A long, drawn-out, internal monologue
So, for anyone who actually gives a rat's ass about what's going on in my life, I've had a few days of conscious thought and came up with a bit of an idea of where I sit and what's going on in my life as far as I know, and how I feel about it all. Have fun, leave thoughts if you would like.
Over the past few days, I’ve been having a lot of hypothetical conversations in my head. Some angry, some hilarious, some strange. There were ones that upset me, while some were terrifying, a few ludicrous, and a sprinkling of those that really made me think. The latter, while few in quantity, were enormous in quality as well as being the ones that took up the bulk of this whole self-dialogue.
A lot of the time, the other imaginary exchanges led to, or added to, or complemented the real soul-searching ones. I rehash words from past fights and late night talks from recent dates. My mind pores over phrases from friends, who I know are only trying to look out for both myself and Danyalle, as well as one of those friends constantly needing to challenge us. As much as he pisses me off, we need that, and it’s why I listen to some of it, take it in, and absorb it.
Through all of the ups and downs and twists and turns, I’ve been searching. I’ve searched up, down, left, right, over and under, around, through, and beside. It’s part of my nature. I’ve got this tic in me that makes me analyze and organize and rationalize everything. Sometimes, it drives me a little crazy.
For a while, I had no choice but to just go through the motions. I was working so much that it was pretty much all I did. I slept and worked, and on my days off, Danyalle and I went into Erie to get her back adjustment and do whatever running the Club needed her to do that week. There was maybe one night every month or so where I could actually let loose and have a bit of fun. Scratch that, a night where I had the energy to do so.
Then I started working too much, because I’m made of awesome and sweetness and would do it all with a smile on my face even if I had a migraine all day. I felt like I was going days and days without seeing my family, and knew I had been gone from my friends for weeks. It was distancing, at least to me. Worst of all, it felt like no one noticed my absence or even wanted me around much whenever I was there. Except Bug, because I’m her study buddy and gaming pal and Meme. Danyalle was always on her phone, all of my friends were always talking about some wacky adventure from the weekend before while all I had was stories from work that didn’t work so well in third person translation.
So I shut down. Completely turned to the off position and barely conscious. I felt alone and exhausted and confused and left behind. I wanted to scream and cry and most of all laugh. But I didn’t have it in me. I’d worked myself into a muddled mess that overloaded herself into malfunctioning: barely eating, not sleeping, literally pulling out my hair until I had to shave it all off. I quit the Peak because I couldn’t do it anymore. It was more up, down, up, down and I wanted off of that fucking ride.
For a month or more before I started to crack, I’d wanted to go to part time. Needed to, because I was exhausted. But then Eva went to mornings. And Maddy went to the bakery more often. Finally, Cassi snapped a tendon in her knee (cool side story: I totally called it as soon as I looked at her leg. Poor thing twisted it all about in a ditch up by the upper parking lot). With Ike as the only full-time and competent hot line cook, Maddy brought back for bar foods, and Denise fucking useless as my cold line coworker...there was no way I’d be getting part time with golf and wedding seasons starting up. There were times whenever I was working all of cold line, all of the fry station and burgers and pizzas, and doing sautee because I was the only one there. No real training, just seen it done a few times. I told you, I was made of awesome and they figured that I could handle it all and knew I wouldn’t say no when just dropped into it like I was ‘chuting my way into ‘Nam, guns a-blazing.
Then, I was helping Danyalle organize the Club’s affairs as far as the bar and kitchen went. I helped her inventory and figure out what needed to be ordered. I’d come in to help her clean, or cook, or bartend. I talked her through shit that really frustrated her so she wouldn’t have a heart attack or aneurysm at twenty-eight years old. Even after I cracked, I still did what I could through the haze. Putting on a little smile as I could while trying to not feel the cracks more whenever we’d get home and she’d situate herself onto the complete other edge of the couch and text, text, text.
And I knew who she was talking to, and I knew that she was lying whenever she said she wasn’t and that anything he did say to him was strictly business. Nothing to be worried about. But I was. Because I’m so far from being an idiot that it actually cripples me in some ways. Stress has always, and I cannot emphasize this enough, always fucked her up in a way I can’t even properly explain, but I’ll try. When I come under that kind of cosmic fire, I just internally sync the shit out of it until I’m basically living internally for a bit. Then I get some creative idea, or at the very least resolution, that helps unfold the mess in my brain. When she gets that kind of stress, she rebels. In some way, she will always have a semi-legitimate justification for it. Her brain will rapid-fire reasons out on why she’s so stressed and distance herself from it.
First, I was too down. That was her original trigger. She couldn’t pull me out of it and was tired of trying. I told her she didn’t need to, but she kept on this idea for a while. After that, whenever I started becoming vocal about he-who-shall-not-be-named and how chummy she was being with him, she said she was distancing herself away from me because I can never trust her. I tried, I wanted to, but again, I’m not an idiot.
Then douchey breaks it off with his girlfriend. And proceeds to spend time talking to and hanging out with my girlfriend while I am feeling like I’m going crazy because she made me feel that way.
So she broke up with me in a fit, two days after his break up. I try to call her on it, she explodes with rage. We fight. Then says she’s going canoeing during the Float with him the next day, and not a full day later I find out it’s a date and totally call her on it. Again with explosive, caught-in-a-lie rage. I cannot “prove” anything, so I’m wrong, and she’s called up my parents at some point and worried them so much and I feel like I should be admitted at this point.
I was a terrible person, but I snooped. I needed the truth no matter what she said about what I was allowed to involve myself in whenever it came to her personal life. I pieced it all together, we talked because she had no choice but to do so, and I found out that they’d been flirting a few months, and that she didn’t feel like herself, but did all at the same time, and didn’t know what she wanted or who we were or why we didn’t talk like we used to. I tried to say it was because I’d just spent eight months working my tail off while she did the same, and how I wanted to be around more often and not feel the stresses of both of our workplaces bearing down on us.
We fell into a grey area, and I worked the Float on Saturday, and she said she’d text, because it had rained for so many days before, and let’s face it, I didn’t want her to go, period. But I had to let her. And she never texted for eight hours. I tried to fight off a panic attack. One shot, one 7.5mg Buspar. An hour goes by, and it’s just escalated as I realize that there is no cook, and this pisses Robin off as I pop pill number two while tearing down my register, and finally hear from her. Even though she left a note saying she’d text that morning when I got up, she left her phone in the car because I had asked her to not ruin a 200 dollar phone in a creek. We have a spat there in texting method, and I order a shot and a beer, then people want food, so I offer to cook it while I have my beer. Serve the food, another person wants a hoagie, so I fix that up and pop pill number three because I could feel my face twitching and my lips and fingers going numb. I order two beers to go, and make my merry way home to get properly smashed because once again, I find myself being blamed for “assuming”.
I stop answering my phone.
Apparently, Danyalle and Shitstain go to our friend Tara’s, and Shitstain is rude as fuck to Tara’s hubby when Danyalle is closing the door to his car to leave again. All he’d asked was if they were coming back to get Bug. A snide “Mmmno” almost made him freak out, but he was a better man than the douchebag, and let it slide, knowing that at least they cared enough for Bug to keep her.
Tara tries to message me, and because I’d already shut off my phone and put it on to charge, I had no idea. So she comes over to find me. Then drag me to the fire while I tell her about how I felt fucking alone as hell, because it just seems like I got left behind in the frays because I was too busy for life. How I felt like Danyalle wanted to snatch up Tara and how I felt like she would side that way instead of giving a shit about what was going on with me.
She only knew the one side, true, but she almost started crying whenever I let all of that out. And her and her husband sat there with me, while I was entirely too trashed to function properly and somehow still was, and let me cry, but they opened a window I hadn’t looked out before. They both said that I really didn’t deserve the shit she was giving me, and I know that. But she also doesn’t deserve my snippy ass moments. That I gave gave gave and she only took took took. Mark took the moment to say he felt like I was being used as a babysitter when she catches some dude’s attention.
Then they both agreed on a point that I barely thought of that night, but later the next day, when Tara called me while Di was at work, it was repeated: “I don’t think she’s really gay. I think that she loves you, but she’d never be with another woman.”
Bam. Concrete.
Of course, something that huge is something I’ve actually had the inkling about for quite a while, “Well, of course not,” I reply as coolly as possible, “I mean, I’d never be with another girl either. Actually, fuck that, I probably wouldn’t be with anyone.”
All of it, totally true, and it’s something that until now really hadn’t seen much light of day. Danyalle and I, while we fell in love and I love so many things about her that separate us from just being friends and companions. How the goosebumps rising under the pads of my fingers while I trace imaginary lines over her stomach, the kisses left on my lips that make my heart flutter. People sit there and dumbly ask why I can’t just be her friend, and I just want to scream at them all, “WHY DON’T YOU GO AND BE JUST A FRIEND TO YOUR SPOUSE, HUH?”
I can’t do it because she’s different in my heart and soul. I can’t do it because it wasn’t long in our friendship that we began to experiment with eachother, and eventually I fell in love with her and she the same to me. At least that’s what I believe. Right now, she’s in such a state that she thinks herself too crazy to know what love really is.
But I’m not gay, I’m not straight, I’m not bisexual, or any fucking label. Those labels can go and fucking stuff themselves. I fell in love, and I’m not afraid to shout from the rooftops about it, regardless of what reproductive parts they might have. The only label I want, is the one that I vowed to be for always, and that’s “hers”. But it makes me feel like a freak because I don’t feel that attraction, that arousal, to a single other being on this planet. And she feels it rather often. It makes me feel inadequate and like I should just stop trying to fight being the lonely little hermit I probably should be, with my twenty cats and untamed “garden” that takes over a whole backyard.
And people don’t understand this. They think it’s because we’re comfortable, that it’s safe and easy, that we were together, and I don’t fucking feel that. Actually, all things considered, it has been considerably more difficult to keep this together. That fight is worth it to me, and I don’t want to give up and just be alone. But it’s not just up to me, and to have any resolution at all, she has to want this to work too, and right now, she can barely keep her own thoughts in line long enough to know where she stands at all. There’s a lot of guilt for how she’s treated me over the years, and I’ve held in a lot of anger about how she’s treated me over the years. Mostly, for my part, the anger only comes back whenever old habits kick back up and I watch the old telltale signs go alight. The deleted and sneaky texts, little smiles, what have you. Yes, I will get angry about that. And there will be no guilt if she would just stop this bullshit, and I want to help her with that, but again, she has to want to be better and do better and stop letting this cycle happen again and again. But the ball’s in her court, I think a lot of the time it has been, honestly, but that’s because I’ve always been the one there, and fighting for us. I needed a time out and thought everything over, and this is all the conclusions I’ve come to. Regardless of who or what I am, I know who I love and I want it to be forever because I still feel how I do, and just as strongly as it did eleven years ago. She’s the one that has to pull out the win, because she’s the one that has made the choices against us, while I’ve stuck to it all.
I just have to pull out my famous old patience abilities, and wait. And hope.
Over the past few days, I’ve been having a lot of hypothetical conversations in my head. Some angry, some hilarious, some strange. There were ones that upset me, while some were terrifying, a few ludicrous, and a sprinkling of those that really made me think. The latter, while few in quantity, were enormous in quality as well as being the ones that took up the bulk of this whole self-dialogue.
A lot of the time, the other imaginary exchanges led to, or added to, or complemented the real soul-searching ones. I rehash words from past fights and late night talks from recent dates. My mind pores over phrases from friends, who I know are only trying to look out for both myself and Danyalle, as well as one of those friends constantly needing to challenge us. As much as he pisses me off, we need that, and it’s why I listen to some of it, take it in, and absorb it.
Through all of the ups and downs and twists and turns, I’ve been searching. I’ve searched up, down, left, right, over and under, around, through, and beside. It’s part of my nature. I’ve got this tic in me that makes me analyze and organize and rationalize everything. Sometimes, it drives me a little crazy.
For a while, I had no choice but to just go through the motions. I was working so much that it was pretty much all I did. I slept and worked, and on my days off, Danyalle and I went into Erie to get her back adjustment and do whatever running the Club needed her to do that week. There was maybe one night every month or so where I could actually let loose and have a bit of fun. Scratch that, a night where I had the energy to do so.
Then I started working too much, because I’m made of awesome and sweetness and would do it all with a smile on my face even if I had a migraine all day. I felt like I was going days and days without seeing my family, and knew I had been gone from my friends for weeks. It was distancing, at least to me. Worst of all, it felt like no one noticed my absence or even wanted me around much whenever I was there. Except Bug, because I’m her study buddy and gaming pal and Meme. Danyalle was always on her phone, all of my friends were always talking about some wacky adventure from the weekend before while all I had was stories from work that didn’t work so well in third person translation.
So I shut down. Completely turned to the off position and barely conscious. I felt alone and exhausted and confused and left behind. I wanted to scream and cry and most of all laugh. But I didn’t have it in me. I’d worked myself into a muddled mess that overloaded herself into malfunctioning: barely eating, not sleeping, literally pulling out my hair until I had to shave it all off. I quit the Peak because I couldn’t do it anymore. It was more up, down, up, down and I wanted off of that fucking ride.
For a month or more before I started to crack, I’d wanted to go to part time. Needed to, because I was exhausted. But then Eva went to mornings. And Maddy went to the bakery more often. Finally, Cassi snapped a tendon in her knee (cool side story: I totally called it as soon as I looked at her leg. Poor thing twisted it all about in a ditch up by the upper parking lot). With Ike as the only full-time and competent hot line cook, Maddy brought back for bar foods, and Denise fucking useless as my cold line coworker...there was no way I’d be getting part time with golf and wedding seasons starting up. There were times whenever I was working all of cold line, all of the fry station and burgers and pizzas, and doing sautee because I was the only one there. No real training, just seen it done a few times. I told you, I was made of awesome and they figured that I could handle it all and knew I wouldn’t say no when just dropped into it like I was ‘chuting my way into ‘Nam, guns a-blazing.
Then, I was helping Danyalle organize the Club’s affairs as far as the bar and kitchen went. I helped her inventory and figure out what needed to be ordered. I’d come in to help her clean, or cook, or bartend. I talked her through shit that really frustrated her so she wouldn’t have a heart attack or aneurysm at twenty-eight years old. Even after I cracked, I still did what I could through the haze. Putting on a little smile as I could while trying to not feel the cracks more whenever we’d get home and she’d situate herself onto the complete other edge of the couch and text, text, text.
And I knew who she was talking to, and I knew that she was lying whenever she said she wasn’t and that anything he did say to him was strictly business. Nothing to be worried about. But I was. Because I’m so far from being an idiot that it actually cripples me in some ways. Stress has always, and I cannot emphasize this enough, always fucked her up in a way I can’t even properly explain, but I’ll try. When I come under that kind of cosmic fire, I just internally sync the shit out of it until I’m basically living internally for a bit. Then I get some creative idea, or at the very least resolution, that helps unfold the mess in my brain. When she gets that kind of stress, she rebels. In some way, she will always have a semi-legitimate justification for it. Her brain will rapid-fire reasons out on why she’s so stressed and distance herself from it.
First, I was too down. That was her original trigger. She couldn’t pull me out of it and was tired of trying. I told her she didn’t need to, but she kept on this idea for a while. After that, whenever I started becoming vocal about he-who-shall-not-be-named and how chummy she was being with him, she said she was distancing herself away from me because I can never trust her. I tried, I wanted to, but again, I’m not an idiot.
Then douchey breaks it off with his girlfriend. And proceeds to spend time talking to and hanging out with my girlfriend while I am feeling like I’m going crazy because she made me feel that way.
So she broke up with me in a fit, two days after his break up. I try to call her on it, she explodes with rage. We fight. Then says she’s going canoeing during the Float with him the next day, and not a full day later I find out it’s a date and totally call her on it. Again with explosive, caught-in-a-lie rage. I cannot “prove” anything, so I’m wrong, and she’s called up my parents at some point and worried them so much and I feel like I should be admitted at this point.
I was a terrible person, but I snooped. I needed the truth no matter what she said about what I was allowed to involve myself in whenever it came to her personal life. I pieced it all together, we talked because she had no choice but to do so, and I found out that they’d been flirting a few months, and that she didn’t feel like herself, but did all at the same time, and didn’t know what she wanted or who we were or why we didn’t talk like we used to. I tried to say it was because I’d just spent eight months working my tail off while she did the same, and how I wanted to be around more often and not feel the stresses of both of our workplaces bearing down on us.
We fell into a grey area, and I worked the Float on Saturday, and she said she’d text, because it had rained for so many days before, and let’s face it, I didn’t want her to go, period. But I had to let her. And she never texted for eight hours. I tried to fight off a panic attack. One shot, one 7.5mg Buspar. An hour goes by, and it’s just escalated as I realize that there is no cook, and this pisses Robin off as I pop pill number two while tearing down my register, and finally hear from her. Even though she left a note saying she’d text that morning when I got up, she left her phone in the car because I had asked her to not ruin a 200 dollar phone in a creek. We have a spat there in texting method, and I order a shot and a beer, then people want food, so I offer to cook it while I have my beer. Serve the food, another person wants a hoagie, so I fix that up and pop pill number three because I could feel my face twitching and my lips and fingers going numb. I order two beers to go, and make my merry way home to get properly smashed because once again, I find myself being blamed for “assuming”.
I stop answering my phone.
Apparently, Danyalle and Shitstain go to our friend Tara’s, and Shitstain is rude as fuck to Tara’s hubby when Danyalle is closing the door to his car to leave again. All he’d asked was if they were coming back to get Bug. A snide “Mmmno” almost made him freak out, but he was a better man than the douchebag, and let it slide, knowing that at least they cared enough for Bug to keep her.
Tara tries to message me, and because I’d already shut off my phone and put it on to charge, I had no idea. So she comes over to find me. Then drag me to the fire while I tell her about how I felt fucking alone as hell, because it just seems like I got left behind in the frays because I was too busy for life. How I felt like Danyalle wanted to snatch up Tara and how I felt like she would side that way instead of giving a shit about what was going on with me.
She only knew the one side, true, but she almost started crying whenever I let all of that out. And her and her husband sat there with me, while I was entirely too trashed to function properly and somehow still was, and let me cry, but they opened a window I hadn’t looked out before. They both said that I really didn’t deserve the shit she was giving me, and I know that. But she also doesn’t deserve my snippy ass moments. That I gave gave gave and she only took took took. Mark took the moment to say he felt like I was being used as a babysitter when she catches some dude’s attention.
Then they both agreed on a point that I barely thought of that night, but later the next day, when Tara called me while Di was at work, it was repeated: “I don’t think she’s really gay. I think that she loves you, but she’d never be with another woman.”
Bam. Concrete.
Of course, something that huge is something I’ve actually had the inkling about for quite a while, “Well, of course not,” I reply as coolly as possible, “I mean, I’d never be with another girl either. Actually, fuck that, I probably wouldn’t be with anyone.”
All of it, totally true, and it’s something that until now really hadn’t seen much light of day. Danyalle and I, while we fell in love and I love so many things about her that separate us from just being friends and companions. How the goosebumps rising under the pads of my fingers while I trace imaginary lines over her stomach, the kisses left on my lips that make my heart flutter. People sit there and dumbly ask why I can’t just be her friend, and I just want to scream at them all, “WHY DON’T YOU GO AND BE JUST A FRIEND TO YOUR SPOUSE, HUH?”
I can’t do it because she’s different in my heart and soul. I can’t do it because it wasn’t long in our friendship that we began to experiment with eachother, and eventually I fell in love with her and she the same to me. At least that’s what I believe. Right now, she’s in such a state that she thinks herself too crazy to know what love really is.
But I’m not gay, I’m not straight, I’m not bisexual, or any fucking label. Those labels can go and fucking stuff themselves. I fell in love, and I’m not afraid to shout from the rooftops about it, regardless of what reproductive parts they might have. The only label I want, is the one that I vowed to be for always, and that’s “hers”. But it makes me feel like a freak because I don’t feel that attraction, that arousal, to a single other being on this planet. And she feels it rather often. It makes me feel inadequate and like I should just stop trying to fight being the lonely little hermit I probably should be, with my twenty cats and untamed “garden” that takes over a whole backyard.
And people don’t understand this. They think it’s because we’re comfortable, that it’s safe and easy, that we were together, and I don’t fucking feel that. Actually, all things considered, it has been considerably more difficult to keep this together. That fight is worth it to me, and I don’t want to give up and just be alone. But it’s not just up to me, and to have any resolution at all, she has to want this to work too, and right now, she can barely keep her own thoughts in line long enough to know where she stands at all. There’s a lot of guilt for how she’s treated me over the years, and I’ve held in a lot of anger about how she’s treated me over the years. Mostly, for my part, the anger only comes back whenever old habits kick back up and I watch the old telltale signs go alight. The deleted and sneaky texts, little smiles, what have you. Yes, I will get angry about that. And there will be no guilt if she would just stop this bullshit, and I want to help her with that, but again, she has to want to be better and do better and stop letting this cycle happen again and again. But the ball’s in her court, I think a lot of the time it has been, honestly, but that’s because I’ve always been the one there, and fighting for us. I needed a time out and thought everything over, and this is all the conclusions I’ve come to. Regardless of who or what I am, I know who I love and I want it to be forever because I still feel how I do, and just as strongly as it did eleven years ago. She’s the one that has to pull out the win, because she’s the one that has made the choices against us, while I’ve stuck to it all.
I just have to pull out my famous old patience abilities, and wait. And hope.