New Ways of Coping

{The Ex} called me yesterday while I was at work. I was listening to Pandora on my phone when the music stopped. I looked down at my phone and saw a call coming in. [The Ex], said my phone screen. So I walked outside and took the call.

Hi. How are you. Is it okay to call. Should I have emailed.

A conversation. Did I want someone else to be there instead of him when I picked up my things. Because he could arrange that.

I'd actually had this weird fantasy that W would drive to [City] with me while I dropped off my rental truck, and would look appropriately gorgeous and angry and protective while I gave the keys to {The Ex} so he could load it.

(I have imbued W with so much meaning already -- even though W is a drunk and is not present -- I still expect him to be there to help me through some major thing. Why? It is not even something that I have thought through, it just feels inevitable. Of course it will go this way. Of course W will stand by me. W has imbued me with meaning. He has said that he loves me, although I don't know what that means coming from him, I do know that it does not mean what the movies say it means. I think it means he's fond of me, has a lot of respect for me, and misses having someone to love. If things were different - I could have loved you. What he said to me ten years ago when I was crying my eyes out over B., my so-called best friend, whom I had recently found out had a secret girlfriend. How its been ever since -- they all have secret girlfriends, until I, myself, am the secret girlfriend kept a secret from other women. So I keep choosing to be alone, again and again. Listening to W say things to me that have no meaning, but wash over me like waves: "I know this is way too early, but I think I love you." "I love you...you know, in the way that I love all humanity...")

So I had a short conversation with {The Ex}. No, I hadn't thought about whether I wanted him to be there. I wasn't ready to move my things yet, so I wasn't ready to make that decision, or to even think about it. (I love you I love you I love you I've always loved you I can't speak to you without crying or feeling sick to my stomach.) He apologized for everything he'd done. He said he'd written me a letter, had re-written it a thousand times but hadn't sent it. I told him that it was up to him to send it.

I felt reserved, held back. The whole weekend with W, I felt reserved, held back. That's fine, tell me you love me, that's fine. That's fine, tell me that you have feelings for me and are baffled by them. I won't hold you to it. I know you've been dating other women, and are surprised by your feelings for me. I won't hold you to them. Words are too easy, you throw the word "love" out there like it means something. I learned from {The Ex} to watch what a person does, not what they say. And there might be other actions, secret actions, behind the daylight actions that say love, love, love...and a person will tell you who he is. You tell other women that you're a douchebag? I'll listen. I will not try to disprove you. Does the fact that you are kind and sweet to me mean that you are kind and sweet and thoughtful of all women? No. And why is that? Don't tell me. I don't need to know.

I am not a maiden in a tower anymore, but there is a large, large moat between me and men.

I don't know what a good man looks like. I don't know how a good man behaves. I thought {The Ex} was a good man. He seemed to love me and to respect women.

I started crying on the phone, not weeping, but crying, sniffling. (Yes, I hope you're doing well. I am doing well, but I won't, I can't go into it. I won't tell you about my life, and the many myriad ways that I am doing well. I won't tell you funny stories about my friends. I won't tell you about why I was in [City], and what I did there. You are not a friend to me, and I won't share news with you anymore, good or bad.)

I got off the phone and went to the bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and started sobbing. Most of my anger is gone, but I am surprised by the deep amount of sadness that rises up still.

Someone in a meeting once said that going to someone or something inappropriate in an attempt to get your needs met is like going to a hardware store for bread. And building ties to people like {The Ex} and W is like going to the hardware store for bread. They just don't sell bread there. So I shouldn't go looking for it where it won't be found.

I love you I love you I love you but I won't go to the hardware store for bread anymore. I won't, I can't. I want to tell you so many things, I want to share so many things, there are so many questions I want to ask, but it's like you're a puppet or a figment of my imagination. You aren't even real. There is no there there. Someone in a meeting said, "I was trying to have a relationship with an addiction as though it were a real person."

As though it were a real person.

I wanted to call W. But I called some Al-Anon friends instead, and I went over to my friend P's apartment, sat in her kitchen and held her cat while she made soup and I talked. And it was awesome. And then we went to her friend K's apartment, and watched comedies and made coffee and laughed. And I thought, This. This is the way to wholeness. These people are healthy and are interested in becoming more healthy, and they're not trying to take on my problems for me, but they are willing to listen and give me hugs. And that is priceless.

Vanity

Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity.

At the wedding, W. said to me, "You're vain, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes, yes, I am." He said, "I thought you asked me here to show me off to your friends, so you'd have some handsome guy on your arm." Yes, that's it exactly. Plus also the fact that I adored you like an older brother when I was in college, that I looked up to you and admired you. That you took care to listen, and to watch out for me.

At some point over the weekend, W's friend J. offered me a drink, and I declined, and said I didn't drink. W said, "At all?" "At all." "Well, how do you deal with life?" Oh no. Ohhhhh, no.

"I deal. With. Life."

And later, after the wedding, he said, "I can't believe you don't drink at all. That is mind-blowing. Lately, I've been drinking six days a week!" And I asked, "When did that start?" And he said, "1996?" Ah.

Over the course of the weekend, I realized he had no recollection of me from college other than the night we met, when he and his now ex-wife helped me home from a party. The first and last time I needed help like that. He didn't remember talking to me about his wife's family's reaction to the news that she, a sophomore in college, was pregnant. He didn't remember showing me photos from the wedding. He didn't remember sharing with me his own moral qualms about hazing the pledges in his fraternity, nor me saying, "But you don't have to do any of it," and him insisting that of course he did, and hating himself for it. I guess I'd forgotten about that -- conveniently put it out of my mind (denial). The pledges that year loathed him more than anything and anyone. I remember pure hatred shining out of the eyes of my friend, A. A. could not believe that I was friends with W., he shook his head and said, "Maybe some part of him is okay if you're friends with him, but I absolutely hate him." I couldn't imagine anything that they could hate him so much for, except for extreme physical abuse. I know they spanked their pledges with wooden paddles and pissed on them -- I saw it myself out of a window. How can I be friends with these people? What did I say to A..."I believe you, but I myself have never seen that side of him. I have only seen a good and kind side."

That's the only side I ever see in any addict or abusive personality. My friend T. does security for rock stars and movie stars. He once told me that I look like a mark -- like a victim. I asked him what it was about me that made me a mark. He said you're pretty, you're tall, and you greet the whole world with this trusting ray of sunshine. People are drawn to you. And bad ones see you as someone they can take advantage of. I hope that's changed. Sometimes, with addicts/abusers, I feel like they seem me as some sort of small, precious animal that they would like to take care of, and that in taking care of me, they would find atonement, only instead they betray me, and therefore are frustrated by their attempts at finding redemption within my person.

My college friend, L., was (is?) a ladies' man, very gorgeous. Movie star gorgeous, like W. And he's English nobility. I stayed far, far away from L. in that way, but I was friendly with him, but not familiar. I walked into a party once, and he was cutting lines of cocaine on a plate and he looked up and saw me and a strange amalgam of joy/shame crossed his face. He said, "You! You're not supposed to be here! I'm not supposed to be doing this in front of you. I never wanted you to see any of this! I would come and hug you, but I wish I wasn't doing this!" And I said, "It's ok, it's ok, I'll go in the other room." And I did. And in a few moments he came into the other room and he took my face in his hands and he said, "I am so, so sorry you saw that, I never meant for you to see any of that, and I'm embarrassed, but I am so happy to see you." And we weren't particularly that close, at least I didn't think we were all that close. And I was sort of shocked by the intensity of his apparent feelings for me, how protective of me he was, how embarrassed he was by his drug use, and what a pedestal he had placed me on. As far as I was concerned, he was just someone (a beautiful someone) I occasionally saw at parties and chatted with on campus. A while later I ran into him at the library and he gave me his number and asked me to call him and I never did. He was too beautiful, too rich, too worldly, too into drugs and women. But I was amazed at the way he took my face in his hands and apologized for having cut lines in front of me. It felt like I held special meaning for him as something good and pure, and I didn't know until then that I did hold that meaning.

And I never saw {The Ex}'s abusive side. I only saw a wonderful boyfriend, who was dismayed and frustrated by his own jealousy.

W sent me a movie, and said, "It reminds me of us." I said, "There is no us. Watch this 'us' business." There is you, and your women, and there is me. And as long as it is that way, I don't mind the women. But once there's an us, the women have to go. And I know that you won't let go of them.

But the movie was about a little boy who is being chased by the mob, and about an aging ex-gun moll who takes him in and they go on the run together. W said to me, "I'm just a little boy looking for a beautiful woman packing major heat to save me." And I knew immediately that W was something that I could not and would not take on. Oh, but I miss him. He'll have to figure all of that out, the drinking, the women, the dark things he did to my friends in his fraternity, he'll have to handle that all on his own. I can listen, and I can be a friend, but I cannot save him.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

A few years ago I had to learn what my own beauty meant to me. My experience with {The Ex} taught me that my own esteem of my beauty could be used as a weapon of manipulation against me. My vanity was and is a character defect.

I humbly ask that this defect be removed from me.

I feel like W's project right now is to learn what his physical beauty means to him. There was a point when I was dating {The Ex} when I realized how powerful my beauty was to some people. And I thought to myself, I must use my power for the forces of good. I don't know what that means, but it has something to do with giving up my own vanity. I do want a beautiful man. But I want a beautiful man who uses his power for the forces of good.

I've gone and done it again.

Oh shizz, I've gone and done it again. I went back to {City} for my friend's wedding. I'd asked my friend W to be my plus one. W and I ended up going out to museums, to a play, and out clubbing a few days before the wedding. Just as friends. He tells me all about the girls he's dating, and I just laugh because I am far too canny to get mixed up with that. Fast forward a few days later and we're dating. Jesus Christ. This is a guy who drinks all the time and tells girls in bars that he's a douchebag. Way to pick a winner, me.

I fly home and we trade sweet cute emails all day. Then he emails me and says he's asked out a friend of mine, but "just as friends."

Wow, I am such a codependent! Thank god, I have a program! I was able to say do what you want, I ask you not to, but if you're going to, then you and I need to not flirt or talk for a while.

He's a fixer-upper! Oh jeez. I totally saw this coming. Now I keep checking my email. The friend emailed me too. Um, so this is awkward!

Let go let god.