"Jammed" Part 3 of 3

I jumped at the sound the bullet made as it screamed through the air.  My heart beat tremendously and I suddenly felt as if the ground was swaying back and forth beneath my feet.

He turned around and with a smile that belonged to the face of his younger self.  A smile that remembered his first lesson in what it meant to be a man and what it felt like to have a whole life ahead of you with countless possibilities.  And then he told me to take the gun.

I was still fighting with the ground, telling it to stay still.  I didn’t want to shoot the gun.  What he saw as power and possibility, I saw as danger; and I couldn’t hide the fear from shining in my eyes.  The match of realization sparked and flickered against the looks on our faces.  His smile turned in on itself as his lips pursed and his brow turned stern.  We realized I would not be able to understand how to be a man the way my father did.

“Don’t be a disappointment,” was all he said.

I saw a look in his eye that told me things would not go well if I did otherwise.

Taking it from him, I faced the mountains and held the gun out in front of me.  He maneuvered my feet and shoulders around to give me a more stable footing.  I stretched my finger out and felt the trigger of a loaded gun for the first time.  He told me to take a breath and squeeze gently on the trigger.  As I exhaled, I held my body tight and prayed for mercy.

Nothing happened.

The bullet was jammed in the chamber and could not be shot.  But I didn’t know that.  I looked at my father, absolutely terrified.  What had I done wrong?  What was going on?  He told me to shoot the gun and I told him I couldn’t.

“We’ve been over this a thousand times, Sarah.  How could you fuck it up?”

I stuttered as he came towards me.  I forgot about the gun in my hand as an avalanche of protests erupted from my mouth: it won’t shoot, I’m sorry, I can’t shoot it, I’m sorry, I tried, it’s not working, I don’t know what to do.  I saw him pull back his hand to hit my face and I flinched and lost my footing.  I hit the ground with the gun still in my hand and a shot rang out towards the sky.

On its way up into the heavens, the bullet tore through my father’s body and he bled out within minutes.

-

Before he died in Vietnam, my father’s brother married a quiet, Christian woman named Rebecca, who worked at the jewelry counter at Macy’s.  She remarried a mechanic from Riverside named Frank, a man known in town for being kind to customers who were facing harder times.  Because my mother was nowhere to be found, Social Services asked them to take care of me.  For some reason, they couldn’t have children of their own.  Even though I was quiet and tortured, I was able to help fill that void for them.  They were gentle and considerate of my history, never raising their voices when I set the bar for my life at shoplifting from the minimarket and drinking until four in the morning with friends who only kept me around because I made good tips as a waitress at the local diner.  All they did was tell me I could do better, and when it was time to apply to college they promised to support me if I promised to leave the dead-end future that awaited me in Riverside.

I went to school in Los Angeles to be close enough to visit them, and never left.  Once I was on my own, I could finally lose myself in a life where no one knew my past.  That’s part of the reason I wasted my time trying to be an actress when I first graduated.  I wasn’t quite sure what to do with a sociology degree, and I liked being someone else.  But after twenty-three failed auditions and two television pilots that fell through, I took a job as a secretary to Eric Phillips, a driven start-up at Lawrenson and Thorne.  Frank passed away two years ago and Rebecca soon afterwards.  I still drive out to visit their graves on the anniversary of the day I went to live with them.

The social services counselors told me that my father’s death was not my fault.  Eric tells me it wasn’t my fault either.  But ask them to live with what I’ve done.

Back in the car on the way to Palm Springs, Eric’s hand is still fidgeting in his pocket and I’m sure he’s holding a ring.  He mentioned marriage once, over our second bottle of wine on the roof of his building a month and a half ago.  Eric told me that he loved me and I told him the words didn’t mean anything when they were laden with alcohol.  He was gone when I woke up the next morning, which gave me some pause, but he asked me to come into his office the moment I made it into work.  He closed the door behind me and held me tightly in front of him.  Eye to eye, he told me he loved me and smiled, asking me to smell his breath.  We laughed and kissed and I found out I was pregnant two weeks later.

I haven’t been able to sleep well for weeks.  My doctor can’t prescribe me sleeping pills because it’s dangerous in my condition.  Late at night, my restlessness rustles Eric out of his deeper slumber.  Even if I’m turned away from him, he’ll reach out to me and pull me into his arms, close.  He never wakes up completely, but it’s like his subconscious knows.  That I’m terrified.  That I have no idea how to do this.  That after what I’ve done, I feel like I have no right to have someone else’s life depend on me again. Sometimes he leaves his hand on my belly, and once or twice he spread his fingers out to give me a soft, little squeeze.  To let us both know we’re not alone.  All he can do is hold me and promise that I’m safe.  But he can’t always hold me. My doctor said I’m only a few weeks from my second trimester.  I still have time to change my mind, but I know Eric would never be able to look at me again.  In that way, he reminds me of my father.  Staring out into the desert, I try not to think about it.  I’m not ready for that option.  I’m not ready for any option.

"Jammed" Part 2 of 3

When he came home the army doctors wouldn’t clear him psychiatrically to be a commercial pilot or enter police academy.  He turned to ranching cattle in the panhandle of Texas, which took him far away from anyone or anything.  My mother was a woman he met at a bar.  He never expected to see her again, but there I was.  She couldn’t take care of me, she didn’t want to have me, but he swore to take care of me if she would let him.  But when he did, all he was qualified to do was work dead-end jobs as a security officer at the cheap hotels where we lived.  Having a child tied him down and suffocated him with lost opportunities—even ranching was out of the question anymore.  He would spend the next decade either locked in a office watching security camera footage or screaming at crack heads or finding more than one baby abandoned in a dumpster.  He gained weight, lost his strength, became a diabetic.  When he looked too long at himself in the mirror, the hundreds of pounds of fat on his bones smothered the memory of his ignorant, inexperienced teenage self, who seemed more man to him than what stood before him.

I don’t remember when he stopped talking to his friends from high school.  I knew countless stories of high school brethren Michael, who worked long after his shifts at the local stable ended to avoid dealing with his drunk, deadbeat father; and Tony, a star tennis player who, instead of going pro, tore his knee apart on a college team to avoid the draft and ended up unsuitable for both sport and service.  The three of them used to get together ever so often and recount their glory days, which included many nights at the drive-ins with pretty girls and trips in Tony’s van across to the Gulf Coast the first week of every summer.  I heard those stories so many times I grew up remembering them as if they were my own.  And being the only child—the only woman they were able to keep around between the three of them—Michael and Tony treated me as if I were their own baby girl to love and to woo, courting me with stuffed animals for Christmas and boxes of chocolates for my birthday.  But by the time I turned eight or nine, we started to see them less and less.  When Tony got married, my father told him to make Michael his best man because he couldn’t afford to take off work for the ceremony.  And when Michael slid off his motorcycle in a sudden storm and fell into a coma, my father, who had waited at his bedside for seventeen straight hours for him to come to consciousness, left the moment Michael fell back asleep after he came to.

One time I asked why we didn’t see Uncle Mike and Tony anymore.  He told me, “Better we remember each other like we used to be.”

Ever so often I would sit at the base of the closed bathroom door, listening to my father on the other side, screaming at himself for never having done anything with his life, for being a fat, disgusting sack of shit.

“You’re a disappointment.  You’re an absolute fucking disappointment.”

I learned it wasn’t a good idea to approach him when he was in that state.  I told myself it was some kind of demon or monster that would hit me, not my father.  So I learned to stay away, until he started crying.  Big, heaving cries out to God and his dead mother to take care of him.  To take care of me.  That’s when I would knock on the door and convince him to lay down on the bed so I could lay down beside him and hold him as tightly as my little body could muster.

I had a hard time learning how to read and write, so I spent a lot of time keeping quiet in school, afraid to be called on when I didn’t have the right answer.  Or any answer at all.  My teachers gave me special attention, which only made the heckling from other students worse.  I spent a lot of time with the maids at the hotels where we lived, eventually making extra money scrubbing bathroom floors and washing bed sheets soaked in sweat and other fluids.  The hotels weren’t the kind of hotels tourists would stay in, but to say the only residents were junkies and prostitutes would discount myself and a few other families there who had too many children to raise them any other way.

I thought it was my fault that my father was stuck in hotel security offices surrounded by cheap women and drug addicts.  That if he didn’t have to take care of me, he would have had the time to get into the police academy or fly airplanes.  I didn’t understand what it meant when his doctors said he was bipolar.  That there was nothing I could have done. I had spent years watching him sit on his bed, carefully cleaning the barrel, the gauge, and watching those shiny, brass beads slide in and out of the magazine clip.  In order to feel comfortable in such close proximity to a deadly weapon, I imagined the gun was nothing more than a Lego house he would assemble and disassemble, something innocuous compared to the weapons he wielded in the jungle.  But as we drove out onto the highway that morning, my father became intensely energetic.  He drilled me countless times on the rules of handling the gun, and I repeated with answers I had echoed hundreds of times before: never turn the safety off until you are ready to shoot the gun, never place your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot the gun, never aim the gun at something until you are ready to shoot the gun.  Never point the gun at something you do not want to shoot.

They were all questions he had asked before, but this time it was different.  His intensity made me feel uneasy.  But it was what he wanted.  At the end of the week we would have to pack up what few belongings we had between the two of us and find another seed motel to call home.  Going shooting would let him escape that reality, if only in a few moments.

We drove off the highway and onto an empty stretch of land that was walled off by a low mountainside in the distance, cutting a dark, jagged line across the sky.  We went on for so long I thought we were lost, but suddenly he stopped and we stepped out of the car.  The dirt ground was covered by thousands of bullet casings cemented together by time and dust.

“When I was younger, this used to be a shooting range,” I stood back as he pulled the black case out of the trunk and prepared the gun.   His hands worked a full magazine clip into the base of the gun.  I kept looking over my shoulder to the empty highway, afraid that someone might catch us.

“I’m so excited…I’ve waited so long to show you this,” he said again and again.

He grabbed the gun and squared off with the mountain before us.  At the tips of the mountain range there was a lush, cold forest where it would snow every winter.  He took a breath and I took a breath.  And then he shot the mountain.

"Jammed" Part 1 of 3

In one of my many incarnations, I am a writer.  The following is a work of fiction I wrote that a friend asked me to post on the blog:

Eric wanted to spend the weekend away in Palm Springs.  His parents have a vacation home in one of the planned communities, and he thought with the news that I was expecting, it would be good to get away.  I would have rather spent the weekend alone, but I knew it was unfair to keep him out of the decision-making process.  We weren’t married and we never planned to be.  He was a lawyer in downtown Los Angeles and I was his paralegal; it was the cliché office affair, meant to expire after a few weeks of racy mailroom encounters and fancy dinners, until he found someone prettier and younger.  Among the paralegals, it is a well-known fact that for every woman a young, corporate lawyer dates in the city, there is someone prettier and younger than her next in the queue.  Except my successor must have been running late, because after eleven months Eric still showed up to my apartment every Thursday night with Chinese take-out and a movie.  We spent most weekends at his place, he reading legal documents and me reading fashion magazines.  Sometimes we drove up the coast to have lunch in Malibu.  When a black Subaru crushed the back-end of my car, I spent a week at his apartment so he could drive me to and from work.  We cooked breakfast together in our underwear and after work we walked down to a local park to our favorite bench where he held me close to watch the sunset.  I couldn’t remember being so happy.

But at the firm, we never behaved as if we were more than friendly coworkers.  At first I was upset that he never met my gaze around the other lawyers.  It gave me the sense that I wouldn’t be the last secretarial notch on his bedpost, so I did my best from becoming too invested.  I never asked to make plans more than a week in advance and I was hesitant to call him more than The Guy I’m Seeing.  And then, at the office Christmas party two months ago, he surprised me by taking my hand as we walked around the room together.  Some of the other paralegals forgot their jaws on the floor and I realized I was in love with him.

On the drive to Palm Springs, he’s kept one hand on the wheel and the other fidgeting in his pocket.  I’ve spent the entire drive looking out the window of the car, watching the tall buildings race past us and turn into smaller buildings, then houses, and finally open fields.

“How are you feeling?” he keeps asking me.

“I’m fine,” is all I’m willing to tell him.  Ever since I realized I was late, Eric has hovered over me like a firefly at a flame.  He wants to know everything I’m thinking about him, about us, about the baby.  It’s evident he wants it.  Eric comes from a congregation of brothers and sisters who, well into their twenties and thirties, have all stayed close to their parents’ home in Fullerton and actually enjoy wearing matching sweaters for Christmas.  His older sisters Jodie and Nancy and younger brother Steve already have children of their own, and the pressure is on Eric to be next.  I don’t have any family left, so I can’t relate.

The green fields we drive past bleed out their color until they’re ashy beige.  Crops are replaced by sand and dust and all is still and empty, just as still an empty as Texas was sixteen years ago.  There, the ground was littered with shotgun shells and bullets encased in the desert’s sandy dust.  My father shot a few rounds into the distant mountainside and then looked at me to step forward.  I was thirteen and my hand was finally large enough to grip the pommel of the gun, in the notch between my thumb and forefinger, and still reach the trigger.  Every week he pulled out his handgun to test me on its mechanics—how to take it apart, how to put it back together, how to clean it, how to store it.  How to shoot it.  It was a matte black pistol, like the ones you see on cop shows and action movies.  A Browning dual-action, semi-automatic.  We would sit on the edge of his bed as he pulled it out of its gun case, a large black suitcase lined with grainy foam.  He removed the magazine and checked to see that the chamber was empty.  Handing it to me, he watched me expectantly, hoping.  Even willing me to pull the trigger of an empty clip.  The gun was heavy and it hurt to strain my forefinger out to the trigger, but I could do it.  I had avoided telling him for weeks now, but he had lost his job that day, meaning we’d probably have to spend a few days in the car while he looked for a new one.  I knew it crushed him, and I knew I could keep him from having a bad night if I told him I could finally hold the gun.  So I did.

His face lit up into a smile and he took the gun out of my hands to pull me into a hug.  He told me how much he loved me, how much I made life worth living.  It was as if I had won him the lottery.  Which in his eyes, I think I did.  His father was an alcoholic line cook that didn’t make it home many nights, and when he did, it was to force himself on his wife who killed herself by the time my father was six or seven.  That left my father to be raised by his older brother, who taught him how to shoot a gun when he was thirteen.  The first time he shot a gun, the aftershock of the explosion rippled through his body and it was such a force, such a power he wielded, that he no longer felt helpless in a world where fathers hit you and mothers died on you.  In his eyes, learning to shoot a gun was one of the first steps to becoming a man in the world.  And in a world where he could never give me our own house or a pet dog or take me to Disneyland like the fathers you see on T.V., it meant everything to him to at least give me that.  It didn’t matter that I was a daughter; I understood what he meant.

My father had grown up on the western edge of the Texas desert in the fifties, when there were still cowboys walking the streets.  When he didn’t weigh four hundred pounds or wake up attached to an insulin pump.  When he could walk more than a two hundred feet without having to sit down and catch his breath.

In high school, he had been an all-state football player.  He earned his pilot’s license when he was nineteen.  He was a search and rescue officer on a team of men that routinely climbed the mountains near his home to rescue injured hikers.  Or their bodies.  When he was seventeen he wanted to be a cop and woo damsels in distress or fly commercial airliners and charm stewardesses.  He was a man’s man, thriving on big dreams and testosterone.  But he wasn’t for long.  He and his older brother were sent away to Vietnam.  An astigmatism kept him from being safe in the cockpit of a plane, so they forced him onto the ground where there was no hope for any many but to end up dead or broken.  His brother ended up dead.  My father ended up broken.

Murphy's Law

Merriam Webster defines "irony" (in the situational sense) as the "(1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result; (2) : Claire's life."

Exhibit A:
I've told you how last Fall the (now ex-) Boy and I decided we wanted to be together after we graduated college this spring. He was accepted to Yale (in New Haven, CT) and when I applied to Teach for America, I listed Connecticut as my most preferred region. I even went so far to tell them he was my fiancé and I had to be with him. It was desperate. It was dumb. It was love.

And then we broke up and all hell broke loose. It's been a month and he's alternated between trying to break me and trying to get me back a dozen times. At this point, all I can do is stay away from him, because when I don't, my feelings for him suck me back in like a black hole. While I can't forget how far he went out of his way to hurt me, I can't erase how much I love him and I can't ignore how happy we made each other the past year.

When I met him a year-and-a-half ago (it was a single, brief moment neither of us forgot: we smiled, shook hands and were introduced by Mr. B and Mr. D, no less) the Universe told me he was important, that he would become a big player in my life. It was three months before we spoke again, and when we did, the Universe told me it was time to jump. And so I jumped and I fell right into his arms. That feeling of direction never went away. It kept me going through countless fights and disappointments throughout our relationship. By breaking up with him, I went against the path I felt the world had set out for me. And before it corrected itself and I was drawn back to him, I started looking for ways to make our separation stick.

That's why I went back to my TFA application and changed my regional preferences, moving Connecticut near the bottom of the list. The fact that it was even made the list was a stubborn taunt to the Universe to challenge my decision to leave him. I never thought I would actually be placed there. The Connecticut corps is comparatively small compared to TFA's forty-two other regions, and I was sure I would end up in New Orleans or New York City or any of the other seven places I ranked before Connecticut. The idea of going somewhere new, somewhere exciting, and somewhere miles away from him gave me an extraordinary sense of hope and excitement for my future. The idea of a future that could never include him gave a finality to my decision and made moving on so much easier. And in some way, it would give me the Universe's indirect blessing to close the door to that path and open myself up to another one.

And then I received an email from Teach for America on Tuesday, offering me a position to teach secondary English in Connecticut. And to put the icing on the cake, I was told that some of the greatest demand for secondary English teachers in Connecticut would be in New Haven.

When I first heard the news, I cried because I was so happy. And then I cried because I was so upset. I have wanted to do Teach for America for years; I will be able to make an impact the lives of my students, help my community and open doors for my future that graduate school would instead close. This is what I want, and I'm going to do it, but the Universe has made it damn clear that there is a price for every blessing. That in order to have one dream fulfilled, I will not get out of another so easily.

The day after I graduate I will get on a plane for Connecticut and begin a new life. But a month later the Boy will also get on a plane for Connecticut and begin a new life, and chances are that we'll be in the same city for at least the next two years. I don't know if it's a sign that we're supposed to get back together or that I'm supposed to learn how to leave him without running away, but it can't just be coincidence that of all the gin joints, in all the towns, he'll walk into mine.

Pardon Me for the Length of This Post, But I've Had One Hell of a Night

If only because I found writing my last post to be incredibly cathartic, I'm back with more stories of the frightening nightmare that has hijacked my life:

After all the excitement of this weekend, I laid low on Valentine's Day.  I had a spectacular time studying, eating chocolate and putzing around with Mr. B and Mr. D, who have kept me sane throughout all of this.  Mr. G, one of the Boy's best friends who has become my good friend and confidante (somehow his knowledge of my deepest, darkest secrets is only bested by Jenna), also stepped up with incredible patience and support.  And with Jenna and I averaging anywhere between fifty and a five-hundred texts/IMs/emails/e-cards an hour since Friday afternoon, those four have acted as my own personal rehabilitation clinic, twelve step program and sanity police.  I have no idea where I would be without each and every one of them.

After Monday afternoon, I stayed away from the Boy.  I gave him space because every step I took towards him left me beaten and bruised by his wrath.  Losing hope that we would be able to salvage a single tanned hide square (give yourself ten points if you get the reference) from our relationship, I felt desperate, hurt and confused.  Losing sight of the reasons I had to be upset with him, I blamed myself entirely for our free fall into destruction.

Then last night Mr. G offered to speak to the Boy.  If only for my own sanity, he said.  But he mentioned in passing there were rumors and speculations about the Boy's recent actions that he needed to clear up as well.  I questioned him as to what he meant, but he refused to tell me without hearing it from the Boy first.  That was the moment I knew.  If I had been wrong, you could have said I was just being paranoid.  Jealous.  Crazy.  But I was right.  I've known this would happen since the first month we started dating a year ago.  Unfortunately it didn't make it any easier.

Three or four months into dating the Boy, before he decided he was my boyfriend, he hooked up with a girl named Lily and didn't tell me.  From what I've heard, she had been a regular figure in his night life before I came along.  She always wanted more, but he was never interested.

I didn't find out about the hookup until months after it happened.  And by then I was living with him and had no way out.  So I dealt with it, convincing myself he wouldn't do it again.  But he kept talking to her.  He met up with her once or twice.  He said he didn't want to be real friends with her, but would never give me a reason for why he kept communicating with her.  And it drove me insane.  Not only did I not trust her, but failing to understand his motives for continuing their relationship filled me with doubt and fear of who he really was.  People say he's strung her along for a year and a half now, if only because her steadfast desire for him strokes his ego.  Also, she sings in our choir, so I have enjoyed the lovely pleasure of seeing her twice a week at rehearsal for the past year.  Always looking for the bright side of things, at least I can say that I am now a master at suppressing the overwhelming desire to obliterate people from existence à la Xavier in X-Men: The Last Stand (in a perfect world I would be Jean Grey and every time I did something bad I would just blame the Phoenix for possessing my body).

Lily was one of the greatest points of contention in our relationship.  The Boy despised the fact that I mistrusted him.  Insisted that he would never do anything with her.  And absolutely demoralized me for doubting him.  I did my best to accept it for what it was.  I even cornered him into choosing to become real friends to her or not speak at all, because I couldn't stand how little regard he treated her with when it was clear she cared for him.  I didn't like seeing them together, but I liked seeing him disregard her even less.

But the moment Mr. G left to talk to the Boy, I had a feeling of what was going to happen next.  It was only a small part of me, but it was the part that always speaks the truth and nothing but the truth.  And when it does, I smother the life out of it with denial flooding into every fiber of my being.  Until I got a text from the Boy saying we needed to talk.

He came over to my apartment.  He said he was sorry.  He asked if we could start over.  And then he told me he had sex with Lily.

It didn't mean anything.
It was a mistake.
It was just to release my frustration.

It was the only way I could forgive you so we could be together again.

Because revenge sex is by far the best foundation for a new beginning, right?

To my knowledge, she genuinely cares for him.  To my knowledge, it was her first time.  To my knowledge, he used her and tossed her aside like a plastic grocery bag in order to settle the score between him and me.  Not just settle the score: decimate it.

I have never yelled at someone with the full strength of my voice.  I have never followed someone into the street to make as big of a scene as I could.  I have never fallen to the ground and cried in the middle of the sidewalk.  And it has been four years since I last huddled in a corner, so hurt by the one I loved most, that I wanted to stop breathing for the rest of days.

He insisted on staying with me.  He insisted that we could make it right.  He insisted on holding me, because I always feel better when he holds me.

We can start over.

We'll be better.

We'll learn from this.

We'll always find a way.  

You are the one I love.

But every time he touched me, by body tensed up.  Every time he held me, my skin crawled.  Being held by him was the single most comforting feeling in the world, but now it just felt wrong.  I kept trying to fight the wronging away, kept trying to be comfortable with him and trust him and love him, but every time I did, the image of them together in the bed he and I have shared together for a year flashed across my mind and my entire body spasmed in pain.

It took me hours of this before I could say the words "I want you to leave."

I know it's hard for my friends to understand, but part of me believes he and I could still find a way to be happy together.  When I was depressed, I told myself that anyone could change for the better.  That if they loved someone enough, they would change.  That if I held on a little bit longer, I would change.  Because if I was going to survive my teenage years, I needed to.  And I did.  Because of that, I resolved to never give up on someone.  No matter how much damage they inflicted.  I stand here as witness and evidence that that is not the best way to live.  But since then, I have only been able to walk away from two people who left me almost too broken to put the pieces of myself back together.  Both times I hated myself for doing it.  Both times I felt just as ripped apart at the seams as I was when I was with them.  And while both times I found a way to move on and be happy, I still feel a lurch of guilt anytime I think too hard about leaving them behind.

I don't know what to think.  How to feel.  What to do.  So much of me wants to erase the past week and go back to being in love with the Boy.  To spending the rest of our senior year together.  To figuring out how to have a life together after we graduate.  But so much pain and anguish overcrowded my mind last night that it took me hours to fall asleep.  And when I awoke from the three hours of slumber I could capture, my first thought of the day was of them having sex.

My stomach feels weighed down by stones and I haven't been able to eat more than a few mouthfuls of bread today.  I formed a massive bruise on my hip where I beat my own body last night in place of striking his.  I called him, because I knew it to be the first step to recovering our love, but the moment he picked up I realized I wasn't ready to say a word to him.  No matter how much I felt like I was supposed to say it, I could not honestly tell him I was ready to start over.

So instead I'm cloistered in my room, missing class and skipping rehearsal; because today I hide away until the debris settles and I can step out into the nuclear winter that was our love.

I wanted us to be together.  I wanted us to be happy.  Now I don't know what to want.

In other news, Mr. D is googling how to hide bodies in the Los Angeles area.  He and Mr. B have been upset with the Boy for a long time over how he has treated me, and I worry they'll soon tip to the point of homicidal rage.  And to add to all the joy and splendor of our uncertain futures, not only do Mr. D, Mr. B, the Boy, Lily and I all have rehearsal together two to four days a week, we're traveling as a choir to Arizona for a performance next weekend.

Fasten your seat belts.  It's going to be a bumpy night.

Spontaneous Combustion

I am not a good person.

I broke up with the Boy on Friday due to his pattern of shady actions that made me feel insecure, and an inability for us to have open and honest dialogue about them.  I did it because based on the hurtful things he said and did, I thought he was done.  I did it because after a year of struggling to communicate with someone who could not have been more different than myself, I thought I was done.

And to numb the pain, I got drunk and hooked up with someone who didn't matter.  Exactly what a wise friend told me not to do.  I wish someone had warned me what Bacardi 151 was before I shot it, and not to combine it with a broken heart.  Resolved to never speak of that night again, I put it in a box and hid it under my bed with all the other mistakes I'll never repeat.

The Boy talked last night and it looked like we would find a way to make it work.  That he was beginning to understand how hard it was for me to love someone who communicated through leading questions and mind games rather than responding to the simplest of my concerns.  I saw the light at the end of the tunnel and I was overjoyed.  And then I felt my heart cry out, calling to that box and telling me there was no way we could move forward, start anew, be happy, with that secret hanging over my head.  So I told him.  And he broke into a million little pieces.

We spent the next hours in silence.  In absolute disbelief of the nightmare my life had become, I couldn't move.  In the past, he told me he would understand something like this.  When we first started dating, he spent nights with other women and I didn't find out until months afterwards, left with the struggle to heal something I that was too intangible to face.  He said that if I ever did anything like I did Friday, that he would find a way to forgive me because he loved me, cornering me into forgiving his behavior.  But in actuality he was devastated and enraged and broken.  I felt the urge to be sick, to scream, to die.  Hurting the ones I love is my worst fear, and here I was making him pay for my mistakes.

He asked me to stay the night with him.  I didn't want to, but I didn't feel like it was fair to deny him whatever comfort I could offer.  He told me he forgave me and asked to have sex, something we never asked of each other unless we were in a good place; but it was rough and unloving.  He pulled me into his arms and fell asleep, and even though the dark thoughts in my mind were raging through me, I told myself that we would make it.  That we loved each other and we would find a way.

In the morning, he was detached again.  Even though he asked me to stay in his arms, I could no longer deny the doubt and insecurity I felt.  I left with the promise that we would talk again and prayed that he would find a way to heal.

Hours later he texted me saying he could no longer see me.  That his forgiveness didn't mean he would forget, no longer be hurt, or ever want to be with me again.  That he only had sex with me to release his frustration.  That he never felt so much rage in his life.  I stopped responding, because I realized I've turned him into a different person.  I've hurt him so much I shattered the man I loved and left nothing but vengeful, selfish fragments.

And to top it off, the Boy found out today that he was accepted Yale for graduate school.  The one school I couldn't attend because they don't offer teacher credentials.  The one place we both knew had no future for the two of us.  It's what he wanted, I know he'll be ecstatic and successful, but I can only offer half-hearted congratulations and lost dreams of the adventures that awaited us past graduation.

My stomach has been in knots for hours.  My chest is breaking under the pressure of a thousand regrets.  Jenna and my other loved ones have been my life support for the last four days, and I don't even know if it'll be enough anymore.  I've spent the past four years of my life working every day to become someone worth loving.  Someone worth trusting.  Right now I feel like I couldn't be farther from either.

Welcome Back to Our Irregularly Scheduled Programming

Tomorrow night I will sing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel in a performance of Mahler's 8th symphony, also known as the "Symphony of a Thousand."  Yes, that's right folks: someone at Disney Music Hall was either crazy/drunk/masochistic enough to say, "You know what?  Not only should Gustavo Dudamel conduct every symphony Gustav Mahler ever wrote in three weeks, but for shits and giggles we should get fifteen choirs and two full orchestras together for the eighth one."

That's how I ended up in rehearsal with 850 singers and 300 instrumentalists at the Shrine Auditorium at USC this morning.

But that's not what I came here for the first time in nine months to tell you (who am I kidding, I'm so f@#$ing excited about this I'm about to start telling randos on the street).  I came to tell you about the lyrics of the baritone's solo in the second movement of the piece:

Arrows, pierce me!

Lances, subdue me!

Clubs, shatter me!

Lightning, shoot through me!

So that everything trivial

May pass off in vapor

And the constant star may shine,

Nucleus of eternal Love!

The piece is sung in German, so I had no idea the true meaning of the solo until rehearsal today, when the English translation was shown on the real-time video projection of the concert.  Before I knew the translation, I found the music passionate and moving and romantic.  It's one of my favorite moments in over 2000 bars of music.  This morning, I held my breath as the baritone rose to the front of the stage; but the rush of release that music usually brings was overshadowed by the twenty-foot screen projection of his harsh, strained features and the English text superimposed beneath: "Arrows, pierce me! / Lances, subdue me!"

As I read the words on the screen, my body became rigid and tense and I felt my face turn to a cringe.  These were not the words of romance, but of tragedy.  I know there is no tragedy without love, but there is also no tragedy without pain and anguish.  Could this lyrical description of physical dismemberment really match a musical depiction of love?

And then I thought of how fiercely the Boy (formerly known as Mr. C, he declared himself my boyfriend last June after asking me to move in with him for the summer) and I had fought last night, the night before, and even today after rehearsal.  Our arguments are not nearly as often or as shattering as when we first began almost a year ago, but every now and again we fall into a rut where the moment one argument dissolves another begins.  I'm not afraid of them anymore; now I just see them as another facet of our relationship that we work through together like we do grocery shopping or rehearsal schedules.

But still, I get that same feeling that I'm being dragged desperately out to sea by the rip current of stress from our differences, frustration over our discourse, and disappointment at the realization that no matter how much we love each other, we may never stop finding new ways to hurt one another.

Due to the way I was raised, I've come to expect a certain amount of struggle when it comes to someone you love.  But how long must I allow for that when it can so quickly tear us up?  Must you really tear everything apart, await the lightning to thunder through you, so love can hold the only space left?

My life has always been a balance: disappointments are followed by opportunities, happiness is made more significant by sadness, life is tempered by death.  I suffered from depression in high school, so until a few years ago I didn't think I had a right to expect (or even work towards) happiness.  Now that I do, now that I can, it would be helpful to know just how much to expect--before I go from healthy and emotionally stable to being gifted the moon and expecting the stars for dessert.  Or at least know how much sadness and pain should be allowed on one path before I owe it to myself to look for another answer.  I want to know that I'm not wrong for being so comfortable with hardship in my relationships; because I look around and so many of my friends and family have told me not to be.

I believe I am so blessed to be in love.  It's what I have always wanted.  It's what makes years of pain and loss worth surviving and conquering.  I just wish I knew if I was doing it right.