Day Five: Kryptonite Circus Carousel Train Wreck
Remember that scene in Superman Returns (the yummiest Superman of all, in my opinion), where Superman confronts Lex Luthor on the continent he has sprouted using the crystals of Krypton? You see that first bead of sweat on Superman’s brow, and you know he’s in trouble. It turns out that Luthor, mastermind villain that he is, has embedded Kryptonite in the structure of the continent, and Superman is beginning to feel the effects.
That was how I spent my night. With Kryptonite. There was that first telltale bead of sweat, and then, all of a sudden, I could be knocked around again. (I mean this figuratively rather than literally, but it hurt just the same.)
It all began with a text message from . . . He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I can’t call him “my ex” right now. I hate the term “ex.” There’s something . . . deceiving about it. We use it so flippantly to take away a title we’d once bestowed upon someone. We’re describing what they are not. Great. Describing what something is not could take a while. I may not be your girlfriend any more, but I’m also not a trashcan, or a gourd, or a paperclip, etc….
Ex is from classical Latin eks, meaning “out of” or “away from.” Is he out-of or away-from my life? Yes, but no. Our so-called “ex’s” sometimes stay with us foreverandeverandever, in one form or another. In that case, they aren’t really an ex. From the Greek, the origin of the prefix means “out of” as in exodus or exorcism. In that case, we can call someone an “ex” only after we have truly exorcised them. Unfortunately, he’s not my ex-anything yet.
Regardless of what title I should bestow upon him now, in his text, I could detect a tone that was edging into desperation. After all, it was the second one he’d sent, and why wasn’t I responding? He was finally serious about reaching me. He was finally pleading.
…Only, he was pleading to come by and get his upright bass, which he’d left behind. (Clearly, “Please take with you the most important things before you go,” did not register in the moment.)
“Seriously,” he writes. “I have a gig coming up.”
And magically, the Mother Teresa slash Gandhi slash Buddha reserve I had been cultivating so carefully disappeared. Replacing it was that wolf with the nasty teeth. The thing I don’t want to call anger but which is—let’s face it, folks—most definitely anger.
I see, I think. He doesn’t come begging for the WOMAN he left behind; he comes begging for the BASS he left behind. Bass isn’t even his primary instrument. It’s the thing that makes money on the side. It’s moonlighting. And, I think, this pretty well sums up the relationship. I am second string to a Palatino four-string. Lovely as she is, I’d just as soon not compete with a piece of Maple.
And yet
that didn’t matter once he was sitting in front of me. That’s the way Kryptonite works. You are very strong until you get around it, and then you are very weak. Your very superhero-hotness drains out of you, and you’re vulnerable to being pushed around. In this case, that meant that after we were done having the unpleasant but necessary discussion about the dispensation of possessions that might fall into the gray areas in terms of ownership (such as, what if I paid for the materials, but he made it?), then we were on to a bunch of silence.
Silence.
S i l e n c e.
The kind of silence that always killed me before. The kind of silence that is a blade of Kryptonite, just like the one Lex Luthor jammed into Superman’s side before shoving him off the edge of the continent and into the ocean to drown.
The kind of silence that always left me leaning forward, toward him, reaching out, saying, Come on, dammit, give me something to work with here. As in,
feeling.
I suppose I was waiting for him to break down, look miserable, and tell me how much he misses me. That I’m all he can think about. That he’s made a terrible mistake and suddenly realizes that he really DOES want to be with me.
That’s what I’m waiting for, in that interminable silence.
And there, in the heart-shriveling quiet, I realize that it was not I who broke up with him; it was the other way around. I said the words, yes. They came from my mouth. But he’d been the idea man. (Remember? He’s the idea man. I am the implementer.) He did everything he could to make it happen. Even though I begged him (sometimes literally) for a number of months not to keep going in this direction. But this way, he gets the easy out. He gets to feel like he wasn’t the one dishing out the hurt because, after all, he can now say, “She asked me to leave.” And people will be sympathetic. “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” they will say. But he will most likely fail to mention the following: “I told her I wasn’t in love with her. She still stayed for another year after that, so I had to step it up a bit. I made sure to be there as little as possible. And stop paying bills. Then I told her to shut the fuck up and quit being a princess when she whined about it.” (In my defense, your honor, after he told me he wasn’t in love with me, he explained that it was a matter of semantics. Please, all you young ladies out there: if a man ever tells you this, or that he would be in love with you, only he has to learn to be in love with life first, run away. Quickly. Don’t look back.)
So. Right!! I’m sure any of you reading this will feel a little uncomfortable now. No one wants to bear witness to someone else’s train wreck (regardless of all the rubbernecking we can’t help but do!)—especially when we accidentally catch a glimpse of a bone sticking out of an arm or a piece of glass jutting out from someone’s neck. A friend of mine once told me he saw someone decapitated in a roadside accident. “You don’t ever get that picture out of your head,” he said. Well, this isn’t a decapitation, but it is the rather oogie business of killing something dead. No matter how friendly it is, it’s bound to get just a little unfriendly. (Even Nelson Mandela, who endured the persecution of apartheid and spent twenty-seven years in prison, suffered a very public divorce. His personal anguish was made a matter of record when he noted that his wife had been having an affair. He took the stand to say he had been “the loneliest man” upon his return from prison. Get it? It wasn’t prison that made him the loneliest man.)
So look, this is definitely not the Greatest Show on Earth. The acrobats all miss the net.
“Step right up! Be Amazed. Not for the faint of heart. Welcome to the Death of Relationship! Ladies and Gentleman, that enormous elephant has tipped and fallen over flat on top of the fat lady who sings, and for the cost of one free car wash, we’ll peel back the curtain and let you peek at the amazing pancake left behind.”
Face it, we’ve all been there. If it were pretty, it wouldn’t give us such a magnificent opportunity to grow.
Anyway, after Kryptonite left, I called my mother and cried. And later, once the griefquake passed, we tried talking about inconsequentials. Somehow, the topic of this blog came up.
“I wouldn’t get stuck on this subject,” she warned me.
“What?”
“Well, it’s not very funny. You last blog didn’t make me laugh at all.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
“Well, I thought some of it was funny,” I said, rather defensively. But probably it wasn’t. Only, it’s what I need to do. And so I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I envision all of the people breaking up right this moment. (It’s something like Charles Xavier seeing all the mutants through Cerebro.) I think, I’m talking to those people. At the very least, we can commiserate together. Sometimes, it’ll be funny. And then sometimes,
it’s going to be like accidentally seeing a bone sticking out of someone’s arm.
Fair warning.