Mainstream happiness looks a lot like settling to me. I might have had a lot of things happen in my life, that maybe I wasn’t ready for (are we ever ready? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence to say we are...) but I’m still not ready to settle and accept that it will never be more than what it is right now.
I wonder if I need to give more and be more to have more, surely what you put in is what you get out, but I feel like my output is always more than what I get back from the people around me. And really, that’s only one person, the one person who I want more from, who doesn’t seem to be able to change and do that. I loved you. But you’re so afraid of change.
I’m dying for a change, it could actually be killing me. Languishing in a dead relationship, feeling the jumper cables spark us together again and then being bitten by the reality that really I don’t have any more for it, and it’s starting to make me a different person. I’m walling myself up, trying to avoid feeling any more about it one way or the other, it’s clear I can’t get away cleanly from this. I shouldn’t have expected to. The bomb dropped too soon, and now all that’s left is fallout without a plan to patch up whatever is left, however we have to, together or apart.
The hardest part is that it’s not just me. If it was just me I would have just packed and left. But I can’t pack and leave when I don’t have any means. “Does he beat you? Has he hurt the children, or behaved threateningly to them? No? Then what the fuck are you doing at emergency housing? Go home silly girl, nobody actually gets to be happy, safe is as good as it gets.”
I honestly can’t even tell you what I mean when I say I want more. More. Just that nebulous something that is bigger than what we are. If you’re happy where you are then that’s good, that’s great, I’m so glad for you, but there is more to life than just scraping by. Sure I’d have loved to get there together, but it’s taken you five years (and me trying to leave twice!) to do the growing you should have done by the time we had our first child. I can’t wait another five, ten, twenty years for you to be the man I know you could be, if you’d just try.
I’m tired. When you asked how I’ve been feeling, and I said tired, and that I didn’t know if it was depression, if I was going up, coming down, or just stuck in the middle of it all, mired in those feelings that I can’t process because I don’t want them to mean what I know they mean, because I’ve been telling you the same thing for more than a month, and trying to rebuild without letting myself feel anything for you. I think that the biggest problem is that I don’t feel like there’s a reason to try. When you ask me what you need to do, and the list is so long I can’t even start, because I don’t feel like any of these are real character flaws, just things I can’t stand, it doesn’t seem fair to you. If I can’t live with and love you for who you are, why do you have to change? Why do I have to tell you to change? That doesn’t seem fair to you, to have to become a different person to keep the family together. You’ll just end up resenting me for forcing you into being a different you than you wanted to be. I just don’t think we’re compatible. We were, and now we aren’t. And when I told you I wanted to end the relationship while we still liked each other? That hasn’t changed. I don’t ever want to hate you. And I don’t want you to have more reason to hate me than ‘she couldn’t stay, she just wouldn’t do it’.