If You Live Long Enough

If you live long enough you have the opportunity to eventually realize that sometimes getting what you think you want winds up being the worst possible thing that can happen. This is not a profound or original realization, but it is the kind that can hit you full in the face and leave you gasping for air and swallowing your own blood.

Marie and I have been back together for 11 months now, and it has been 11 months of misery. Insanity is repeating the same behaviors and expecting things to change. They rarely do, not without a profound shift in attitudes. They have been no such shifts.

We are repeating the same arguments and fomenting the same resentments. A bad relationship is full of its own unreal reality. Those of you who have witnessed, or come out of the other side of such craziness must know exactly what I mean. You begin to believe the worst messages you hear about yourself. You begin to think, she treats me this way because I deserve it. You surrender the power to change things, or walk away from what you can't change.

I've run all my life. Run from conflict and run from failure. My thinking was, I'll stick this out, I'll change, I'll try harder, and things will get better. They haven't. New battle lines are drawn every day. No combination of sacrifices or gestures invalidates the fiercely stored bitternesses of the past. The script is maddening and exhausting and futile. I hurt all over. The walk up the steps to work is the lonliest and most miserable of my life. I come home to a crazy, lost, hurting house, and I want to escape. Pack up a few things and sleep in my car. Show up at my sister's or my best friend's doorstep. Anything. Anywhere. Just go. Can the unknown and uncertain be any worse than this hate-filled oblivion?