rivka | Entries tagged with the ex

I haven't been posting much to my journal recently. Which is weird, because I've been composing journal entries in my head almost every day. In the past week I have meant to post:

- musings on my identity as a therapist.
- a lightheartedly ranting poll about the awfulness of other drivers.
- a geeky ode of fascination to Reproduction Fabrics.
- a bitter rant about medical billing requirements and governmental accusations of billing fraud.
- a sickly furious response to something

lizw linked to.
- a return to my "excavation work" series of posts about unrooting the internal effects of a former relationship.

Why haven't any of these made it to the screen? It's probably the last item on the list, holding things up. Nah, scratch "probably" and replace it with "almost certainly."

trinker pointed out that I've been much visited by the past, lately, in memories and dreams and strange coincidences. At the end of last week, once more my ex re-appeared distressingly in my head. I've been resisting thinking about that episode ever since, but somehow it seems to be bottling up other things I'd like to write about. So I guess it needs to be extracted, like a tooth. Argh. I thought I was done.

Maybe now that I've said this out loud I can write about something else in the meantime. I'm not writing about the ex at work.

Quiet afternoon, followed by a frantically busy morning. Must be awake and alert before the evening, because of Great Big Sea.

[Sidenote: When I decided that I needed to make a series of exploratory entries about my previous relationship, because not everyone wants to read about high-trauma stuff, I created a special friends list for the purpose. If you've joined my friends list since then (or you're lurking) and would like to be put on that list, just let me know. I have some journal creation codes I could give out to lurkers.]

Current Mood: blah

I had the strangest experience this morning. I was not quite asleep, not quite awake. I knew as it was happening that it wasn't real, yet it was more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream.

I was lying on my stomach in bed, and it suddenly seemed to me that I was in Lane's bed - just as it was when I used to visit her in Portland. Instead of the slightly sagging double bed I sleep in now, I felt underneath me the featherbed covered in black and white-striped flannel, and the cool firm cotton-sheeted futon below that. I sensed the grey Portland light flitering through the window, in an intangibly different way than the Maryland light does. I felt the chill of the air against my exposed shoulder and felt the sense memory of how cold settled into that house. I sensed the position of the bed in the room, walls behind and to the right of me. All of these sensory impressions were perfectly detailed, perfectly mundane... just as it feels to wake up in a bed and become slowly aware of your surroundings.

"This isn't real," I told myself, and I knew it to be true. But at the same time I had the vivid sensory knowledge of how it would be to turn my head and brush my face against Lane's hair. How it would be softer and finer than the hair of anyone I've slept with since. I inhaled the scent of her shampoo. I had a sense of her size and weight in the bed next to me.

"This isn't real," I told myself again, and this time I imposed some discipline: I started singing to myself in my head, a slow and rhythmic song, a song with lots of lyrics to remember, a song with no connection to her. And the song occupied my mind in an orderly fashion, and gradually I fell asleep again, and when I awoke I knew where I was.

I knew yesterday that she was on my mind, although I still don't know why. But I never imagined that I still had memories like this, or that the past could impose itself on me with such perfectly realistic mimicry.

Current Mood: unsettled

I don't know what prompted me to remember that I'd never followed up on this letter a friend sent me about my ex. But this morning I found myself thinking about it, and realized that I shouldn't have left my friend dangling in space.

I also found myself wondering whether there's more to write about under the "excavation work" header. (i.e., posts about my former relationship and the effects it had on me.) There may be. I don't feel nearly the sense of urgency that I did before I told the Two Big Secrets, but there are probably still bits and pieces it would do me good to explore. Not tonight, though.

Here's the letter I sent:

Dear [...],

Your letter of last October (which I've attached below, in defiance of netiquette, because it's been so very long) started me down a long and productive chain of reflection. It only occurred to me relatively recently that you'd expressed concerns about whether you had done the right thing, and that you might take my silence on the matter as evidence that you hadn't. My apologies.

Why did I ask you about Lane? Because our relationship was long and intense, and because she still occupies a significant portion of my mind. Because I was curious. Because keeping track of her is still a fairly strong mental habit. But not in fact - although I don't blame you for reaching this plausible conclusion - not because I still have positive feelings for her or hope we can ever be friends.

That looks like a terribly cold thing to say, and it probably is. Given that you see both of us socially, I'm resisting the urge to explain or justify it with information that might make you uncomfortable. Suffice it to say that I really don't think further contact between me and Lane would be beneficial to either of us.

I'm not sorry that you wrote me that letter, because it spurred some useful exploration of my own feelings and motives. But I am sorry that you got caught in the middle.

I hope there's a chance that I'll be seeing you and [...] at Minicon.

Regards,
Rivka

Current Mood: sore throated

Over the last month or so, I've been trying to ignore my growing awareness that there are some Things To Be Resolved regarding my relationship with my ex-girlfriend. If nothing else, the way I felt when someone called me to her attention alone shows that the passage of time hasn't stilled all of my strong feelings... but there were other things as well. An alt.poly thread (at this point, and in an open journal entry, I can't say which one). Going back to Portland, and re-connecting with the friends and places I shared with her.

Some of this stuff has never been said, not even to Misha. A lot of it is bound up in the belief that I owe it to her to keep secrets about the bad things she did to me. But I'm becoming more and more certain that I have to talk about those secrets, or she'll always have power over me.

I want to talk about them here. I need to be able to organize my thoughts and analyze them in bits and pieces; that means either text, or therapy. Text is cheaper. *half-grin* I've never made any private LJ posts before, but for obvious reasons I'm going to be limiting access to any posts involving this kind of excavation work.

It has occurred to me that not everyone on my friends list will want (or have the energy) to read something that has such high-stress content. What I'd like to do is set up a specific friends-list subgroup for this. People who don't want to be privy to past-relationship excavation work can continue to read my ordinary posts, without being troubled by overly private/traumatic information.

Let me know whether or not you would like to be included on the subgroup list. I'm not going to draw any Deep Meaning from your choice. If you're reading my journal without a LiveJournal account, and want to have subgroup access, I have some account codes I could give out.

Gosh, this is going to be fun.

Current Mood: uncomfortable

(I decided to drop the present-tense narrative style I used in part 1. The stylistic discontinuity bugs me, but writing in the present tense is bothering me more.)

Saturday, October 27
On Saturday, despite being in a three-hours-earlier time zone, we didn't wake up until 10:00. In contrast to Friday's nice sunny weather, on Saturday the weather was highly Portlandesque: chilly, drizzly, and blanketed with grey. I made the alarming discovery that Misha didn't pack any flannel shirts for the trip, and started worrying that he would either (a) freeze to death, or (b) be arrested for failure to display flannel in a Northwest zone.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: happy

Four and a half years later, I should not be breaking out in a cold sweat.

I just got e-mail from one of my old west coast connections, with whom I visited at alt.polycon 7. She says that she visited Portland last August, and talked with my ex:

Laine was there, in a good mood and pretty good health. At one point in
the afternoon, I told her [] and I had had lunch with you, and that
you'd asked after her. She frowned and asked why you'd asked. I said,
because you still care about her, want to know how she's doing, and hope
that you might be friends again some day. I said that telling her about
the conversation with you was entirely my idea, not yours, and that it had
not seemed to me at any time during the conversation that you were trying
to send her messages through me, and that I hadn't checked with you before
talking to her (I am saying this badly; she didn't ask me whose idea it
was, either; it seemed to me to be important to say that you weren't
sending a message, that what was going on was me meddling or gossiping
rather than anything else).

She said if I talked with you about her again I should mention that she
was looking particularly cute (she was, in fact). She said she'd be
willing to consider future friendship with you if you'd talk with her
about the breakup face to face, not over the phone. That part seemed to
me to be an intentional message, which I suppose I should have been
expecting on initiating the conversation, but I wasn't.

I've hesitated passing this on in largest part because I'm rather sorry I
started, but having done so, it seems wrong not to let you know. I poked
the situation, and I should not have done that.

I feel sick to my stomach. It's already been in the back of my mind, with this trip to Portland coming up: what if I run into Lane? What would I do if I saw her? (Well, hide. But what would I do if she saw me?)

Augh. Maybe the fact that I'm so agitated about this means that I ought to talk with her. Obviously the ugliness of our relationship and its end has never really settled for me, or I wouldn't feel this way now. At the time that we broke up, I was still caught up in the mindset that I needed to protect her and shield her. So I didn't say anything about the time she...

Jesus.

I don't know.

[] was wrong. I didn't ask about her because I want to be friends with her. I asked about her because she still holds a sick fascination for me. Because I used to feel that I was responsible for what happened to her, right down to whether she lived or died. And old habits die hard. But Jesus, I wish I'd never said anything.

Current Mood: unsettled

I realized today that since our honeymoon, Misha and I have only travelled on weekend trips to conventions or to visit our families. This is our first vacation in more than two years. No wonder I'm so excited!

We have our flight reservations. We'll be leaving at godawful-early-o'clock in the morning of Friday, October 26th, and getting in to Portland around 11am. We'll be leaving at 2pm on Wednesday, October 31st, and getting back to Baltimore at godawful-late-o'clock at night. We'll be staying in a hotel, at least most of the time, because the friends who offered to put us up had to construct a baroque plan involving hauling their sleeping child around at midnight in order to be able to say that they had room for us. We'll probably be staying at least one night with our friend Jez in Salem, her not having a sleeping child who'd need moving.[1]

I haven't seen some of my Portland friends in four years. Barely spoken to them, either, I'm ashamed to admit. Things with my Portland ex ended so horribly, and some of our friends took sides, and... all things considered, it was probably easier to just avoid reminders. And then there was the whole mess last fall and winter, when everything was so hard for us and I dropped out of contact with practically everybody. My friend Wynona called me then, I remember, and I said I'd call her back the next day and never did. And then of course I felt diffident about contacting people, given what an uncommunicative jerk I'd been. Fortunately, they all seem disposed to forgive me with great enthusiasm.

So now begins the making of plans, and I'm incredibly excited. Sushi, lots of sushi - this much is a foregone conclusion. On my previous trips to Portland I'd often have sushi four days out of five, and I never grew tired of it. Hot tubbing at Inner City Hot Springs, a beautiful quiet bath-house and sauna where the tubs are open to the sky. (They offer free hot tubbing on your birthday - which, coincidentally, will be the day we arrive.) Powell's City of Books, the largest used bookstore west of the Mississippi, covering two floors and an entire city block. The Reed campus - apparently they've built enough new buildings that I won't even recognize the place. The Crystal Springs Rhododendron Gardens (if it's not too cold), the site of the majority of my experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. The little cafes and shops along Hawthorne Boulevard. Pioneer Square. The long winding drive along the Columbia River gorge. The seafood and champagne brunch at Skamania Lodge, and then relaxing the afternoon away in rocking chairs by the fire. Northwest microbrews. And my friends: Jez, Sam, Shandra, Diana, Wynona, Jeff. Their kids, Alex, Rory (the whitehaired baby I lived with during her first year of life, who is now in the second grade), baby Max (whom I've never met).

Oh, I'm happy.

[1] If you don't count her shockingly young boyfriend, who probably doesn't sleep in the guest room anyway.