Secrets Don’t Make Friends – Volume ii
I am short on time and long in that which I must do, but I don’t want to leave that one hanging. So… Basically it boils down to this:
He has very seldom, since becoming an adult, not been able to ‘best’ a woman. He’s been able to get away with serial cheating, (this is something he’d admitted to me, voluntarily) in all of his relationships and is the reason that they have all ultimately failed citing his inevitable loss of intrest. Once he sleeps with you, your novelty level has lost it’s maximum value and will decrease expotnentially… Quicker than driving the car off the lot depreciates it’s value… And while I’m not so stupid as to think, “I’m different! He’ll change for me!” he has also shown me through his actions that he’s not in the place where that’s even a possibility…. There’s admittedly a lot of things at work in the stew of motivations for his behavior. I have studied and listened and paid very close attention and have, with a certainty level of about 97.678% figured out the why of what he does. (Par for the alchohol and thinks-he’s-sneaky-cocaine-events, another related but separate matter.) So he doesn’t get anything by me in that way. I’m aware. But like any one who wants to master something, it is with patience and a great deal of time spent in the war room at the topography table mapping my strategy that I prepare myself.
Inside that man is a broken, young, child with a father that is impossible to please and never affectionate or loving, and a mother that is absent when it’s crucial (but took his younger sister when she left!) but ‘makes up for’ this by enveloping him with the Little Prince circumstances when she is around, and one very unhealthy relationship with a family member… On top of being a very overweight and in all rights, an awkward goofy teenager that was dismissed almost entirely by all the girls…… Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is going on there. I make no claim to right these wrongs. I know that an endeavor to attempt this would be futile. I also do not claim to be some Captain Save-A-Ho or Pyschologial Savior, I don’t have any delusions of righteousness or any type of savior mentality… What it really is this…
I have seen that man, inside and out. Top to fucking bottom. Inside and out. I have seen the most hideous and abhorrent parts of him that he does his very best to keep hidden from the world, and for good reason. I’ve not only seen those places, but I’ve mapped them. I know them very well, their jagged edges and strange smells. I’ve seen the parts that have turned over, that have deadened his childhood innocence and that have ripped his heart into pieces. I’ve seen the parts that he neglects, the few he cares for, I know quite literally, every inch of that man, for some reason, quite a bit better than he knows himself. Again, I’m not tooting my own horn or saying that I am some heroic anything… It’s not that I did this by choice or that I’m even all that jazzed about it having happened, it just did. I know the man in a completeness and totality that I have never known anybody. And actually, if I’m really honest, probably even better than I know myself.
So along with all the shitty, gross, unpleasant to look at parts of him, at least for most of them, they have a juxtaposed counterpart. There are many, and I really mean many things about that man that are truly wonderful and amazing. Although I’ve done a great job at painting for you the picture of his yucky ones, I am going to be something of an asshole and not paint the good parts with as much effort or vibrant color. Only as I’m now very short on time… Haha… But I will definitely make clear that this man contains within him a dichotomy that I can see he wars with on a constant basis. He’s very deeply and seriously clinically depressed, physiologically battling a constant low level of Happy Hormones. He’s also not physically taking great care of himself and abuses one of the worst substances for overall health that you can obtain literally ANYWHERE, ANYTIME…. Hasn’t been to a doctor in Gods know how long…. And on top of all of that, has to deal with the fact that I, here admit, to a chronic case of Serial Cabinetry Door Ajaring… I am much too short to concern myself with the troubles of hitting one’s head on an open cabinet door. To me, they are nothing but obstacles in the way of an already difficult process of reaching whatever it is in the cupboard I need… Fuck the doors, that’s what I say. What he says, in the middle of the night, walking through a dark house to get a drink of water (over indulgence in alcohol leaves your tongue feeling like the tongue of a dehydrated cat in the desert) is, “OW! Fuck! What the fuck?! How many times do I have to %*#(* %…..” Because he’s put his eyeball right into the corner of an open cabinet door…. Courtesy of Yours Truly!
I’m sure there may be perhaps one, maybe two other things that I do that could be considered ‘annoying’ to the particularly sensitive person… (That’s satire!)
Anyway, get to the point, damnit!
He’s not been able to ‘best’ me. I see through his tactics and bullshit. (This does not mean that I am not still hurt by his actions, but I am fully aware that it is entirely my fault that I am being hurt by them. I’ve known who and what he is for long enough… If I were intelligent, I would leave, and that hurt would stop.) Because of this, I remain a person of interest to him. He can’t let me go. Not entirely certain it’s based just on that, there may be, and I hope there is, more to it than just that, but I don’t either delude myself to believing it… At first he kept at it because I unknowingly did nothing but stroke the narcissist’s ego. Something they need a constant supply of or they wither. And I do understand that I did a really bang-up job of filling that role for a much longer time period that I should have. But that’s gone by. While he may be able to get a small fix off of me from time to time, I am no longer the constant source of his gigantic ego’s food supply.
The trouble is, at least for me, that because I see the entire man, I see all that he is, good and bad, horrible and wonderful, beautiful and ugly, once that door was opened and the was without barrier completely illuminated to me, I realized only then what love was. (This kind of love, anyway, I’ve long known the love of mother and child and sisterly/brotherly love, thank goodness.) I had long before and in not just one but TWO other circumstances believed that I was in love. But I could not have been more wrong. I had been in a very loving version of infatuation or adoration or simple, old school lust. But it took seeing this “Noah” undressed and unhidden, in his entirety to understand love.
It happens that with his flaws, faults, and gross, abhorrent and putrid bullshit, also come the things that make him beautiful. They are not separate of one another, ever. They are, and may likely remain indefinitely, hand-in-hand and conjoined. What makes his beautiful parts beautiful are also what make his ugly parts ugly. To only accept one side of that coin would be not accepting the coin at all. When I saw his true form, I loved him anyway. All of it intact. Even if he never makes the effort to right the wrongs within him or that he’s commited because of them, what I feel for him will remain the same. What I feel for him is not expressible in language or fully fathomable in thought. It is not able to be studied or seen or heard, or even just felt. It is a very complex phenomena guarded within an impenetrible citadel… There is no getting in, there is no getting out. It just is. No amount of his terrible and disrespectful behavior will change it. It is truly unconditional.
It’s got benefits and downsides. I’m aware of more of the down that the up, but… I learn constantly as I go, too.
Now what in the fuck I am supposed to do with that is, of course, another matter entirely.
I’m very late for all the things now. I wish you long days and pleasant nights!
L&R,
OP