Four Years Later

What a strange thing. Was it really only four years ago? Bizzare. You may have known me then, or years prior, when I was RenOrsino. This isn’t one of those posts though. I’m writing because I need catharsis and I wasn’t going to achieve it in short form.

-break-

The voice inside me is quiet because I strangled it to protect her from herself. Monsters of her own making chase her hopes, her dreams, her sleep. Fear stalks. Doubt looms. Suspicion haunts. In our first few chapters, she felt threatened by women who were close to me, past or present. She saw predators where I see pack. She is not a wolf, and perhaps that is why she does not understand my nature.

To save her pain, I let my song go silent. If the words that begged to fly across the page were not for her, I clipped their wings and caged them. Now they pluck their own feathers. They gnaw at the bars. I can not love her the way I chose to love her and be a poet. And I am a poet. Something must change.

It is easier for her to love the poet I was. While my bygones weigh on her, they are bygones. I do not know if she is strong enough to love the poet I am. I worry she would hurt when a poem extolled nostalgic emotions. I worry she would resent me when my words spoke of anger and frustration. She nurses her wounds and lets them fester. The less I speak the more the unspoken words wrap around my muscles and the tighter those muscles get. The other day my jaw locked up and I could barely eat lunch. We spoke briefly about something that was not working for me and while the issue hasn’t gone away entirely, I haven’t had nearly the same issues.

I want to write again. Spill it all out as if I had no one to answer to for my aches, interests, desires. She follows me, though, on the account that has been mostly silent since our relationship began. My Instagram full of poetry, mostly love poems to women I could never have. She is good to me. I am good to her. But I don’t feel like I can write and post whatever comes to me, because inevitably she will ask what or why it meant, and will take something personally even if it has nothing to do with her. Or take it personally that it has nothing to do with her.

It’s been a good year and nearly a half. We have a good relationship. But it would need to get much better to be sustainable for the rest of our lives. She feels like she is the lesser person in our relationship. I am strong, intelligent, and confident. I enjoy knowing things and will research anything that sounds strange or I don’t know. She’s decided that I have an agenda. To prove I am right and she is wrong. I do love being right. But if she is right and I am wrong, then I will have learned something new. I will move forward with that new perspective. I may have an agenda, but it has nothing to do with her and much more to do with wanting to know accurate information everything that piques my interest.

The most recent instance (since she can’t remember ANY examples when asked), was a medical issue. She discovered she had a UTI. She works closely with doctors and I wanted her to ask them about it. She said that she had heard drinking cranberry juice could cure one, so she was going to try that. It sounded like an old wives tale, so I looked it up. All the medical pages I read described it as a myth. There is a chemical in cranberry juice that can help, but the amount of juice one would have to drink for it to matter is humanly impossible. I shared my findings with her, because I wanted her to chose the healthy route. She believed it had helped in the past, the one other time she had a UTI, so she was going to try it again. I dropped the issue. Her UTI developed into a kidney issue and the doctor was so worried about her when she finally asked about it that the doctor immediately called the pharmacy to arrange a prescription for her. My girlfriend thinks I looked up the cranberry juice issue because I wanted to prove her wrong. That is not who I am. I do not know if she has the self-esteem to handle a longer term relationship with me. When I shared the results of my research, I did not do so in an unkind, condescending, or rude way. I asked.

So I am left with the sensation of walking on eggshells. But in trying to work around her, to take care of her, I have lost so much of my passion. I have lost nearly all my inspiration. Indeed I have not so easily written anything this long for so long that nearly everything I have written in the past year is about how I used to be a writer.

I do not blame her for my choices. I was afraid to hurt her because I choose to use my voice for my own art in my own way. I didn’t want to do anything that would push the buttons on her jealousies, insecurities, and so I stopped expressing myself. I lost so much of my passion. I lost nearly all my inspiration. I do not know if we can survive me finding it again and I will not go behind her back to create.

We’re good together.
I don’t know if we’re good enough.