, and how I wanted to be living.

As I was writing the journal assignment, I suppose I had The Colombian in my head.  I haven’t yet found his purpose in my life, and I’ve always hoped there was some deeper significance to his being in it.  But now, as I drove from one appointment to the next, I considered that man about whom I’d written.  And he wasn’t The Colombian at all.

He was Married Guy.  He was the soul-shattering love that seemingly never should have occurred.  He was more than just the one who got away; he was the One.  Only of course he wasn’t the One!  He was someone else’s One.  But the point seemed to be that his was the kind of love I wanted to have:  patient, understanding, strong, true.  It was a kind of love that reached straight into that young child I once was, and pulled her out of me to be worn on the outside.  That was what I needed.

So what about The Colombian?  How did he figure into my life?

When he hurt me again today–purposefully, I might add–I realized it, as sure as the sun shines:  he is the mucus, screaming to get out.  He is the (literally) foreign object inside of me, the one that doesn’t belong.  I’ve let him fester and swell, eating away at my insides, taking little pieces of my soul with him as he walks away.  And he always walks away.  It is in his nature.

Almost the moment I realized this, the mucus began to creep up and release itself.  It filled my head, and tickled my nose.  And anger set in.  Anger I’m no longer supposed to have.  But anger is a secondary emotion, and in this case, it was secondary to hurt.  He hurt me.  Many, many times.  Now I am finally beginning to feel it, and it is working its way out of my body.  The trick now, I suppose, is to honor and process the hurt, without letting the anger take me over.

I am realizing that sometimes in life, we hit a hill that seems to be surmountable, but we may be misjudging how deep the snow goes.  It is human nature to sit suspended, listening to our wheels spin, hoping that something will give way and propel us forward.  But it may just be that the best course of action is to stop, back up, turn around, and find a longer, safer way around.  It might take longer, and it might be unfamiliar.  The important thing is to keep moving forward, no matter what occurs.

The Colombian is a pretty steep hill.  I am beginning to see that there is no reward in reaching the top, just more hills.  If I want to get to where I’m going, it might be best to find the long and winding road I was meant to travel.

Gravy, Minus Biscuit

So much of the physical emptiness I feel, the constant hunger I allow myself to feel as I starve and suffer the effects of it, is related to the absence of Biscuit. I feel a tremendous sense of sadness and loss when I think of him. While my life here is sometimes happy, and always dramatic, it is half lived without one of my most cherished friends. I’ve said before that Biscuit reflects my own sadness back at me, and seems to want to comfort me in my dark moments. He wants to hold my sadness and anxiety. How can he do his job from the other side of the region?

Dogless Whisperer

In preparation for my trip to The Big Apple tomorrow, I’ve sent the Queen Bitch away for a sleepover. She joined her Uncle Patrick and brother Biscuit–and, much to his chagrin, Wyatt Earp–on their journey home. If I never felt lonesucky before, I certainly do now.

Warm Latin Rain: Take Two

We danced and danced and danced. And it was joyful. I remembered very quickly what had attracted me in the first place: his confidence, his respectfulness, his willingness to let go and become a part of the music around him. When I allowed myself to let go as well, I also remembered that we dance well together. But I have to let him lead in order for it to work.

Mi Gordita

This morning when I shoved the Queen Bitch into her snappy red jacket, I was reminded of my favorite scene in the classic “Tommy Boy,” where Chris Farley’s Tommy Boy attempts to make David Spade’s character laugh by doing “Fat Guy in a Little Coat.” Katie is a fat dog in a little coat. Like a heavy woman in too-small pants, the coat rides up on her body, wrinkling and scooching until it is too short for her. People are beginning to stare.

Morning Cuddles

These days, I wake to an entire crew in my bed. Little Willie’s is often the first face I see, because he spends a good chunk of the night lying squarely on my stomach, facing me so his wake-up screams land like firebombs in my bleary-eyed face. Biscuit lies at my right hand, just touching me, so he can roll over and sneak a French kiss if I’m not paying attention. Katie guards the lower passenger side, just in case a large cat attempts to sneak in during the night. (It hasn’t happened in many months.)

Poor Richard

Richard and I spent most of our time together talking about how much we hated what we do for a living. We shared our dreams for the future, and our memories of how good things used to be where we’d been before. We talked about our families, and groused about our coworkers, and shared funny dog stories. He became like a grandpa to me, even though he is the same age as my dad.