Yesterday

I woke up one step closer to normal yesterday. This past week crashed over me like a wave. It slammed into me, snatched the breath from my body, and left me choking up my guts on the shore. Yesterday, the wave receded. The tide went out. I felt like myself again.

I rode my bike to the Cat Vet, Redman’s "Smash Something" cued up on my i-pod, and I realized the my mood was not flavored with sadness or rage. I petted the kitten into a roaring purr, ran around with Mocha and Sebastian, and I couldn’t help but smile. It’s been a week since I couldn’t help but smile. The feeling shocked me. I found myself poking at the sore spot, the emotional wounds left from this week, and while they were still there, I could feel them scabbing over. Scabs are ugly, but without them, new flesh can’t be born.

All day, the elevator music of the world was singing my song. I found myself humming along in the Goodwill, buying half off clothes with my mother and grandmother. The Country Buffet was playing the tunes from my childhood. I don’t even remember the words, or the tunes now, but yesterday the song list of various stores and restaurants was exactly what I needed to hear. Sometimes canned store music can be a balm for your soul.

When I did the intake phone call for counseling this Thursday, the woman asked me why I was seeking therapy. I told her that I felt I was experiencing some symptoms of depression. I told her I didn’t feel right in my own skin. I’d lost my center. I didn’t feel right within myself. She told me I’d likely be best served by a short course of therapy to “process the incident”.  

Those words helped. Since then, I’ve been processing. I’ve been doing my best to put things in perspective. Think through events so I can understand them better.

I asked myself how my pain and anger could wash away so quickly? One week can’t equal seven years – with the last year marked by an extreme betrayal. Then I realized, Malcolm had been eroding my faith in him for more than a week. More than a month. Almost a year, I think. In recent memory, there was the whole Otakon debacle. Right after that, the fact he never directly told me that he had made a promise of commitment to Tammy (wearing her wedding band) until I asked him about the ring.

After him and I broke up, the inconsistencies in his stories became more and more obvious. It seemed everyone around him was “lying” – and he sat in the middle of it, the victim of varying agendas, just doing his best to make everyone happy. His battle cry: I don’t want to hurt this person, or that one. “I don’t want to hurt you.” I remember asking him, before we broke up, “If you surround yourself with people you consider dishonest, what does that say about you?” “If you surround yourself with people you consider insane, what does that say about you?” He brushed it off, claiming a desire to help, or that I didn’t know this person as well as he did, etc.

From all of the motivational literature and MLMs I’ve been involved in through my life, I have learned a few basic truths. Take the 10 people you spend the most time with on a weekly basis, the ones you are most intimate with: they are a reflection of you. I knew that then, but I wanted to believe in Malcolm. After all, he was most intimate with me, and I am both honest and generally sane.

I wasn’t able to believe, ready to believe, until I took a step away from the situation. Outside of the world he had created with me, I could look down on it and see the cracks. The places where things didn’t quite fit together, match up, or make sense. My suspicion is that once Malcolm and I split, he had little motivation and less opportunity to keep these things from me anymore.

I think in his mind, he would call it protecting me. Keeping me from the truth of what was going on, so as not to destroy the illusion. Did I prefer the illusion to the reality? Sure, when I believed the illusion was true. Knowing that the illusion was false, I prefer the truth. The truth may not be as comfortable, but it’s real. Solid. You can’t build a home on a cracked foundation. Eventually, the building will fall. The floors will sink, and when battered by wind, the walls will shake and collapse. No matter how pretty a structure may appear, if there is no truth to it, no foundation, then it has no strength.

I remember sitting on the edge of Malcolm’s bed, just after Tammy went back to Florida, and with tears leaking from my eyes, I said, “I just don’t understand why you can’t be honest with me. Be straight with me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” He responded. He stared down at his hands. Played with Tammy’s wedding band. “I don’t want to see you cry anymore.”

There’s two ways to relieve the psychological pain of seeing another in pain.

1. Help relieve the other person’s pain.
2. Leave the room.

Both are equally effective.

When I found out that Malcolm had been having unprotected sex with Becca while he was with me, I felt completely betrayed. It never crossed my mind that he would do this to himself or me. That we would play games with my life.

But the saddest thing I think about this situation is that I didn’t ask myself in that moment, “How could he lie to me?” I asked myself, “Why didn’t he at least have the self preservation to protect his own life?” which basically boils down to, “Why would he lie about something so important?” I was furious that he had slept beside me every night, woken up with me every morning, and kept his lips firmly shut around a secret that effected my very existence.

But I never thought to ask myself, “How could he lie to my face?”

Evidence had proven to me that he could lie to my face. In the months after we broke up, he lied to my face about stupid things that he knew no longer effected me. Going out to canvas with Becca. Promises he had de-facto made to Nikki. Through that time, I lived with a growing confusion and faint sense of betrayal. He always apologized for having me involved in the drama. Never once did he say, “I don’t want to talk to you about my relationships with these people.” Instead, he just lied. And he never apologized for it. I tried to laugh it off. Because I wanted to believe. I wanted the man I first met, the friend I thought I had. 

On Friday, I decided that if things had to go down this way, this was the best “this way&rdq

uo; for them to go down. Malcolm had sort of sensitized me with a increasing doses of betrayal, and so by the time the final blow came, I was somewhat immune. The pain passed quickly. On the other hand, it meant that the poison had spread so far, the rot so deep, that when the final cut came, like the inside of a dead branch, there was nothing left to save. No life left.

It saddens me because not all the times were bad. Many were good. For a period of my life, I felt a connection to Malcolm that I treasured. That’s the thing about a lie. The best ones are mostly truth. The best ones tell you everything you want to believe.