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.