tiny history

pretty much honest account of my relationship from 1998-2019

[lacunae-inc]

These are the pretty much true stories of my relationship with my partner from 1998-2019. I'm hoping that writing them down as I remember them will help me to feel less connected to them.

[hedonistmartyr]

nettle creek house, no longer standing, illinois, 2017

[s0faa]

“I wanted to kill myself and you were yelling about dirty dishes”

—

12 word story, d.m (via i-need-a-cure) (via pvnkslut)

wow… this just hit me on a very personal level.

(via kiefeon)

[lacunae-inc]

Baltimore, 2008

His sister gave us double walled juice glasses. These like insulated glasses that look nice and are aggressively impractical. He had a habit of putting silverware in the glasses in the sink. To soak. I guess. But then he'd set something on top and the spoon would punch through the glass.

Once, I trapped a housefly under one of these glasses. I watched it flying itself over and over against the interior wall until *crack* the glass fucking cracked. How impractical is a glass that can't withstand the assault of a housefly.

We received 6 of these glasses as a wedding present. By the end of a month only 2 remained.

I hated these glasses for their fragility. I hated them for their ostentation. We were not a household for delicate things. And yet his family had given us many delicate and impractical glass objects. Like an omen: Step lightly. Like a curse: When the last object has broken you will be struck down dead. Like a blessing: Maybe the glass will make him mind his temper.

I hated coming to the sink and seeing a spoon in the glass like a time bomb.

Who can remember why we fought? We fought endlessly about everything. But the fight escalated and I mentioned the glasses. My resentment. And I threw them at the floor. Release the curse. Let it be over. The glass exploded into shards like powder. When they redid the interior of the house, shards of that glass were surely still embedded in the floor. Between the rotten linoleum. I'm sure when I painted the kitchen, bits of that glass were in the wall, painted over. Sealing the curse in the house. The interior air gap in the glass contained the poison that would kill us both.

When they were gone I felt relieved.

[lacunae-inc]

An empty can tipped on its side, smell of stale, the aftermath of the party

[lacunae-inc]

The sound of the ceiling fan clicking, clicking

It's the sound of neglect

[lacunae-inc]

Because every time someone asks me how I stayed for so long

All I can hear is How could you have wasted so much love?

Because when I think about the intensity with which I made his life my life

All I can think is How could I have chosen so exquisitely wrong?

Because when people ask me how I put up with all of his quirks

All I can think is How could I have been so stupid?

Why is my heart so committed to harming me? To attaching to something so destructive? Why was I so willing to paper over the everything for the myth?

I like to tell stories. I like myths. I like big feelings that are too big to contain and so they spill over in a big mess and are outsized and feel like they belong to the everything instead of just to myself.

I liked the extremity of our life. I liked that it felt exceptional. It just drained so much out of me. That when I left I was so spent, so squeezed. I had wrung so much love out of myself that it felt like there was nothing left.

Now when I think about the time we spent together I can only see the bad. I can only see the bottoms of stale beers scattered around my life. The detritus of a party that was never for me. I was just the cleaning crew. making nice after the party was over. The party was for the people in the story and I wasn't the girl who was the girl in the story. I was the shadow of her believing the lie. I was the girl in the editing bay cutting out the parts that hurt. The parts that didn't glow. The parts that were too human. I was the girl putting out craft services and cleaning crumbs off the floor. I was the nanny to my children, not their mother. Their mother was a larger than life woman who had so much and I was just the set dressing. I was just the background. But I was both. And I poured so much love into the story. And I loved. I loved. I loved. I believed I was loved. And I wasn't. But it was ok because it was the shadow who wasn't loved. It was the girl cleaning the beer bottles who wasn't loved. It was the nanny, not the mother, who wasn't loved. It was me. Pouring myself out again and again and again and now I want to believe. That my heart is empty. That he consumed it all and it is gone. That I have no more capacity to love. That my heart is a cold dead place. That I buried my heart with the dream. That I am not constantly leaking love everywhere I go. That I do not glow anymore. Because that woman who loved. Who glowed. She never existed. She can't be me because she wasn't real. She isn't.

But she is.

She's me.

I love. I glow. My heart is not a cold dead place.

How can I live this way? How can I live any other way?

[lacunae-inc]

July 2019, Pittsburgh

You don't usually get to know that you're doing something for the last time. Sometimes you do, of course. But especially with the people you've built your life around. How could you know that you were doing something for the last time?

Leaving my marriage I observed doing so many things for the last time. I held those moments in my mind. This is the last family outing. This is the last time we will have sex. This is the last time I will cook you breakfast. This is the last time I will wake up in a puddle of your piss. This is the last time I will have to talk to you on the phone until you fall asleep. This is the last time I will fold your underwear. This is the last time I will close the front door behind you and watch you walk out of our life together. This is the last time I will look into the contempt in your eyes. This is the last time I will argue with you about what to watch. This is the last time.

[lacunae-inc]

The transom window, from Zillow. The only remaining piece of the house.

[lacunae-inc]

July 11, 2019 Pittsburgh

We'd been together too long. Three weeks of trips in six weeks, six weeks together without a business trip. It was definitely a pressure cooker of too much time together.

We'd had a few fights in that time where Ben undermined my parenting with our son. He'd let our son say he'd only do things for his dad. And I wanted to be very clear that was unacceptable. But Ben was more than happy to swoop in and reinforce the idea that our son could only respect him and that I was secondary.

It was July, and it was hot. We didn't have air conditioning and it was very warm and really near stifling in the house. I don't usually get that bothered by the heat, but this was more than usual. We fought. I demanded that Ben not undermine my parenting. He demanded that I leave the house. I refused.

He lifted me off the ground by my shoulders and threw me across the room. I landed on my ankle in a way that sprained it. I was very clearly injured, but Ben couldn't acknowledge that.

There was so much more to that night, but it was the end. There was no coming back from that. And it was so much less painful than I had expected. It was more like waking up from a very fitful sleep and being relieved that your dreams weren't reality

[lacunae-inc]

Pittsburgh, 2022

The ongoing hostility and tone and intent of messages from Ben that just continues into the present never ceases to exhaust me.

In co-parenting counseling, our therapist said that Ben would never stop trying to be my friend, that he will never accept that I want nothing to do with him. It irritated me initially, the idea that he couldn't accept that I wanted nothing to do with him. That he would have the audacity to believe that I could want to be friends with him.

What strikes me about his deployment of the word "friend" is he does it when he's the most aggravated with me. Like somehow it's a weapon, like it would hurt me for him to call me a friend and for me to feel like I was spurning him or something. But it doesn't work that way. And in a way, it's a vindication, because *he* is holding on to something I have put down. I endure the frustration of being forced to raise children with him, but I will never be his friend.

[whitepeopletwitter]

Diary appointment

[lacunae-inc]

DC, 2018

This reminds me of when Ben was certain that we could plan to close on our house very very specifically on June 28. And we had to manage a ton of delicate details to ensure it would be done on that date specifically because we would be inaccessible after. And that was how I spent many afternoons of my vacation sitting in pizza restaurants and coffee shops connected to the most tenuous internet trying to send the remaining documents for our mortgage. Can you write a letter explaining one late payment two years ago? Yes I can, in Google Docs on my phone while my kids run around frantic because I am sitting in the booth of a restaurant and I only have a few minutes of battery left. Are you done, yet, Mommy? Why couldn't we just skip a vacation this year? Or go after we moved?

[lacunae-inc]

Kate

Madison, WI, 2002

Kate and I were pretty fast friends. In retrospect, I was in love with her. I don't know if there was anything reciprocal there or not. It doesn't really matter. But we spent a ton of time together. She came home with me at winter break and we saw Patti Smith at the 930 club. The next week I flew to Columbus to see Interpol. That night was so wonderful.

After we got back to school, everything started unraveling between us. She was annoyed with me, I was depressed. She was depressed. We signed the lease to an apartment together and by the summer we hadn't been speaking for quite a while.

She was dating a friend of mine I had kind of had a thing for. He introduced me to the man who would be my boyfriend for the rest of college. They just wanted me to be somewhere else, to be distracted.

When I first went to therapy when I started cutting, Kate came and took my blades and said she'd hold on to them so I wouldn't be tempted to use them. It worked.

But after some outing or fight or conversation, I went to her apartment and asked if we could talk about it. She just handed me the box of blades and said she didn't want to talk to me at all anymore. That I was selfish and she was tired of it.

We moved into the apartment but I never lived in it. I stayed with my boyfriend most of the time, crammed in one small room. I'd go to my apartment sometimes when I thought Kate wouldn't be home. It was a storage unit basically. I had ordered some Ikea furniture to be delivered and the transaction was rejected because of fraud detection. By the time I understood what had happened and how to fix it, I decided I didn't want the furniture anymore. I didn't have an apartment to furnish, I'd make too. Hunched over my books and laptop on a bed, or sitting in the library, I managed to make do.

By the summer, I'd had it with living with my boyfriend and 6 other guys, so I got a studio for the summer and my boyfriend and I moved in together.

Kate and I saw each other maybe twice in the year that we shared the apartment, and we never spoke again.

Friendships end, people have fallings out. But I have rarely felt so rejected in life as when Kate passed me the box of blades through a crack in the door like, Here, I can't hold you anymore.

And the apartment and the rejected furniture and abrupt ending to a friendship that meant so much to me.

[lacunae-inc]

Pittsburgh 2021

I had a thought that he is like an elephant. I brought him into my house when he was small and cute. He charmed me, and I wanted to take care of him. And then he grew and grew into a giant. He took up all the space until there was nothing left for me.

I feel pressed up against the walls of my life, confined to the spaces around him. Struggling to keep up with feeding him and cleaning his shit. Apologizing for the space I need and the desire to have something for myself.

But he just grabs handfuls of food from my hands. He needs. He needs them more.

And since I brought him in when he was small and then he grew and grew, I can't just open the door. He won't fit through. I have to change my house or dismantle him. But if I keep feeding him, he will crush me. If I keep letting him take the space that's my space, then I will never be able to have anything for myself.

And I can have things for myself.

Even if there's still an elephant in my house.

[lacunae-inc]

Baltimore, 2012-2015

Grad school part n of m (in no particular order)

Earlier in our relationship we'd bickered about the division of household labor. I think this is pretty typical when you figure out how to balance cohabitation.

But first I started working from home, which meant I was home during the day, so of course I'd sneak in some household chores during my workday, right? And then I didn't work at all. So the balance of labor affirmatively shifted from Ben doing some of the housework to him doing basically none of it. (He did do all the grocery shopping. He didn't put the groceries away, but he did all the shopping.

While I understood what the logic of the shift was - we were living a long commute from Ben's work so we could afford to live on one income while I went to grad school - it made me feel insecure and it made me feel like Ben wasn't taking me seriously.

But he was so! excited! about my grad program. He was always talking about how great it would be for me to get into software engineering because it was such a growth industry! And I was going to make all this money and we would have such a great life afterwards.

[lacunae-inc]

Baltimore 2012-2015

Grad school part n of m (in no particular order)

I'd joke that I was a stay at home mom during the day and a grad student at night. It was not that far from the truth. I did all stay at home mom things in the day - went to the playground, cut grapes in half, made elaborate dinners, dropped my husband off at the train in the morning, kept all the plates spinning.

I'd do homework during periods of napping, or in stolen nights that Ben came home late (many, as it turned out). I'd catch up on the weekends when Ben would take our daughter to run errands or do fun things and I'd do homework and house work, and, honestly, it was great.

But the downside of spending a lot of time with stay at home moms is: (1) they have subjugated much of their career ambition for the prize of putting motherhood first, which is fine, but it makes being an aspiring working mom put some sand in those gears, (2) the kinds of jobs women quit to be stay at home moms in the kind of socioeconomic circle I was in don't leave you with a lot of capacity to imagine living independently with kids. Which means that stay at home moms are afraid of getting divorced.

When I was a stay at home mom, my targeted ads were for spyware to catch my husband cheating, liposuction, workouts, workout clothes, ways to make parenting a toddler more intellectually stimulating (read: Pintrest boards of heavily supervised arts and crafts). The articles I'd click on were about how women didn't always get the brass ring in tech jobs, about how women who leave the workforce to raise kids, even for a year or two, often find it hard to return, women who've "demonstrated" that they can't balance work and family because they deigned to stay home aren't taken seriously when they try to return to work, and when they do return to work, they have to hide all evidence that they care about their children because workplaces don't want to hire moms.

That I had been fired not too long after I'd had my child amplified my anxiety about re-entering the workforce. But being surrounded by women who felt like my peers who feared nothing more than getting divorced made it much much worse.

[lacunae-inc]

Baltimore 2012-2015

Grad school, part n of m (in no particular order)

I had tried to go to grad school several times after I initially failed before I graduated college. I applied for mechanical engineering when a colleague said I'd be a shoo in, and was rejected. I applied to law school two cycles, and two LSAT rounds and got waitlisted both time times. But after I'd been fired from my job, I was doing some odd jobs and taking programming classes while my first child slept a lot as a baby and at the strong urging of Ben, I applied to school for computer science.

I'd applied to do a second bachelor's degree on the logic that I didn't have enough education to jump to the master's program. To my surprise, the chair of the master's program in CS at the school I ultimately attended reached out to me and said that I could do the masters, that they had a one year bridge course for career switchers and that he thought I'd be a strong candidate.

I hadn't really considered computer science, but at the time, there was definitely starting to be the drumbeat of everyone should be a programmer, everyone should do software. Marc Andreessen's "Software is eating the world" quip was still relatively new. So going into a master's in CS seemed like a great idea, but I was also pretty scared at the prospect. Ben was enthusiastic. You'll be able to make so much more money than you did in nonprofits! You'll be able to work from anywhere, so we can move anywhere! (This was important at the time, because Ben was still a postdoc with tenure track dreams.)