the last email
I understand that you’re upset. All I ask is that you trust me. You can still email me in times when you need someone to talk to. Bounce things off of me. I just can’t talk about the connection anymore. It’s distracting you. Just know that your soul knows but your mind must forget. I can’t address it anymore. To be honest, it’s not fair to anyone and it’s not helping you out in the right way.
I also want you to know that you have helped me with what keeps me running without knowing it. I don’t know exactly what it is but I’ve been fighting my demons one by one my whole life hoping I finally slay the granddaddy of them all, whoever he is. I went through incredible psychological and emotional pain growing up. Pain that overwhelms me until I have no words with which to speak. Because I am very sensitive to things, and like I told you, the connection to my mother is very strong so I pick up a lot of her currents. After I got your email yesterday, something clicked in me. My dream the other night. I called my mother yesterday morning and asked her, begged her, to just be honest with me. If she only married my father because he had been abandoned his whole life and she felt she shouldn’t (couldn’t) leave out of pity and obligation. Because she was afraid to venture out into the world, and risk not finding someone else. If she already knew she was unhappy and wanted to leave before I was born, yet she had me anyway, hoping I would come into this world and help her with her own loneliness. And then she broke down and cried. My mother is a rock. She NEVER cries. And she said yes. She said she knew it was wrong, and she knows it was the wrong decision and she did my father, my brother and I wrong by not being stronger, but yes. Oh, how hard it was to hear my mother sobbing, begging me to tell her how she could make it up to me because she would do anything. I told her, she doesn’t have to. I’m making it up to the universe now. And I also told her, I wish she hadn’t had me.
I went to bed every night with them screaming in the next room. And now I can’t fall asleep without either someone sleeping next to me, or having noise/music in the background. (So you want to know why I hate sex? Because sex is the price I have to pay just to have someone to sleep next to me so I can rest for a little while.) And the excruciating pain of feeling the suffering in the people you love most, but as a child, your hands are too small to stop all of the bleeding that just keeps coming and coming and never stops. How worthless does that make one feel? I left home three times after I got my driver’s license, when the anger and frustration from the marriage became emotionally or violently directed at me and I finally had a way of escaping. But the last time, they told the school so when I finally came back 3 days later, the school had a police officer pull me into an office and scare me straight about what happens to people who do things like that (“You want to be a bum your whole life and go nowhere? Because that’s where you’re headed.” I’ll never forget that. He just stood there yelling at me, putting me down, an honors student who had never gotten in trouble at school, who barely even TALKED to anyone, who couldn’t look anyone in the eye, and never once asked me if maybe there was trouble at home. I had no one to talk to. No adults who could possibly understand or cared enough to understand the violent storms I came home to. And how could anyone believe me if my ability to find words failed me?) Soon after that they also sent me to a psychiatrist who I will hate for the rest of my life. I would sit across from her, and not know how to speak, and wishing she would open up the conversation for me and help me find words, but instead, she threatened to hospitalize me if I kept pulling shit at home. Oh man, people have not given me much reason to trust them.
God, I never ever want any vulnerable child coming into this world to go through what I did. This loneliness that has always been a part of me, it’s been there for so long, it will probably always be a part of me in some way, no matter how much work I do. Because it’s my past and where I come from. I will do the best with what I got, but the reality is that it is a part of who I am, for better or for worse.
When my mom tried to leave my dad 8 years ago, I wanted her to, but he told me that he would kill himself if she did. And there we all were, trapped. God, they are not bad people I swear. But the marriage, such a bad marriage, brought out the ugliest things. But emotions, abandonment, it’s a tricky thing. The right thing often feels like the impossible thing, the dangerous thing, the cruel thing. We were all trapped.
Why I recognized your sadness? Because it is the same as the one coloring my world.
One day, I will write you a poem about my house. How the silence had teeth and echoed all around. And the darkness that churned inside of me because of the unhappiness of my most loved ones. I created my own cage inside myself, to mimic the cage of the trapped people around me, because you will suffer their wrath if they know you are actually free. And I’m still looking for the key to that cage.
I understand your unhappiness. I’ve felt it before. In the woman whom I would lay down my life for, who needs me to help her fend off the demons of her own decisions, but who thinks I do it out of obligation rather than a deep, unquestioning love. And now you…also in such pain…it agonizes me. And for your unborn child…pain beyond words. How much I want to protect it, protect you. But my hands are still too small. You ask me what torments me and this is it.
I know you have so much going on and you have some hard decisions to make and I wish to God that you didn’t. But you aren’t going to face them for anyone but for yourself, because your life is your own and exactly what YOU make of it. I don’t want to complicate your life because I don’t want you to feel like I’m giving you any kind of pressure in any way, for any reason. And I don’t want you to use me as a source of pressure to motivate you. No, I don’t like to feel your sadness. But ultimately, there are things in my life that are for me to tackle for no one else but for me, and vice versa.
I don’t want to become entangled in that and confuse the situation. I want you to do the things you want to do, the way you want to do them, at the times that feel right and I feel that if I’m too close to you, it will feel more like pressure than support. So that’s why I’m trying to take a few steps back. Please…I’m trying to do what’s right for you. And this is the only way for things to turn out okay.