Okey dokey Rae.
I guess I will let you know if I CAN’T talk about it anymore, OK?
You must know I have no real answers. I am just a survivor–of many things.
The trick to surviving anything intact, is maybe different all the time, for everybody. Don’t you think?
No one explained to me that I would not do it gracefully, that it would not really stop hurting before I could learn to bear it, that others might judge me, that I would still lose something for cutting the offending part from my life.
I kind of thought that if it was the right thing to do, it would feel better.
Later, yes. But not for some time.
No one told me that 90% of people who had “advice” for me had no clue what I needed.
I am really not saying this for you, it’s more just what is in me. I am so far away from it now, that, surviving it until it passes a little, that I can now reflect on it without pain. That took an eternity. [Not very hope inspiring am I?] I guess I say that, honestly, because for most, I don’t believe it goes that way. A little while, yes. Then, on to something else. Most do not become hainted, right?
Isolation is the worst curse–no one really understands, so one keeps them and their advice away. And no one can bear your pain if it comes out all over as mine did. OK, there was one or two. But I am just guessing–even in a crowd, or the arms of another, the apartness is there. The missing part that is another that has bound a part of you to him, like a hostage really.
I sound hostile–I am so aware of the other side there can be. The sweetness. There wouldn’t be any of this if not for that. Maybe it’s called something else sometimes, anyway it comes. It is always uncanny, eerie/easy at the same time, overwhelming, your own wayward selfs lost pieces returned, your orphaned insides finally home.
There is really so much more dynamic in place than that, but I am speaking of feelings.
I am really, really out on a limb, letting any of this out in words, and obviously [I hope] you know I am not trying to tell you about YOU. I just believe this is what he brings. It’s a sort of talent.
I have always hesitated to call him a sociopath. I really don’t like the black and white of labels. I also call a spade a spade when I have to. I did once. He was good natured about it, or appeared to be.
Still, in all the time I have spent studying these people who are studying us, I have learned some things that finally explained it. Him. It. The why and how.
So where does that leave things? Easy to deal with him [not deal with him], and with the ability to have peace finally, at least about that. That’s all I know–until I saw it that way, I was still trying to figure it out–him/me/it/why/how. Most people cannot understand how it is to find yourself where you are. I know because I have been studying THEM [regular people] all this time too. Not to emulate as I cannot. But to understand what might be different about ME too.
That difference from the norm, that is the hook. No one understands, and then there is one who is different too. And it seems the same difference, for the symptoms seem the same. Like your piece, your letter. But as you already know that I think– they LOOK the same, they create an alchemy together that is yet still a whole different thing, and is very powerful. Yet they are NOT the same. A person can tell me they are, and make me believe it, and I may for a while. At least I once did. But it was a poisonous understanding of what was “wrong” with me, or “same” of me.
So much overlap, one of us had to be right, right? If we are the same, soulmates, as one, even in moments, then he is like me. Flawed but pure. Broken but whole. Jaded, but with hope.
Or. He is as me, so I am as him.
No. I am trying to look at a person with reasoning that has nothing to do with who they are.
I stopped writing because of this. See–I could go on and on and on and on and on. An infinite array of shadesofgray. I drove me crazy.
It made me think I was someone I do not have to be. It made me believe he had redeemed ME. Even then, the twist, and then I must redeem him. Another twist, as he cannot be. Redeemed. He can only play out this scenario again again again again again.
It is quite possible he went somewhere with me he never had before, and perhaps has not since. I do not flatter myself at all with this thought. I am not the only person who has heard those words from him. But there is a chance my first statement is true. And here, if true—-it didn’t matter. He still had to do the only thing that works for him. Play out his endless cycle of redemption and rejection. That’s the script anyway. One person after another, or the same person again and again. And again.
And another person, and the same one, and another one, and another, and the same one.
I wanted him to stay so badly, at one time. I would not abandon hope for him, us, myself. I knew enough of his truth, that SOME part of him still got to make a CHOICE, that I believed he would not choose to lose hope. He explained himself finally, with the statement that he had believed that I could save him. From himself.
It’s really what it all amounted to, in part. His choice. If you are without ability to feel connection with other humans, you still don’t have to choose destruction. He just did.
Blend in equal parts of a personality type that will always opt for what makes them feel good, and real connection with other humans just cannot. Power can.
I would stop wanting him to stay. He would move a mountain to change that.
You would not believe the life span a cycle like this can endure.
Or maybe you would.
I am clearly impassioned about the subject, but not because it is him so much. I have seen this game played out on so many levels, with various degrees of destruction involved, up to and including ultimate destruction of many kinds. He plays with fire and feeds off that, as tho it were his right, and as tho he would turn to dust when the sun came up if he did not get his fill. THAT is a tall order to fill. For he will never be filled. Your fate is quite secondary to his appetite and need, and in fact it’s a given, all his life, that his partners will be made not important, impotent, left with out their wings, in a heap. Fuck! Could I ever be done saying what I have about this, once I start?
I don’t want to have anything vested in what you choose for yourself, especially if it has to do with him. Still, this pours out of me. Did anyone ever tell me? A few, very few, did try. A warning of sorts. All men, which is funny. Their statements were lame, any girl would bristle.
No one did ever tell me to what degree he was “impulsive” as it was put to me by one. No one ever did tell me my association with him would damage me beyond belief. No one, not once, ever told me what he is capable of. Correction, he himself eventually told me some, most of it voluntarily. Most of it mixed with lies.
A liar is easy to deal with once you name them
You just know when they open their mouths lies fall out.
A truth teller and a liar in one, now that is a hybrid not many know the rules of. There is no operators manual as yet. The one I found that works, is the one that works for garden variety liars. Assumption in this case, works well. I assume they are lying, and don’t let them twist my mind into a pretzel as I try to discern truth from lie. It’s a black hole, finding the lies within lies, the truths, the lies within the truths within the lies.
There is like, no end to this. The reason I do not get started. It makes me feel there is really no end, when for me, I know otherwise. I stopped trying to talk to anyone about it and as I have said, I stopped writing because of it. That may not be a good thing—it was one of the casualties.
So…Rae. This is where I became exasperated with myself, the sheer volume of things I can say on the matter, when in fact long ago there came the time when there was so little left to say. He himself has at one time or another, heard it all, and yet heard nothing. I was tireless, relentless, sleepless, in my quest for truth, in my pursuit of speaking what I thought that was.
I spent hours weeks and days and months, yes, years, pouring out my soul and any ounce of intelligence I possessed, to voice, to pen and paper. To him and for him, to myself, to the air, to a trash can. Reams of paper he sometimes just threw away unopened. Somewhere, I hope only in the ethers, are entire treefuls of paper-crap, gutwrenching heart stopping soul twisiting tear jerking mind blowing young revelations and pleas to a slimly seen higher self, in a soon to be fully formed card carrying womanizing sociopathic demon lover.
Whatever your dreams, I will find them, I will remind you, I will be them. I will find your darkest terrors, dig them out with my bare hands and pet them into submission, docility, surrender. I will make you safe, I must–I must. I will find all the pieces. I will take your body your soul your broken angry scared assaulted ignored places. I will take them and heal them all–and I will never even tell you that I am. You will just find that I have done this.
I will take your darkest terrors, your broken angry scared assaulted ignored and healed and loved places. Now. I will smash them, for you trust something in me, and I have gotten your attention. Because I can. Because I need for you to want and need and crave me, to live about me and die inside because of me, for I have no other. Other power–I cannot feel the power of God or the universe, for I am eternally separated, the original Hell, and I am alone with the only feelings I know how to create. The rush of adrenaline I get whenever I acheive a conquest, when I WIN. When *I*, can MAKE something happen.
Or the feeling I have when something amuses me or entertains me. Life is like pornography for me. One dimensional, lurid, fantastic, obvious. I sense something more. I cannot really have more, so I do my best to attain the closest thing–the PROOF of recognition from another who can. Someone as deep and intelligent as I aspire to be seen as. For I have no else–no other meaning.
I play at spirituality, and as always, I “excel” at all I do–I am well versed in metaphysics, and the unseen world. I practice techniques I have studied that show my skill in that world. I do indeed have some talents. I am a quick study. It takes me far–I can connect with nearly anyone, on a good day. Occasionally someone is repulsed by me, on instinct, but I can sense this coming and usually avert any serious damage to the goals I am reaching for in the moment.
Somehow, with all my talent and ability to move through the world, my many superficial skills in so many areas, all connecting me to so many—I am still alone. No one can touch me, but I try to touch as many as possible. I cannot know I exist otherwise, my ego will not allow me to just live life. I must attain, win, be the best, even if it means none of that is really real. I cannot get the tingle of life inside me any other way.
Except for one. All my life, whenever I can make an innappropriate and risky sexual encounter happen–I do. Especially if I feel like I “got away” with something, or made someone want me. Or if I get over on someone, or can keep a part of myself from one who loves me. “THIS–you shall never have!” I don’t care how I do this.There is nothing noble about this–even I don’t pretend there is. It’s one of the few things I still think I feel, is all, and frankly, it has always been somewhat this way. I fed it, so it grew, and little by little, I began to feel little, nearly nothing at all, for any other connection with body or soul.
I pursue those connections anyway, as there is really no other way to play out my favorite game. Redeem and reject. I must first find the hidden nugget of lost innocence and faith and love, buried in an aloof womans heart. She must be a worthy opponent. Unworthy are delegated to ammunition status or are whores for my amusement and self degredation.
My worthy opponent, I may take months or years to win her trust and friendship. I am not a needy or possessive kind of guy–I respect her boundaries. Except for all the ones I quickly begin to violate, one by one. All in the guise of love. Comradery. Sameness.
Eventually, I get what I was looking for—her truth. I have not much of my own. And I become bored, restless. I do not mind revealing this in subtle and not so subtle ways. Staring at maps of the high seas has always been a favorite one with me. Sometimes, I begin to place numerous international calls on her phone, and she will see the bill. She will discover that they are not all phone sex lines.
When confronted, I will tell some of the truth, and the rest will be lies. She will go crazy trying to understand which of the lies are the real lies.
Later, the real truth will come out. Still much later, she will discover that the REAL truth, was the lie.
One day, the fun of cat and mouse has just plum worn off for me.
The huntress reduced to a scared mouse. By turns, a scared and angry cat.
One day, she tires of me and my destructiveness, my disrespect , my shit. And she begins to get over me. The hook is slipping out. I can always smell it just when it is on the brink of ripeness–this strength to push the last prong from her flesh.
And I begin the dance again.
I always have something in my back pocket, just in case. I will not be without an audience. Even in my episodes of self imposed solitude, there will be something in the works.
My image of myself alone, or virtually so, is always of star crossed lover, victim to my fate, Jonny Lang Wander This World-ing, and for extra flavor, I would like to man a ship with your name on her side. This kind of thing romanticises my disconnection, my selfishness and alienation from all human connection perfectly. This way, you will think I long for you, but cannot give up my love–the sea. She is an all consuming lover, and will not let me go, tho I love you so. I will honor that love, star crossed, ill fated, sad and mourned, with your namesake.
In truth, I keep you in bondage even in my abandonment of you, even in my flight from all things decent, even as I steal my best friends boat, even as I betray everyone who ever cares for me–you will be bound. Because also–I will be back one day. And the sailor sings “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be. But my life, my love and my lady, is the sea.”
