What the Hell is This?

Well, here’s some good news: my Christmas miracle came in the form of a surprise year-end bonus from my employer, which could easily have been used up immediately on badly needed items like new underwear, secondhand dishes, a teeth cleaning, and/or a visit to my chiropractor, not to mention the needs of my fellow poor folk…but I chose to spend it on the tuition for Matador University.

Matador offers a 12-week online course for aspiring travel writers and photographers. Their faculty and alumni write for paying travel blogs and magazines like National Geographic Traveler. I had been trying to figure out how I could pay for “tuition’ ever since finding out about their program. My initial plan had been to get a better job and save up, but that obviously wasn’t happening, and I could see myself putting off the course indefinitely in the meantime. I seriously considered charging it on my high-balance, consolidated-debt credit card, but I have enough trouble meeting the monthly minimums as is.

Instead, the crazy-making job I do have, after my many attempts to leave, provided me with the unexpected means. Go figure.

So I have taken the first step toward at least one dream.

**

The day before Christmas, I had a massive shock: I found Sam.

Online, that is. On Facebook. Through a mutual friend. He had been loath to join Zuckerberg’s internet playground back in the day, but his girlfriend must have convinced him otherwise.

Yes, I said girlfriend.

Given that Sam has never tried to contact me again, I didn’t attempt to ‘friend’ or even message him, but as the contents of his page weren’t hidden from me by privacy settings, I simply looked at his info page, wall, and photos. I guess you could call that Facebook stalking. Since I’ve known nothing about his life after he left, however, I don’t think anyone will blame me.

There was a relationship status and anniversary. Sam had apparently gotten involved with a young woman his own age eight months after leaving me. They are still together after a year and a half; living together, in fact. I like the look of the girl: she has that sweet, slightly bug-eyed vulnerability of a Jane Adams character, sweatshirt-clad, sans makeup, with a pierced lip that defies midwestern conservatism. She’s not the type to inspire violent jealousy in other females. Sam still looks ineffably Sam, of course: a sly smile flickering in only his eyes in one photo, breaking into an unabashedly happy grin beside the girl, who looks delighted to be with him, in the next. She should be delighted to be with him. In one photo he is kissing her, and I remember his knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect that knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect a few things. Blessed art thou among women, I think. It’s all hers, now. But Sam…he looks so terribly adorable, and so terribly Sam, I miss him all over again, and burst into a torrent of hot tears. Sam!

**

It is a bittersweet Christmas. I am both gratified and newly heartbroken. Finally I know where and how Sam is; finally I know Sam is never coming back.

By way of consolation, I find myself contemplating Dan Savage’s “campsite rule,” which has been summarized thus:

If you’re in a sexual relationship with somebody significantly younger or less experienced than you, the rule that applies at campsites shall be applicable to you: you must leave them in at least as good a state (physically and emotionally) as you found them in. That means no STDs, no unwanted pregnancy, not overburdening them with your emotional or sexual baggage, and so on. Younger partners and particularly virgins will often take everything given to them by an older, more experienced partner as being “written in stone,” and will carry around everything they learn from them for the rest of their life: so treat them right!

My young friend had, at the time I met him, only recently lost nearly half his body weight. He had had considerable social difficulties all of his life because of his extraordinary but differently-abled brain. I was, all things considered, writing on a fairly blank slate, one belonging to a boy of twenty-one who was far more vulnerable with me than any “grown man” had ever been.

I thought of all the positive reinforcement I gave him almost continuously, all the many ways in which I told him he was wonderful and beautiful and amazing, how sincerely I enthused about his marvelous natural abilities as a lover. I showered him with well-deserved praise. The feeling comes overwhelmingly back – that enormous, grateful love I could scarcely contain at the time, which overflowed in words as well as in kisses and caresses. I wanted to offer him anything and everything for everything he offered me. Our lovemaking was more deeply satisfying than anything else I’d ever experienced, nourishing both my body and soul. I loved it, and I loved him, and I told him so at every opportunity.

In the end, what Sam gave me even he couldn’t take away. And perhaps my loving words overwrote some of the noxious messages, some of the neglect and cruelty of his own past.

After all, here he is, two years on, in a longer and more serious relationship than I’ve ever had in my life, with a young woman who posts adoring messages on his Facebook wall even though she’ll see him at home later. Sam looks happy. She looks happy. They look happy together.

I’d like to say it’s a campsite rule epic win.

**

The kicker comes when I go back and read the emails I wrote to Sam in those months after he left, when his silence drove me to speculate wildly and to drink. I had expected them to be more oppressive and scolding than they were; I was startled to find some beautiful, heartfelt words that expressed sentiments even I’d forgotten expressing. I’ll leave most of it between Sam and me, but here’s the passage that contained the words (italicized for your benefit) that caused me to burst into tears one more time.

I thought: Whatever (Sam) has to do to reclaim, or save, his life, I’m all for it. I don’t even know if that’s what you’re doing. You once told me you didn’t care to get well. But so help me God, I would give anything, I would give you my blood, baby, I would give you up entirely, I would give you to another woman…if it meant you could be well and whole and healed and happy.

I guess I said it first, didn’t I.

I had no idea I was predicting the future.

**

One door closes. And then another. This week I learn that a girlfriend of mine is engaged to a widower who had caught my eye more than once. I hadn’t even known they were an item. Well, bully for her. One more possibility bites the dust.

Matador is, I suppose, my way of prying open a window – not quite far enough to escape, yet, but at least to let the air in.

Escape does not seem to be in the cards.

**

Escape from what, you ask?

Look here, people: I have tried to be good (even though Mary Oliver tells me in “Wild Geese” that I don’t have to be). I have not indulged thoughts that could easily have taken over my idle hours. For well over a week, I did a decent (at times excellent) job at work while Dan was absent, and I took the aforementioned steps toward my future as a writer. I didn’t wallow. I didn’t obsess. My sexual fantasies consisted of syndicated reruns of The Best of Sam — at least until Christmas Eve. I flirted with the Asian Adonis, who returned to the call center a few months ago. I tried fantasizing about him instead.

None of this seemed to matter when Dan came back. Nor did it matter that he’d cut off his beautiful thick hair, or that he told a lame poop joke, or that he has a paunch in lieu of Adonis’s veiny arms and tight little body. My struggle doesn’t stem from lust for his physical attributes; it’s not made more difficult by intellectual accord; it’s not even quite such a matter of emotional attachment, at this point, because I prevent myself from confiding too much in him. Seriously, I’m clutching the reins so tight, I’m drawing blood.

No, it’s as if there were a magnet inside of each of us, some kind of subtle gravitational force that keeps drawing us back together. If I stay away from him, he finds me (and so help me God, I’m happy to see him). Break time the other day found us standing together in the hallway by the credenza, munching on our respective apples, through absolutely no effort of my own. I had actually deliberately gone somewhere he was not. But when he came toward me, grinning affably in his way, something in me rejoiced in spite of myself.

Don’t think it’s Dan being “bad,” either. He’s not seductive or a flirt like Ted. He’s not seductive at all. That’s not his modus operandi. He just apparently really likes being around me, probably without even knowing why. I really like being around him, too. At the time, it just seems to flow so easily. It’s no big deal. He treats me like a good friend, a buddy, telling me about what he and Mai did over the holidays…but I know we can both feel the magnet. Don’t ask me how I know that. It sounds insane, even to me. But I understand now what people mean when they say “It was bigger than both of us.”

**

I could always write off married men before, no matter how charismatic or handsome. A ring on a man’s finger was tantamount to an electrified fence as far as my crushes were concerned. (My fondness for my friend Ben paled in comparison to my grand Greg Schulz obsession, anyhow.) How harshly I judged people who couldn’t restrain themselves! I thought they were being willfully stupid. All of that drama, it seemed so avoidable.

“The heart wants what it wants,” said a disgraced Woody Allen by way of explanation, after breaking an even stronger taboo. “What you resist persists,” cautioned Dr. Jung, who failed to resist his troubled patient Sabina Spielrein. In the Whole Foods restroom, I happen to hear my old buddy Melissa Etheridge, who wrote the soundtrack to my agonized twenties, growling and howling over the sound system

Now we make our choices

Doing what we think is good

We deny our own dreams

‘Cause we think we’ve been told we should…

She looks up to heaven

And wonders why love is so cruel…

Can’t stop the wanting of you

Even Sonny weighs in, quoting Kierkegaard in his Facebook status: “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” I can’t help but wonder what it was like for Sonny to meet Elyse, his on-again off-again girlfriend of almost seven years, the willowy, stunning kids’ yoga teacher who precipitated the end of his fourteen-year marriage.

Personally, I think I summed things up best in a comment on my last post: “All of my malaise of the past several months can be attributed to the bitter realization that someone else has married my husband.”

**

Soon after writing that comment, I dream that I am wearing a gorgeous white wedding dress. There is a wedding happening, and it’s Dan’s, in a facility that looks less like a church or government building than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (of the 1971 musical). A setting I’ve associated since early childhood with wishes and dreams, with finding that mythical golden ticket. (The song “Pure Imagination” puts a tear in my eye to this day.)

Even though I’m in a wedding dress, I am nevertheless aware that my job is to walk Dan down the aisle and give him away. The bride-to-be is nowhere to be seen at this point, and I’m passing time with Dan outside before the ceremony. The one person who is around is a woman from work who I’m certain (given some barbed offhand comments) has grasped what’s going on between Dan and me. She can be a bit catty, and seems jealous of him at times, in that competitive alpha-female way former homecoming queens can have about them (despite being married, with a baby), but (unlike me) she’s not one to be shy to speak her mind.

For my part, I am suffering tremendously and at length over the concept of “speak now or forever hold your peace.” Oblivious, Dan is talking to me like I’m his best friend. Maybe I’m the Best Woman? Liz, the coworker who can tell how I feel, gives me a tight hug of support in passing. In contrast to waking life, I feel like she’s the one person on my side. But still I wait, and say nothing.

At what seems like the last minute, I blurt out to Dan that this joyous occasion will, in fact, go down in history as the worst fucking day of my life. Dan looks stunned. I flee.

I run right into Liz, and tell her that I’ll be drinking a bottle of wine by myself tonight and crying my eyes out. She shocks me then by telling me, very sharply, how disappointed she is in me – she had thought I had more ‘fight’ in me than that – and stalks off in disgust. Dan has still not walked down the aisle. I start to meander tentatively back toward the wedding, but at that point I wake up.

**

Don’t ask me to interpret that in detail. I will point out that it’s the first dream I can remember having in which I’m wearing a full white wedding dress. It was strapless, as I recall. An elegantly simple, satiny, form-fitting thing. Quite lovely, really. I felt like Audrey Hepburn.

I do think it all points back to my lack of a sense of entitlement, and the fact that I’ve always felt forced to “give away” the men that I love…whether the man was León in my teens or Sam in my forties. Liz probably represents the part of me that’s disgusted by the way I just lie down and roll over. There’s no ‘fight’ in me at all. I don’t believe I’m deserving…and even if I could believe that, I still wouldn’t believe I could do anything but lose in the most humiliating manner imaginable. I’m not the kind who would ever stand up in church and stop a wedding. Easier for me to buy a bottle of wine and go home, get drunk alone, and cry.

**

Not that I don’t believe I did right by Sam. At least I have one thing I can be proud of. If nothing else, I seem to have left his “campsite” in such primo condition the next visitor decided to stay permanently. In general, I try to leave people better off than I found them, although the Jeannies and the Elis of the world, who are probably off somewhere right now feeling aggrieved, sometimes can’t be helped.

León used to claim that I saved his life, even as my experience with him left me licking the stab wounds for years. I let Jeannie tear me down mercilessly without even putting up a hand, despite the cruel words I could have thrown in her face like acid. Somehow it’s always me who winds up in the worst sort of pain, regardless of whether I did the “right” thing. I wonder if I shouldn’t do the crime, once in a while, if I’m going to do the time.

Bold words from a coward. No matter how much Dan may like me, he has a nice, comfortable life he probably likes a whole lot better. I’m not the woman men want to run away with, anyway; I’m the one who gets left behind without a backward look. I’m Jen, not Angelina. Or is that just what I believe?

**

But here’s an interesting exercise: read my dream again, just as it happened, and ask – what if the bride is actually me?