Hunter (and Pray)

As I sit here, I’m somewhat astonished that I have consecutive days with no work for the first time in many weeks, and I have no idea what to do with myself.  Apparently, it’s not only possible to accustom oneself to an endless grinding of days, but also, magically, possible to find moments of relaxation and warmth in between.

This entry isn’t going to be earth-shattering or revelatory. I am tired. It’s just me rambling on, shaking some thoughts free from the tangle and seeing where they land. You will likely learn more about my recent breakup than you have before. Enjoy the glimpse, for I really don’t spend too much time talking about it in everyday life.

First, some random pimpage: If you’ve never stopped by PostSecret you really should. It’s a shame they don’t keep an archive, which I didn’t realize for a very long time. I love this site. Sometimes they’re just ok, but many times, I am incredibly touched by what people send in. It’s beautiful, poignant, and sometimes heartbreaking. I really need to buy the books from Amazon.

Thanks. Moving on.

Today, my apartment hunt neared completion.  I submitted an application at the best of the ones I examined–and now, I must pray it is accepted, for my options aren’t exactly overflowing.

Using the word "shithole" would be unfair.  Having been spoiled by living in a house for the last four years, I am less than pleased about being potentially forced into 563 square feet, saddened by the loss of multiple windows, trying desperately to comprehend where I am going to fit the detritus I call "possessions", and already wondering just how much stuff I will simply have to throw away, or destroy, in lieu of paying even more money for a storage facility.

Despite that, it is liberating, and that pleases me immensely. It will be nice to have my shithole, rather than being tethered to this place. Yes, I will miss the house. It is a very cute house; I loved it when we looked at it, as it’s a perfect size for a beginning couple. It was a home.

Four months ago, I was shifted from my orbit and irrevocably steered off into space. One and half months of futilely waiting for her to get her act together passed slowly, and two and a half months of saving money and hoarding cash has passed quickly. Today, we went through the house, dividing up possessions and negotiating. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, obviously, since we’re able to live together semi-amicably. Still, it’s silly how you can argue over something like who gets what pillows.

It’s been an interesting couple of months living here. Most of the time, we ignore each other, except light conversation in passing, or the occasional joke.  The downstairs is mine, the upstairs is hers, and that’s a perfectly acceptable division of space.  Ironically, the most fun we’ve had was in the last week, because we both are avid American Idol fans and couldn’t resist shouting our opinions and laughter to one another.  For a second, it was normal, it was almost comfortable, almost fun.

I’d really like a larger, more expensive place, but my income won’t cut it. That income is largely why I’m still here–there’s no way I could have moved out immediately. When I accepted the position at the library, it was with full understanding that it was part-time, with room for advancement through the system (which heavily promotes from within). It was for experience, it was a ground-level position. We knew it would be at least a year until I was able to progress further. Then, of course, four months later, she drops the bomb.  

Having been through a very bad divorce-style breakup, her recognition of my situation was very welcome. My library monthly income is around $560. For comparison, the apartment I am looking at is $550, which is far and away on the cheap end of the spectrum throughout the Puget Sound area.

Yes, life is a sweet fruit.

Ironically, I am only set up to move out this quickly for two reasons. One, because at the same time I was hired there, I was hired by another company to do occasional contract work that pays twice as much as the library.  I can do this work from home, which means it fits nicely around my part-time schedule. Unfortunately, it also means that at times, during deadline crunches, I work 60-hour weeks (such as the part of January in which my OD was noticeably bare of entries.)

Two, because of one of her less-than-sterling traits, which is the inability to discipline her spending.  I should have been insistent at the time, I suppose, but when you think you’re going to be with someone for the long haul, you tend to take the accompanying farsighted view of your finances.  For a year, she dumped thousands–and I mean thousands–of dollars into her boat, leaving none for our future/nest egg and a couple of times far exceeding budget and needing to be reined in by me so that we weren’t in the red.

I certainly wasn’t going to stand in the way of her building her dream. Thus, I took it upon myself to scrimp and save every penny that I earned, for the both of us. I was successful.  Now, that nest egg is the backbone of my solvency.

Indeed, the argument that started the process indelibly down the road to separation occurred one day when, boat built, her vacations taken, and the latter quarter of the year approaching, I was distressed to find that she was still partitioning money away not for us, not for the planned nest egg, not for the promised improvements on the house, our future, or anything involving the two of us, but for another boat. This caused quite the argument, as she had gone back on her original plans to wait a year between building them to allow us to accrue wealth.  This was when my eyes opened to the fact that she simply didn’t want to invest her time, effort, or money into our relationship anymore–and indeed, hadn’t for many months.  In my mind, I was empowering her to consummate her dream early in our relationship before our future robbed her of some of that freedom and had no reason to suspect she would deviate from plan.

Funny how that turned out. I’ve yet to talk to anyone who can grasp the pure craziness of it.

Today, before we Negotiated, I had to laugh. I was telling her I had applied for an apartment. She said she was relieved; she needed to sell the house because she was "barely getting by". Now, having handled the finances for the last four years (and as recently as four months ago), I am finely attuned not only to the household expenditures, but to her income. I said this to her, and said that by my reckoning, especially since I was no longer a financial drain to her, she should be making $600-700 a month in profit, and that "barely getting by" was either impossible or an outright lie. 

She rightfully looked a bit abashed at being caught in such a gross exaggeration, and confessed it was because she was putting it all into her boat fund.  I also noted the numerous amounts of money she’s spent recently on new computer games, multiple MMORPG subscriptions, books, and technological bits.

It’s an excellent microcosm of our relationship, which is her inventing a distorted perception of reality that doesn’t match at all with the actual situation, which usually involves her taking responsibility, being proactive, or examining things objectively and realistically.

Willful blindness is one of the things I am not going to miss.

I can only dream of "barely getting by" like that.  I guarantee I could do a lot with that money.  For example, if I had that much, I guarantee my dear Ceir wouldn’t have to deal with bunny pee *or* a cat in heat.

And I’d be applying to much, much better places.

Still, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. She’s just terrified of having to deal with any sort of personal responsibility or obligation, and fabricates a false reality that supports whatever her immediate interest is at the time.

We all have our demons. She could just as easily say that I’m a heartless bastard who has a strict and uncompromising view of the world as black and white and demands the world adhere to his personal principles on a level that borders on obsessive or abnormal.

See, you can make anyone sound bad with the right words, which is one reason I’ve refrained from talking about things in my recent past.  Despite the fact I’ve moved on emotionally, I’m not stupid enough to think that I don’t have residual bitterness, or a tendency to paint things a bit harsher than I might a year from now, five years from now, ten. And, true to my obsessive adherence to principle, I don’t think that’s necessarily right.

That’s why I write disclaimers. 

By and large, let it be said that daily life as cohabitants is not stressful at all. It might be best expressed by a passage from Little Children, the brilliant novel and likewise stunning movie (until the last scene, which was completely different from the book, and I did not like it, no sir.)

Oddly, those last two years were their happiest as a couple, though they rarely slept in the same bed and kept their social calendars as separate as possible. Something about the expiration date on the marriage made each of them more generous than they’d been in the past–your spouse’s annoying habit becomes a lot less oppressive if you don’t have to imagine putting up with it until the day one of you dies. 

Indeed. And because neither of us is terribly eager to spend our time glowering at one another, we usually get along just fine when we interact. I should rephrase that–she has absolutely zero reason to glower at me, which she readily admits. I made some mistakes, some misjudgments, and surely I’m not perfect, but I was a good boyfriend.  The onus of the breakup rests not on any mistreatment of her by me. We can firmly paint ourselves in the camp of neglector and neglectee, striver and conceder, devout and fickle, deluded and deluded (for you see, we were simply deluded in different ways.)

Thus, what I should say was that neither of us is terribly eager to repeat the "Michael glowers at her and she shamefacedly apologizes for the 100th time and calls herself a worthless human being in hopes that he’ll somehow give her a Get Out of Jail Free card by going, ‘no, no, you’re not worthless at all’ and assuaging her guilt."

She used to do that at first–and during the grieving process of the breakup, those types of discussions happen.  Once things were final, however, I no longer played those games. Sometimes, I (and others) think I’m cold or callous, but I think it’s really a matter of simply being able to place things in their proper perspective. I am stringently polite and considerate to her, I am scrupulously fair in all discussions, but I am also firmly polite and unyielding in my refusal to allow myself to be drawn into emotional games and grant her any sort of emotional absolution.

Simply, she’s not my problem anymore.

My only concern, as I told her today when she momentarily dipped into her self-flagellation-in-hopes-of-my-excusing-her, was to ensure that the split was as equitable and fair as possible. She lost all rights to anything more long ago.

Mostly, however, I avoid the dramatic by simply keeping things light. Light is good. There’s enough darkness in the world without contributing more unnecessarily.  I don’t think she can understand that I am not obsessed with trying to find ways to cause her pain or make her feel bad, and for the first month she looked like a beaten puppy every time I opened my mouth to her, as if she expected me to do nothing but spew venom and call her names.  Sorry, I’m not that man.  In the last two and a half months, I can think of three times I’ve said something that might not have been nice or polite, one of which I wrote a poem about.  Failing only thrice probably deserves some sort of Ex-Boyfriend Award.  I crack a lot of jokes, and make her laugh a lot, because that’s what I love doing most. Even more than writing, I love to make people laugh.

Laughter sets you free. One reason I enjoy the library so much is that I adore my coworkers.  Of course Heather is marvelous–our shifts together are essentially one giant ongoing conversation that we grudgingly allow to be interrupted by work. Everyone else, however, is likewise charming. We laugh and tease a lot, and even if I don’t call them all friends, I am glad to partake regularly in their company. Even on the worst days, when I’m feeling down or alone or bitter or anxious, there’s always moments of sweetness and light.  Perhaps it’s a sign of getting older, but I never thought the day would come when work was the best part of my life.

It’s a sign that I like my coworkers that I’ve talked to a few of them about my breakup, and my life situation.  In the old days, my lips were sewn shut. One of them, Chelsea, whom I consider a friend and really should start hanging out with if our schedules coincide better, is flabbergasted that HFoL and myself can coexist peacefully. As I explained to Chelsea, it’s relatively simple: You are either on my island, or you are off my island, and there isn’t an in-between. My ex is certainly off of it, which means I’m not investing emotionally in her. In terms of my life, she is disposable. Our time remaining is limited. She has meaning in the past, but not in the future–and when someone has no meaning in your future, how do you treat them? Think of the countless people each day who mean nothing to your life. I’m as pleasant to her as I am to the workers at Panera Bread who know me by name, or a coworker who I’m not particularly close to, but desire constructive relations with. I have neither the need nor desire to be everyone’s best friend; I expend my energies on people who deserve them. If I pay you significant attention, it means you are very important to me.

Thus, it’s remarkably easy to interact with her on a superficial level, because she has ceased mattering to me except for the obvious and direct way–being, essentially, my landlord and primary reference. There’s no real discomfort or drama 95% of the time, and when it is, it passes fairly quickly because I know I won’t have to put up with it much longer.

As the date of liberation approaches, I’m looking forward to simply having time to myself.  I’ll wait patiently for my next relationship, hopefully with my Equal and Match. I posted about What I Want a few entries ago, so I won’t repeat it here.  I’m sure I will wax lonely, for naturally I want companionship. I’m sure I’ll feel out of sorts adjusting to the new place, and grump about it to one friend or another until it grows on me. I fully admit I do not rush to embrace change.  Heather gave me a pin once that reads, "Change is good. You go first."

Perfect.

I do, however, wish I could look forward to more space to wait patiently in. Before I moved to this house, I lived in a trailer, which isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. I owned it (having bought it from She Who Has No Soul after the other time I’ve had to go through this division of resources bullshit), and paid $300 a month for the usage of the lot, and had a decent amount of room and a decent amount of money.  That trailer is what allowed me to get back on my feet financially, really, and I look back on it more fondly than I would have imagined at the time. I then, of course, spent all of that money moving here.

The trailer was larger than the place I’m going to be moving into. As part of the Negotiation, I’ve been assured I will have plenty of time to deal with all of my stuff, using the house as an interim staging point and free use of her truck if necessary.  I am properly grateful.  Essentially, I’ll have to move the critical belongings into the apartment first, see how my storage situation is, and then, only then, actually go through the boxes and boxes of stuff I have in the outside shed to see what I can actually keep and what I’ll have to get rid of. I have more than I left Illinois with, that’s for sure. I’m pretty sure I’ll just have to get rid of my college books, which makes me sad for some reason as there’s a lot of tremendously useful psychology and sociology texts in my collection.  When I think of the fact that I have the Internet, though, and pretty much all academic data at both my fingertips here and at work, I realize that the closet full of space they take up could be better served.

That’s providing my application is accepted, of course, which I’m somewhat nervous about, simply because my income doesn’t look impressive on paper due to the fact the freelance stuff is so up and down. The place really seems nice enough–the "show" apartment was one that a person just left today (because they’re rented full; I live in the hip, happening town apparently), so it was completely not clean and kinda smelly, but I’m willing to forgive that. It has an exercise facility (yay), a pool (great for the days I wish I had a/c), laundry facilities on-site, a dishwasher, and best of all, high speed Internet.  Hell, it even has a racquetball court, if I ever again have a friend who plays.

Now, I am sufficiently exhausted, and can finally go to bed instead of laying down and thinking repeatedly about my outstanding application.  I hope this glimpse into my present has been as enjoyable as the peeks into my past.  With that, I’ll leave you with another quote, from Brother Odd.

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing. We yearn for tomorrow and the progress it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?  Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

Ps: I am too tired (and lazy) at this moment to properly link to the referenced books. I trust in your ability to search Amazon.