Tuesday, November 22, 2005

breaking hearts with gin, etc.

My feet are freezing and unsocked, I'm wrapped up in one of Robert's bathrobes and we just drank hot chocolate and ate fresh croissants and I fell asleep last night crying on my side of the bed. When I think about saying goodbye to him, I am a wreck. I woke up drooling from some heavy dream about desecrated buildings and abandoned houses and he came in wearing a blue turtleneck sweater, crawled under the covers and tried to start some lovemaking and all I could think was Go away, I have to wipe the sleep out of my eyes, I have to take a shower, I have to get dressed, I have to start pounding my too many clothes back into my too-small suitcase. Ugh.

Yesterday I was reading an email from Julianne in California about a fallout with a friend of hers and we hadn't spoken since August so when Robert and I were sitting by the fire upstairs and he left to do some work, I reached for the phone and called her. And, of course, twenty minutes later she was telling me that she doesn't know why I'm still bothering with Robert, that he's not good enough, that all it does is hurt me. I thought, "No, no, you don't understand, I am happy with him." And I could HEAR her shaking her head no, sigh, saying, "There's such a correlation between unhealthy family dynamics and that fact that you've run back to him. How are you getting your schoolwork done with all this traveling? I'll pray for you."

I felt so lonely and shaken up at the end of our conversation that I could barely remember what it felt like to love our friendship, to look forward to our talks. The strangest part was that she had said, speaking about her own friend, that the two things she cannot tolerate from a friend are for her feelings to be invalidated (because they're seen as an overreaction) and to be abandoned.

Over Indian take-out of lamb and prawns and something called legumes maharana korma (with pistachios and creme fraiche), I told Robert about Julianne and how we had been "best friends" throughout middle school and high school and college. And how she became a born-again Christian, how she's never had a boyfriend, how reaching out to her feels like waking up and finding out that I've fallen off the bed.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i recently heard someone say
"let go. let god."
just thought i'd mention it.

9:42 PM  

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