Dear Fishboy: The Love Letters

The Final Goodbye

2012-01-28T18:45:00.002-05:00

To all my readers, I thank you for your support over the past several months both through email and via comments on this blog. I thank you for journeying with me as I sorted through my feelings for a singular human being and my own heart.

And to the real Fishboy, I will always love you. There will never be a time in my life when this is not the case. I walked to you when there were no others. I spread out my floor before me and took one step after another to reach you. You filled me with music where there had been silence and solitude. You were the bravest decision I have ever made and I can only hope I find that bravery again in my life. I love you, my Son of Arianrhod; you will always be in my feet and in my heart. Be well and be happy and if there is ever fair weather on your seas, well you know where I am...

For those who wish to continuing following my writing, please visit the new blog "The Seahorse Lady" Thank you and goodnight!

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 74: Loving & Trembling Again

2012-01-10T13:16:00.003-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I spent yesterday on the cardiac unit of ___’s ER—my second visit to the hospital in a week. They thought I had a pulmonary embolism—for most going into the ER it would have been a simple asthma attack (although for most asthma is not simple; in my situation it’s an easy-peasy problem). The ER yesterday looked as if it was filled with refugees from a war-zone; although I suppose modern life is itself a war zone. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the ER and it was overwhelming. Yesterday in particularly—so many people means the overall volume is louder than most Fridays Restaurants. The cardiac unit is full of beeps, clunks, beeps, and alarms going off with every heartbeat. Televisions are all set to different channels with volumes increasing as the volume in the ER does. Added to this there was a man there yesterday screaming and cursing the staff and yanking at his restraints with short periods of quiet when he was dosed with haldol; nonsensical moans from older patients with Alzheimer’s wafted in an out. I forgot just how noisy the place was. For years I had been in and out of the ER so much that I had gotten used to the repetitive sounds and the volume, but I had had nearly a year off form this. Luck runs out at some point.

Tom was with me, of course. This morning I woke up and he was sitting at the edge of the bed and telling me that I was well when I saw you. He said that while it upset him because he did not want to lose me. I was happy and somehow that seemed to have substantially changed my health. He wondered if it was simply that the joy of being in love managed to act as some sort of protection and because I didn’t follow this my body has again descended into its own decline—lost of something. Tom added that my Someone, while clearly important to me and someone with whom I feel good talking, is like a traveling musician. I have a call from him, but we never see each other. I wonder, of course, what it would be like to have him in my life. Would this return me to a state of health, or would he, like Tom before him, suddenly find his own life undermined as my health declined. Were you an exception or simply coincidence? I don’t know anymore. I know I walked for you. I know that there was one thing I wanted more than anything else and that was more time with you and for you to see me the way I had been. You never really had that chance, except in the brief glimpse the times you saw me briefly this past fall. I still walk as best I can with symptoms—no different than when I started a year ago. You were like a pause in the clock.

There is a dreadful fear that I have. I thought my friend Mike, who has stood by me with a fierceness that has been deeply moving since we reconnected from our adolescence, said that the situation between Tom and my Someone—as you had been but had simply blew apart—is like a Low Risk/Low Reward and High Risk/High Reward. Tom I know will be with me regardless of whether my brain dwindles into mush—but it is not the life I want. I saw a glimmer of something with you that I had not known would ever happen in my life again once Jeff left. My Someone has a vibrant passion and there are so many possibilities with us that could take my life and transform it into something so incredible—but it’s a leap and it could also fall apart if my body cracks, dropping me off a very high mountain--he's one of these incredibly dynamic, brilliant, encompassing and big personalities, but also profoundly kind and loving. But I suspect my body is not going to hang in there with me as I had once hoped.

You know that tremor I started to develop last December—that light flutter of my hands that we joked about. I have a body-wide tremor that has emerged as a resting tremor, co-mingled with an intention tremor. It’s worse if I’m stressed. Yesterday at the hospital it was so bad I struggled to keep my body still for the X-ray. Sometimes are of course worse than others, but it’s there—like the shake a baby bird makes when it wants to eat.

Perhaps it is my way of saying someone please feed me more than what I have. If I could go back in time, I would have divorced a year ago. And perhaps you would have actually been here. Perhaps I would have decided that my idea of you is better than you; perhaps we would have made love and thought—“why”?; perhaps nothing would have happened at all and perhaps I still would have ended up where I did yesterday. My Someone loves me, you know. Tom calls him my “virtual husband”. I have Tom here and my Someone there—they seem reluctantly accepting of each other. I have no idea how this will all play out. I dream of my Someone; I wake up to Tom--and you are the one I smell every time I walk out my door and you are the one I feel in every step I take. I have no idea how my life took this crazy turn.

You were my joy. I am grateful to that and I hope I have enough time with my health to know what it is like to be loved. I know what it is to love--but I have no idea what it is to be loved without a double-edged sword. Well, that's all for today.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 73: Wintering

2011-12-21T00:48:00.003-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

My someone wrote to me tonight:

You're beautiful all the time no matter what.

It’s spooky sometimes how he seems to know when just perhaps I’m not at my best. I’ve started to fall into a morose mood, tearful really. I hate this time of year. I hate the holidays with a passion—beginning with Thanksgiving and all the way up to New Year’s. In all truth I wish I was a big Grizzly bear who could crawl up in a den and hibernate through winter. And what is sad is I actually love winter itself. I love the quiet that settles over the marsh here where I am. It is so silent, empty. The birds are quiet and reflective. The seagulls, the mallards, the chickadees, thrushes, finches… they all sit on the bulkhead and stare into the dimming sun and the steel-gray clouds; an occasional quiet gust of wind ruffling their feathers. I find myself doing the same thing, with substantially more clothing on than just fluffed feathers. Today was somewhat miraculous on the marsh as surprising me was a red-tailed hawk that had decided to take up residence on the bulkhead staring into the dim sun. I know how much you hate the winter—we are opposites in this. You are the Summer-Boy and I the Winter-Girl. But I hate the holidays. I feel like the moment I hit Route 36 and leave my protected little peninsula of solitude and stillness I am bombarded with everything I hate: consumerism, pollution, rudeness, impatience, frustration, and family…

I wrote back to my Someone—how strange we write letters to each other throughout the day. He answered my letters here, you know. He answered “Wild and Wonderful Sex”; he just sent me off an email after reading it one night and my jaw dropped. I had no idea he had felt as he did for me all these years; I had no idea that I felt as passionate as I do about him. But I digress, I wrote him before I wrote this. I was on my way to writing this blog when his email popped in and I decided to talk to him first. I think this is a huge step on my part in separating from you—and attempting to have a real relationship with another human being whom I actually talk to about how I feel. I am still cagey, guarded, reluctant. I am still afraid of being the dysfunctional self—the wounded self, the nearly 40-year-old woman who still finds it impossible to understand her relationship to her family and her absence within her family, who cares when she shouldn’t. I am trying not to be the person who waves her hand to change the subject because it is too depressing as I did that one day with you when you wanted to know why my folks did not come to help me with the divorce last year when I initially planned on leaving Tom. When you asked me all about it and wanted to know the details, I became utterly terrified of simply breaking down in front of you—and perhaps I should have. Perhaps you should have seen me and just how awful I felt then—the woman who hid in the bathroom and broke down most nights and would then come and see you on most days. It was grueling that holiday season last year from sleeping on the floor on Thanksgiving to Christmas; from the police telling me to be concerned about homicide and suicide to my folks disappearing on me entirely. When I went to see you that day after everything crashed and burned and I was once more stuck in my marriage, I should have allowed you to see all along the woman who had lost just about everything in her life—repeatedly—not the woman who pretended that everything was okay and that divorce was just a flick of the wrist easy-peasy event. I should have shown you that I left because of you and I have never written that, but it was true. I left my marriage, not because I had come to a point where I could not tolerate the abuse—I could have gone on for infinity with this—but because I had simply fallen in love with you and saw another way of being treated. And I never said anything. I never showed you the full scope of me. It may never have made a difference and perhaps I just simply knew that all along and so kept myself tightly wrapped up so as not to feel at the end rejected—at the end I simply was left with grief. That was far better than rejection.

I have been attempting to rectify this with my Someone. He is my chance at a loving relationship where I fit. Where all my weird edges, ideas, odds and ends, fit—even as I am terrified. He is my chance to get it as right as I can where I so completely messed up with you. But still in the interim, I really just want to hide and wait for winter to pass. Sometimes I wish this were possible with the whole of my life. There are times when I sincerely wish I could wait it out without having to be someone I am not—or at least feeling all the time that I must pass for “normal” and without feeling like I have made so many mistakes or that I am so flawed.

Hopefully you are surviving the holiday shoppers.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 72: Gravity & Hard Places

2011-12-08T21:04:00.002-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I’ve been struggling a lot lately—perhaps it’s because symptoms are emerging; perhaps it’s the stress of the possibility of a new relationship and my own intuitive sense that even though we “fit” we fit without my illness. My instinct keeps telling me that my illness will be a problem—even if my Someone feels he can readily handle it. I have no doubt of the sincerity of his feelings for me. He sincerely loves me and there is no doubt on my end that I love him. We are a seamless couple—two people with their own goals, but also who have shared goals. He’d carve out a permanent life with me and I can easily conceive of a permanent life with him—full of new places, people, cultures. He opens the door to a world I have never seen or experienced—the girl who has lived her entire life exactly where she is. When I talk with him I feel such an excitement about seeing the world and when he tells me of the places he’s been I can readily imagine his misadventures. I laugh a lot with him and I find myself missing him when I don’t have an opportunity to talk with him or when he’s on the opposite sleep schedule as my very routinized one. I send him emails throughout the day to complain or say something silly—just to touch base with him and know that he is there. I am attached in a very real, tangible way—but there is a bittersweetness to it and a growing sadness. I feel as if I am simultaneously building a beautiful relationship—that one person who thinks like me; who loves like I do; who lives as I want to—while also ending one. I feel as if my heart is growing in one direction, while my body is going elsewhere. And his dreams are out of reach of my body—it is the place where a faultline exists.

There was no faultline with you. You spread out before me like a yielding ocean that I would roll within or float upon in whatever shape my body was in whether it was overweight and partially paralyzed, whether it was trembling, or whether it was marked by a brain that forgot. With you I always felt my heart, mind, and body were moving at the same pace—with my heart pushing both my mind and body forward and towards a kind of peace that I had never had. The edges between my Someone and me are palpable and scary to me—where I am fearful an earthquake will come before I meet him or will wait until after we are so attached as to wreck him against me. How I felt for you never had an edge—there was simply this unexpected well of emotion that I had never felt before that seemed to contain the whole of me. You I loved with the wholeness of an ocean.

No matter how many moments have passed, you still pour from me into music. You are the ocean that is within me that cannot be contained in my being. It is as if I am so desperately trying to drain you from me; to find that last note that is you and relinquish it back to the sea but I cannot find it. Even as I move forward, the water trails behind me like wet footprints—as if you are still there walking beside me. It confuses me to no end and there are moments when I am walking that you are suddenly and I want to stomp my foot as if to shake you off of me. I cannot possibly love you. And yet like water, you slip right back into the emptied space, filling it back up.

Tom said to me the other day to shake everyone off; to shake everyone else’s dreams away and to strip down to my center to see what is there. So I did. I imagine everyone gone; everything is silent. There are no students, no work, no illness, no Tom, no Someone, no parents, no fantasies. There is nothing but an empty space. And as that space forms, it is an ocean, rocking beneath me. There is music there at the heart of it. And there is you. You remain when all else is gone. Perhaps I simply needed to admit that so that when I finally pour the rest of your water out from within me, I will be able to fully move forward.

I thought the other day about how I initially wrote you pitched me back onto land and returned me to my tribe… and it occurred to me that it wasn’t to the land I needed to be. I am by nature a creature of the sea. In the sea, my ill body floats.

I so much want to meet my Someone and to experience what it is like to love someone who loves me and who would spend all the days of his life with me. But I am terrified of gravity and hard places. And that is where I am now—walking on the hard surfaces and my hips hurt and I am slowing down once more.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

An Interlude

2011-12-07T01:50:00.000-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

It's about 1:40 AM. I am awake having had a panic attack in the middle of the night while sleeping accompanied by a good old fashioned nightmare. I would assume seizure-related. There are times when I wish I could simply think to you and you would hear me and you would know everything. I know you can't and it's an entirely silly thought, but there are moments when it is you I want here. I move forward, but somehow I still remain.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 71: The Tale of Echo

2011-12-05T00:22:00.001-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

There is a legend of how the echo emerged in our world that goes as this. There was a beautiful mountain nymph, who was gifted with the ability to sing, create great music, and talk—she could talk so much she entertained the Goddess Hera. But it soon became apparent that Echo was a distraction to prevent Hera from seeing the truth of her husband, Zeus. And in Greco-Roman fashion where women are always punished for the sins of men (literally), Hera exacted her revenge against Zeus on the nymph Echo. She stripped her of all that was her talent and that defined her power and left only the capacity to echo what another person said. No other speech would come from her and so tortured by her loss, Echo wandered the wilderness alone unable to communicate to any other being. Until she glimpsed Narcissus, the son of the nymph Liriope and the god Thespia. Echo fell instantly in love with him and hid in the forest just out of visibility of where he stood by a crystal-clear stream. He heard the noise and asked “who is there” and Echo responded “who is there”. She eventually worked up the courage to run to him and he pushed her away. She turned and fled back into the woods with a broken heart until her whole substance disappeared but for an echo—her despair haunting the earth. I am Echo.

And while the broken heart component has its applicability in my life, it is not entirely why I claim identification with Echo. It is her speech itself, the echoing speech deprived of all other words that reflects or echoes my own circumstances. I have noticed over the past few months just how little I talk these days. I am doing something that Alzheimer’s patients do: a lot of yessing, nods, and echoing. I cannot find words quickly enough to match the speed at which people talk. I stumble over common words and can’t figure out how to coordinate my speech to the word. I um-hmm a lot. Once in a while I find that nerve route that retrieves words effectively and I can talk for an explosive moment, but then it disappears and I fall silent.

I noticed it on the phone with my Someone the other day. He is a fluid speaker—he could talk your ear off and never repeat a single phrase twice. And like all conversations to they move into a period of silence that communicates: “here is a break in the conversation, now it is your turn to speak”. And sometimes I can do not, but echo. It is as if my brain has suddenly run into a wall—a large mountain peak. In psychiatric terms we call it “poverty of speech.” I still sound better than most only because I have an above average intelligence—but it is there. Tom noticed it the other night as I attempted to explain something and stuttered and stumbled until I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders and said, “I can’t explain it.” I have a set of dismissive statements that end my speech when I can’t go further because there is a mountain region in front and I can’t climb it. I try. I usually repeat and repeat my sentence or the word, echoing it over and over in the hopes that it will float up above the mountain and to the other side to complete itself, but it never does. And it is worsening and it is frustrating.

I can write fine (well there are usually a range of spelling errors for words that are spelled differently but sound the same—I can no longer seem to write those out correctly anymore). But I can write all my thoughts down. In this I have what is known as expressive language problems—I can’t express myself fluidly anymore. I told my Someone that I have no intention of public speaking on any endeavor we do—I simply can’t do it anymore. And I used to be able to—I used to be so brilliant at speaking, just as I was with singing. It was natural. I was a natural talker. And now I really simply want to be silent. Using writing as my only form of communication and I do most of my “talking” to my Someone via email rather than phone. On the phone I listen to him. I love his voice and I love listening to him. And I carefully and painstakingly think of things to say to him and what I forget or can’t ultimately get into words I write.

I think you were my Narcissus (sans the narcissistic component of the myth)—but I saw you and ran to you and attempted to talk. But most days we’d lap into silence or I stuck to the repeated stories of my seahorses and turtles and Tom. I spent hours before seeing you preparing what I would say to you and mentally practicing “talking” to you so that I could say something intelligent and intelligible. But I also knew that you were equally comfortable with silence and I could just trail after you as you worked. But there were moments when I’d make no sense or a story would come out wrong. Like the time I had a really funny seahorse story to tell you but you were busy in hellishness at work the day I came in and you didn’t have time, but you asked me about it the next day and I hadn’t practiced it and so it stumbled out as this jumbled and confused tale, but you were kind enough to smile and not embarrass me. Then there was the time I couldn’t remember “credit union” (see NOW I remember it!) when we were talking at the front with P. I kept stumbling and repeating myself trying to find the word, over and over becoming more panicked until you rescued me from my embarrassment. I think this is also why you. I could stumble and echo and it was okay.

Tom tells me to talk to more; talk to my Someone more, talk to more of my friends to practice my speech rather than just type everything or text messaging. He says this because I told him that my verbal speech, my expressive language, is the one thing that I was unable to rehabilitate after my strokes and the continued onslaught of my seizures. I only have Tom to talk to and that’s only when he returns home from work. I still spend most of my days, like Echo, in solitude. But even with practice, there is the possibility that it is somewhat too late to rebuild.

My head empties when I have to verbalize. I have loads of thoughts racing about internally, but the minute those thoughts have to connect with speech or the situation requires spontaneous speech, it is utter silence. I function on a delay—when everyone has moved on from a conversation, suddenly the light flips on and I have a thought. Other times I have only parts of a sentence—a noun here, a verb over there—a choppy constellation of nonsense that made sense in my head but doesn’t make sense once I speak it.

It is as if everything in my head is empty—I know there are thoughts there, stuck in some fold of gray matter, but sometimes all I can say is uh-huh or yes. Until suddenly that thought emerges like a little Who from Whoville piping in.

You know with you I have so many things I wanted to tell you but they always came too late to my mind. After thoughts that became irrelevant once the timing passed. I don’t want to do the same with my Someone. I’m trying not to repeat the same events with him. I am able to tell him that I am in love with him. Those words are comfortable and surprisingly stick to the walls of the brain even if it does look a bit like Swiss cheese. I couldn’t say this to you—but at least I know that wasn’t due to a lack of speech but simply timing. Yet I am still concerned about my Someone is flourishing. He is standing at the top of the mountain and finally accomplishing what he set out to do. He is full of energy and so much sunlight, but I am waning moonlight. He wants to travel the world and I cannot even get through shopping at Shoprite these days—again. I am an echo of myself—the substance I had started to become with you seems to have started to once more dissipate. Of course that is not to say I am thinking pessimistically. My Someone knows my health issues and has consciously chosen to dive into my life at the intimate level and so some part of him clearly feels comfortable with my health issues. But he also loves my mind and that makes me nervous.

How can I be loved if it is my inconstant mind that someone loves…? Yes, I know that probably makes no sense... In the interim I do my best to echo speech in the hopes that one day I will talk your (or my Someone's or Tom's or another friend's) ear off rather than write your eyes off.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 70: The Tale of the Hummingbird

2011-11-27T19:27:00.001-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I’m relapsing I think, well, I’m fairly certain actually. If you’d ask me in September I’d have said it was just a blip—the increased tremor that became a subtle rock. You wouldn’t have noticed it when you saw me—I mask it well when I stand up with fidgeting or moving my arms. It’s when I sit that it’s noticeable. But that was initially just a blip. Much like my tremors were last winter when I came in that day and said my neurologist was sending me for tests and you and I joked about how I should be a doctor with a lousy signature. I think that was the same night you tripped over the mops talking to me. Well this past summer the tremors worsened. I assumed it was stress-related—what with Tom going nuts, divorce, and losing you so entirely. But now I have them in my legs, my arms, and my trunk. Sometimes it’s so bad I flutter like a hummingbird. It’s not just the tremors that have worsened, which prompted a repeat MRI.

It’s the lupusy symptoms—the joint pain, the increasing low-back stiffness and inflexibility. The increasing dryness—my dersertification I wrote about months and months ago on my Chasing Zebras blog. The dryness is so bad I barely produce saliva and my eyes are so dry that they are starting to show scarring on the cornea. My rheumatologist has me back on a 3-month visit cycle, but I may have already written about that. She is concerned that I am relapsing as well. She said when I saw her last month that I was clearly showing increased symptoms. She added this saliva-producing medication to my regime—it’s evil. I stopped taking it last week. When I take, within the hour I start to sweat profusely and then get the chills—but I can spit. I could out spit the best spitter on the planet on this medication! I haven’t been able to afford my eye medication yet. I’m waiting for PAAD—I can qualify for that now that I am divorced and it will help me pay for my medications. I’m up to about 28 meds now I think.

My asthma has worsened as well. My oxygenation has dropped to about 95% several times this week and I’ve had to increase my medication frequency. It could be seasonal allergy or it could be some small infection running amok in my crappy immune system. My immunologist was going to see how I fared this winter and whether I would need IgG transfusions—the ongoing debate. But the worst part of all is I am breaking through my seizure medications more than once a week. That is decidedly not good and bodes poorly. It takes almost 2 days to recover from the episodes that can involve anything from sheer demented confusion to muscle stiffening and poverty of speech. I have a holey brain. The MRI this past November showed widespread damage throughout both hemispheres—small holes throughout the brain of dead areas. The seizure specialist who made the diagnosis in 2009 said it was a serious neurological condition and one with a poor outcome—but you know that.

And then there is the subtle symptom no one ever knew what to do with, but which has always corresponded to a severe relapse: dysregulation of my blood sugar. And I don’t mean a definable diabetic issue—but rather a rapid drop for no reason. It was 47 on Tuesday when I got up in the morning; 50 on Friday when I got up; 60 this morning. I eat—it goes up; it drops. It drops without my eating. I now at least have the best endocrinologist on the planet and so I called her and she talked with me on the phone for more than 30 minutes. I got a script for blood work and urine studies yesterday. She’s still concerned about my weight loss.

Something is wrong. My theory has always been that my glucose indicates my brain is using up more glucose than my body can replenish it. Your brain is a hummingbird you know—rapidly feeding on sugar to keep all of the neurological connections firing away. And my brain keeps starving—intermittently devoid of either glucose or oxygen; intermittently overheated with fevers that run amok now every night. It’s a relapse.

I broke down today, hysterical about it. Tom tries to stay optimistic, telling me (you know he and his odd beliefs) that perhaps I am just picking up on energy from others, taking in others’ worries; don’t say “relapse” because it will create it; and it’s just the cortisone shots you had in your hips—they wreak all kinds of havoc. It’s not, but he feels better with these rationales. When people have to deal with you and scary symptoms start to emerge you hear all kinds of rationales to limit the seriousness of what’s happening. I usually let people believe what they need to—it helps them cope. And I am fairly certain that I am going to utterly devastate Someone as I have Tom.

And my Someone goes and writes the below (in reference to a new quartet piece I am working on entitled “Legend of Seahorse Lady”; you can hear it on my facebook page or my myspace page:

I've continued to reflect on the music you create. The arrangements do have complexity, yet what really comes through is all the pain and suffering you've experienced. Metaphorically it is the sound of a breaking heart. It is an anguish that resonates in your bones and tissue of your body with a faint and distant crying out for recognition and compassionate understanding. Likewise people have listened and admired the sound of your voice, but few of them have heard or felt the emotion behind the music. Enduring loneliness and being misunderstood is more profound when we are with someone that fails to see us for who we are because it is a constant affront to our expectation and hope of having someone to share our life -- whereas true aloneness allows us the opportunity to imagine there might actually be another person out there who experiences the world in a similar way.

These are my thoughts this morning driven by another sleepless night -- and I wanted you to know that I'm here in this world with you, even though I'm still so very far away

I am dreading my health. He is someone who has a 5-year plan. He’s this enormously productive writer and researcher. He is lives in the world to absorb every experience possible; he rarely sleeps until he has drained all ounce of his own energy and completely shuts off. And I cannot keep up—at least I know that I will not be able to. I tried to tell him this and instead he calls me in a bleary-voice of someone who has not slept in 24 hours and is trying to string a sentence together to haul me back to him before I recede out of sheer despair that I will wreck him as I did Tom and, although in a different way, as I did you. Tom was like him in the beginning. Tom had a 5-year goal, although his was less realized and had less to build from. But he had one as well. Tom would stay awake all hours working feverishly on his plans—composing brilliant music until the shoe dropped, and dropped, and kept dropping and suddenly I was immobilized in bed and Tom had to take a humdrum job so that I could afford medical care.

I am tired of losing. I just see all of you lined up and in various states of disrepair because of the hummingbird that sucked out all of your energy to sustain her own functioning. I just see each of you bedecked in red to attract me and then slowly drained of everything. Tom has succumbed to a monotony of work he dislikes, gray hair, wrinkles, and this strange squeezing sound at each heartbeat (I have no doubt I am listening to the tick of a bomb). And you—I took from you nearly every day, slurping up the moments with you and living upon the sugar high that ensued. I fed upon your calm gentleness, your quiet, your peacefulness, your movie recommendations, and that smile of yours—however reluctant it was. And it fed me so much so I got up and I walked. And I returned nearly each day to feed, a hummingbird finding a nice feeder to migrate back to every year. And then you went dry. Today as I walked for the first time in 2 weeks, I thought that perhaps I should have greeted you the first day I went back and saw you. Perhaps you would have been less angry at me and I could have more fully explained what had happened. But obviously we cannot change things. And now there is my Someone—it’s so obvious from the above he adores me, he understands me. We work well together; we see the world in a common way. But I am breathless with him—I suppose that is what is at once arousing, literally and metaphorically; as well as what is frightening. I know that I cannot keep up. At first I had thought, riding on that wonderful taste of sugar that had been absent for too long. Anything is possible on that first sip—you feel lighter than air, only this is an illusion. You are working harder and harder to create that illusion. And then a massive seizure and I realize that I could be repeating the losses all over again.

And then maybe not. And therein is the problem. With Tom and with you—and most definitely with you; I said to myself—take the chance. You have to take the chance, so what if it goes badly—you won’t know unless you do it. And so I took the chance. It was a disaster in the end. I utterly upended your life and completely cracked my own. I left myself devastated—it is the heartbreak that my Someone hears roaming through so much of my music these days. But then I took the chance. Isn’t that what counts? After all there was always a small possibility that things would have worked out between you and I and right now, you’d be coming home to me, telling me about how awful the day was as people start their holiday madness. But you’re not. And the reality is I am also divorced now from Tom. That, too, did not work out (although we are getting along now better than we have ever before). And now there is my Someone—another risk to chance.

I told my Someone there is a high probability that the person he fell in love with, the Katie who’s mind he loves, will no longer exist—long before I die. I will not remember him. I will have no recollection of the “new” Katie that exists now. This woman who is making inroads into an academic world she has always thought was beyond her reach; this woman who writes articles that are philosophical in nature; who contradicts leaders in the field and maintains her ground. This woman with a doctorate and accrued masters degrees to “prove” her intelligence; the woman who is no longer learning disabled. She will die far sooner than “I” will and with her any recollection of the man who wrote the above paragraph on my music; the first human being who accurately articulated what I was actually expressing with the sound. I will remember Tom more because he has been in my life longer at younger stages of my life. He has also been traumatizing and so my brain will cling to him and thus the Katie he has known will hover—this inbetween Katie who is profoundly self-conscious with low self-esteem. This painful psychologically wounded Katie will linger… You will remain—because you exist in the memory of my childhood. You are the boy who became a man tied to the sea—someone I have always remembered. You will float about and I will talk with you perhaps as the 5 year old who collected the seahorse. You will linger on the periphery of the person I will erode into being.

I will erode like a bank of sand on the beach. The oldest portions embedded deep; the newest layers siphoning off storm after storm; seizure after seizure. First my Someone, then my new-found friends, then Tom, then the boys of my early twenties, then Jeff, then Kaz and my friends from high school—each falling away under the surf. And I will be the frail girl, who couldn’t read, who had no friends, who lived a childhood out of a horror film, and who felt the world was better at the ocean than anywhere else. And you will be the neighbor boy who skirted the edges of my consciousness. You will be simply because you are embedded in my memory far deeper than anyone else I know outside of my family.

And then there will eventually be nothing—a final wave with a final storm will wash even the deepest layers of sand and I will be no more. That is what dementia will do to me—that is the prognosis for my seizures. No matter how many times doctors shift the diagnoses around, the outcomes are always the same: dementia. I lived in a state of bliss for a while—my symptoms and my seizures seemed abated. I was a hummingbird high on sugar. Now that sugar is dropping, literally.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 69: An Archaeological Ruin

2011-11-25T19:30:00.003-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I dreamed of you again last night. I was walking to the store in the dream and just as I was about to cross the highway you walked by me once more profoundly angry. I found myself at the store talking with T while holding a small orange wisp of a fish that looked half bug and half fish in a tub of water. I told her I didn’t intend to be in your way; that I had tried to avoid you but had no choice; and what did you expect me to do if you parked your car where I was walking. How was I to know? She listened sympathetically to me and said you just needed time. P then came out to talk with me and said the same. The dream then descended into a nightmare—or perhaps challenging me to leap into the dark.

I feel at moments deflated by my dreams of you. They emerge and re-emerge reminding me I have moved so futilely forward. Just as I think I have shirked you from me, you emerge in my sleep and my heart breaks again. Just when I think I have pulled myself back together and have made a more rational choice and have set myself upon a path that fits with who I am and what I am, you slide into my dreamscape and I grieve for you again. You are some symbol that I have not deciphered. I don’t know how you. Unlike my Someone or even Tom—you are nothing like anyone of them. There are no shared projects between us; no free-flowing conversations. There was never even an overt romance for that matter. There were just these tiny moments where we stood together and I smiled at you and you smiled at me.

How is it possible that such small moments have shattered me so completely that months after you are gone I am still putting the wreck of me back together? I think of myself as a kind of archaeological ruin. There is beauty in my ruinous self—it speaks to something powerful, some ancient civilization, some lost people. But it is still a fractured self—no matter how informative it is on shedding insight into the there and then period of time, it is still fractured and still speaks of grief.

There are times when I wish someone would tell me specifically why you. I wish someone could pick through the archaeological ruin that is me and say “this must have been what defined this civilization” or would read the hieroglyphic inscriptions and say “ah the Fishking was…”. I wish someone could peel back the layers of my heartbrain and say “Katie, this was what Fishboy meant. This was why you met him. And yes, you love him.” And I wish someone would say, “this is how you rebuild and move on.” That someone would look at the ruin of the civilization and say “that was why the city crumbled…best not to do that again; but it was a GREAT civilization while it lived.”

My dad is in the hospital. I can't shake a bad feeling. I hate hospitals.

Love,

The Seahorse Lady

Letter 68: The Wave

2011-11-22T21:01:00.003-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I suppose some of these letters are better served on the Chasing Zebras blog, but I feel like writing to you about them. I had a health blip this morning. I woke up feeling generally yucky and decided to check my blood sugar. I’m not quite sure why I opted to check it, it’s been normal for months now. But it turned out to be a good thing—it was down to 47. For those unfamiliar with blood glucose: < 70 is not that great and you can start to have symptoms like anxiety, sweating, shaking. < 60 and you start entering into the landscape of potentially dangerous. < 50 and you are at risk for seizures and coma. The brain becomes starved of the necessary energy it needs to fuel function. In short, 47 was potentially lethal with all my combined medical issues. The good thing was I was still coherent and could get to the fridge to pour out some OJ, which brought my sugar easily back up to normal. I called my endocrinologist and we spoke tonight. She remains concerned about the weight loss—I keep losing a pound here and there these days. It really isn’t dramatic at this point, but she remains concerned. Anyway she is sending me for blood work and a 24-hour creatinine clearance study. Joy I get to pee in a cup and save it in a giant orange container in the fridge. I’m still waiting to hear from my neurologist. Aside from this I saw my friend Sharon this afternoon and she had the opportunity to hear Son of Arianrhod for the first time. It brought her to tears and she said to me in her motherly/sisterly way “you must have grieved in an unimaginable way.” No one has quite said that to me—and it is true. From the moment I walked out the door on April 22 until September 28th when you snapped at me, I grieved. There were moments when I could do little other than sob. I cried in the shower; I cried in bed; I cried on walks; I cried at the beach. I simply cried with no words, just wracking sobs. She said to me that you surely had an incredible purpose in my life to bring me back to my music, my writing, my health, and to open up my heart. I said you did. I then started to read the dedication of the CD to her and broke down—barely able to complete it.

You don’t stop loving people. I suppose some do. I don’t. I move forward in my life and follow its path and try the best I can to keep an open heart because in the end you simply don’t know who else will fall into your life. I readily recognized that after months of grieving you really were never going to come back and it was likely just my own fantasy, however important it was to my health at the time. And so when I last saw you it was simply a confirmation of an ending and an opportunity for me to fully set aside my grief. I tied it up in a bow with the last song on the album “Always in My Feet”. And I engineered the album and that was it. You were now permanently encased in plastic on a small, increasingly outdated Frisbee. You were gone.

I was surprised, though, today how readily you bring me to tears. Sharon said to me that she felt confident that you would one day realize just what you did for me. You would one day get what it means to always be in my feet. It may take you time, she said, but that you would get it. I hope you do.

I have moved forward with you inside me. There are moments when I deeply wish my Someone was here so that I could walk to him so that whatever is happening in my body now recedes like a wave as it did with you; perhaps though you being a creature of the moon and sea and he being a creature land and sun, you have greater pull over these things. So if you read these letters, perhaps you will “get” what I was saying. And perhaps if you get it, my slowly reemerging health issues will dissipate as if by magic.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 67: When the Lights Go Out

2011-11-21T21:30:00.004-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

Well as you know my health never stays perfect. I suppose last night I had a small ischemic event. It’s the first one since 2009 and I certainly hope this is not an indication of worse things to come. Both my rheumatologist and my neurologist were concerned that I may be relapsing. My rheumatologist has me slated for an appointment to see her this January and has put me back on an every 3-month schedule as she wants to see what’s been happening. I had a repeat MRI a few weeks back. I haven’t blogged about it here or on the Chasing Zebras blog, but the good news was there was only minimal change, the bad news I suppose was they confirmed the widespread damage throughout the brain. I have tiny holes throughout the right and left hemisphere, a lesion in the subinsular cortex, and the continued damage at the ventral horns—it’s called the generic term “White Matter Disease”. Anyway, last night I woke up a few hours into sleeping and told Tom (yes Tom is still here—he’s sane now) to turn out the lights. Of course there were no lights on. He asked me what I meant and I gave him some garbled answer. He asked again and I garbled out more things before going right back to sleep. In the morning, I had severe sensory issues and a wicked headache. I was jumpy and definitely not normal. I went through my usual neuro check: check motor function of the facial muscles, check coordination, check balance; then a mental status exam: count backwards by serial sevens, president, run through the alphabet for good measure to check pronunciation. It was when I got to the alphabet that things got a bit dicey. I couldn’t remember the last five letters. I tried singing the alphabet to see if adding the melody would help trigger the memory. Nothing. They were entirely gone. I tried again. I tried again. I thought of other ways we learn the alphabet to find that trigger to get my brain back online. Finally there it was: V W X Y Z. I was never so relieved to hear those five letters resound in my head and out my mouth. But the headache followed me through most of the day—only finally subsiding about an hour before I wrote this.

I told my Someone that he could back out. He had a free pass to leave at any time. My health is something that is unimaginable until you live inside my life. He had his first taste of the scary today. He called first thing in the morning when he learned I wasn’t feeling well. A tinge of panic in his voice; not unlike your own anxiety that day you saw me wander in with a bandage on my arm from blood work. It’s hard to care about me, isn’t it? I hear it in my friends’ voices as well. And I am fairly certain that Sharon, whom I planned to have lunch with tomorrow, is thinking superstitiously that we should never have made plans. She’s said for years every time we make plans I end up in the hospital (it’s not quite true, but ever-human we look for patterns). I hear it in my friend Laura’s voice, who already has so much on her plate. Tom is old hat with this. He knows the routine. My Someone is new—even though he has been in my life for years. Now he is on the inside of my life. It's a terrifying place to be. I am fragile and one-of-a-kind. I am a rare animal on the verge of extinction with each breath I take.

My Someone wills me to be with him for years to come and I can’t promise it. I can’t really even promise tomorrow. I try and I want to. But tomorrow is a gift when it comes for me. I realized this morning as I updated and reprinted my health record info, as I washed my clothing, as I put on my medic alert necklace, as I charged my phone, as I straightened the house in case the medics have to be called, and as I put together my hospital To-Go bag that I am truly ill. And that even though I had the last two years of knowing you with such a profound sense of hope moving through me, I am still a house of cards.

There are moments when I wonder if I had changed the dynamics between us; if I had just gotten a divorce earlier; if I had just… I would have stayed well. I know you can’t think like that—it’s by and large utterly unhelpful. And in all respects my Someone fits so well with me it’s truly remarkable. It is like a puzzle piece. But still you were the one I walked to—for whatever that reason was. You were the one I walked to. I got up and came to you. You will still be given my seahorse. Should something happen to me, I have made it clear that you are to be given the seahorse, the books, and the CDs. You can throw them out if you want. But you have to take them at the very least. They belong with you.

I’m a bit maudlin I know. And chances are tomorrow will be a bright and sunny day. I will have a good lunch with my friend Sharon. I will talk with Laura and hopefully with my Someone. And I will write last night off as simply a blip in a line of many blips.

Goodnight, Fishboy.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 66: Pink Memories & the Heartbrain

2011-11-20T18:15:00.000-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I have dreamed of you daily for the past three days. I would hazard a guess if I went to my journals of last year there was something significant about these days. I know it led up to the conversation we had on Thanksgiving where you stayed with me at the register and propped up your arm on the lid of the Red Sea tank there to jump into the conversation I was having with a coworker of yours about Thanksgiving plans. And I remember vividly you telling me I should have a big “feast” and if Tom didn’t want one, then to hell with him. So perhaps the dreaming is simply remembering—or perhaps it is reminding me to stick to the good in my life and demand it—or perhaps it is simply that quiet echo of a loss.

For some reason one memory keeps bouncing around in my head over the last few days and that is when I came into the store one winter morning bedecked in pink. I had my hot pink vest jacket, my pink long-john shirt, my pink-hued scarf, my purple-pink skull cap and matching gloves and my tight pants. My blondish-brown hair curled around my face, sneaking out from under my hat. You were at the register when I arrived checking a gentleman out when you turned to look at me and said to the man that I was the person you were talking about, the lady with the seahorses. I remember during that conversation your look as you watched me talk—just staring at me. That you talked about me while I was not there tells me you carried me with you when I was not there. Perhaps my own sense that you are always with me, isn’t just one-way. There are moments when I suspect that I am always with you—and, like you are with me now, I weave in and out of your consciousness at times unexpectedly.

This time last year I was leaving my marriage and anticipating that by the end of December, you would be a permanent and intimate fixture in my life. I suppose it was a necessary optimism—one that kept me both hanging on and at the same time moving forward. Each visit with you was carefully documented in my journals—perhaps because on some realistic level I knew that you would not be here and I wanted to record the microscopic details of this one-way love affair. But perhaps it wasn’t as one-way as I have come to assume. In thinking back to the pink-shirt and seahorse conversation day and the many other days that marked the majority of our experiences together, you held me in some kind of affection. And perhaps that is what made you so angry.

You were the path of a simple life and one in which I shed most of who I am and how I am. I think this appealed immensely to me. I was tired of myself when I met you. I was tired of thinking. And I was tired of doing. And I was tired of being sick. And with you I felt peaceful. And like I wrote in the prior letter, there was a sense of youngness to it—adolescent enthusiasm. In retrospect, we probably could never be anything of substance. But I sometimes think our heart-brains don’t particularly care about long-term compatibility—the heart wants what it wants. You were the one that I loved—unabashedly. And you echo there in my heartbrain.

My Someone fits with me. I fit with him. And it feels so incredible when he tells me he loves me and I love telling him that I am in love him—he simply feels so right somehow. He recently told someone he was in a relationship and I admit it felt good to hear him affirm our relationship—even in its infancy. It felt so wonderful to be affirmed.

But you still resound in that memory of pink.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 65: Little Creature

2011-11-16T00:08:00.002-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I think I’m living in a dream world. Each day my Someone and I talk—sometimes it’s simply zinging emails back and forth or chatting incessantly on Facebook, but most times now we talk on the phone for hours on end, 3, 4, 5, 6 hours at a time. And it is as if no time has passed at all. And as the days pass I feel more and more excited and terrified that I’ve possibly found the person I have been looking for my whole life: that someone who is at the same place as me—the same train station at the same time.

I was meandering around with Charlotte this morning thinking about you, him, and Tom—three experiences that have all collided at one time in my life. You are all different—loved, but all different. I’ve decided that Tom is my Mother/Father. He is a figure whom I have turned to for guidance and to be re-raised so to speak: Someone who was there to nurture, but also maintained a certain degree of familiarity to the dynamics of my childhood—those intermittent moments of despair and feelings of being unworthy of my own existence. Yet he also proved himself to be someone who was consistent and willing to change and there when I needed comfort and security where there had been no one. He re-parented me and I think in some ways it was mutual. I suppose in most relationships this is where we start—rehashing and regurgitating family dynamics. And then came you.

You are the teen love: that first love that has a mythical quality. You were and are that love that is reckless and completely ungrounded. It is enthusiastic and directionless. It is full of dreams and whimsy, but never a reality. It is the stuff of fantasy, yet this does not mean it is any less. It does not mean that it isn’t love—but it is a testing love. It is a love that opens oneself up to become an adult who can love another human being. It is that first moment of separation from one’s parents to strike out on one’s own path. That is/was you to me. You were the young love that by and large I missed out on in my life. I am restarting my life and trying to finally become an adult and get it right. You were the prom date I never had. You were the guy in the backseat of the car whom I never made out with. You were the one who broke my heart, who left me weeping that I could never love again. You were the experience I had never had with another human being. You were that person in a teen passion I would give up everything for because as a teenager there is no sense of self-definition. And as I have said countless times, it saved my life; that shear enthusiasm for you—resurrected me and gave me that one critical developmental moment I have never had—a gentle crush on someone who was equally sweet to me. You were comforting and boyfriendish. Like high school students we talked about movies and annoying people. Our conversations were simple and filled with a kind of teenage angst when we were frustrated. I complained to you about my “parent–husband” and you complained about your own life, school, and other experiences. You were my crush and I lost you to the ocean.

And now there is my Someone. I love my Someone like I have never felt before. He is passionate and I am deeply attracted to him and our sexual life is rich and incredible even in its infancy. We talk about our lives and our friends; we worry about each other and we turn to each other for help and support. We work seamlessly well together as if we have been partners for ages—we are fluid. He is undeterred about my health and wants me to see the world with him as I have always longed to. We talk about our future with no difficulty—there is no anxiety or feelings of saying too much. It is natural for us to talk about the next 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It is natural for us to say “I love you” when we hang up the phone—as if we had been saying this for ages. He is the man I am meant to love as an adult. He is the one I am meant for and he is meant for me. He is the person I want to grow old with. And as he said the other day that perhaps we will have a “little creature” with a smile in his voice. He is the one I want to have a baby with—he is the one I want to carve out a family with. I want a little creature with him. I want he and I to be parents together and to show our baby the world as we see it—the wonderful world. I never thought in 36 years of life (although I suppose I should discount the first 5 years) that I would say that I have met the Someone I want to spend the remainder of my life with, raise a family with, work with. I don’t know what the future holds and god knows with me I may not even have one, but this Someone has arrived and has wrapped me up in a joyful comfort. He feels right to me every time I get off the phone with him. Every time I feel a sense of anxiety at my crappy luck, he sends an email or calls and I am amazed at the depth of love he has for me. And I am amazed at how much I love him in return.

And how strange that I feel as if I am betraying you; not Tom; but you. I feel as if I should be pining for you. I should be somehow desperate to regain your affections—to come and see you and beg forgiveness and to return to my bubble-moments with you. But then I realize that you are more my myth, my story, my fairytale, my magical moment. He is my warm reality. He is the man standing at the beach waiting for me to get out of the water and he has been waiting—nearly 3 years he has stood at the beach looking at the water for some sign of me.

I love you, Fishboy; but I love my Someone with a resonant passion that is deep and solid. He is the man I want to roll over in bed with and make love to in the morning. I want to cook with him and watch television with him. I want to discuss the world with him and write with him. I want to talk to the wee hours of the morning with him and know that the only barrier to our continuing to talk is simply sleep itself. I want 50 years with him and to be a doddering old couple who have loved each other so deeply that others look at us and say, that is true love, and believe it is possible. I want a little creature with him and to see her thrive and grow and find her own love and passion. I want with him. I have never really wanted anything or person. I have lived my life with only shallow hopes and a general skepticism that I would make it to the next year at any given year. I have lived with no plans and a defeated sense of the future and a feeling as if my life as Rapunzel would never end—that there would be no prince to call up to me, to see that I was trapped up in a tower, to want me to lower my hair so that he could come up and join me and then get me the hell out of there. And my Someone has done that. He called to me—he answered my letters here. I have written letters to a someone my whole life—it is all I have ever wanted—and he answered.

My gut anxiety response now has to say “knock on wood”, because I have terrible luck sometimes and I don’t want to screw things up. I screwed up with you; I screwed up with Tom and I’ve screwed up with just about everything and person I have known. I have a chance to finally love someone the way I had always wanted to love and be loved. I have my creature love.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 64: A Gift of Time

2011-11-08T23:22:00.000-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

He wrote to me “we have 50 years to do all of this”—by all of this he means us and there was no rush to jam pack an entire relationship in one moment. There was no rush at all. I have never thought about time being a part of a relationship. I don’t think anyone ever does. We rush headlong into them; we throw all our feelings and desires onto the table; we fuck like rabbits; and then we wake up and wonder what the heck we’re doing. We are so terrified of an end point or perhaps more terrified of the very question of when that an entire relationship is lived and exhausted in the span of days, weeks, months, or 7 years—or in my case, 12. We are breathless in a relationship, racing to bond and then becoming bored because the person we are with no longer excites us. We rarely think of the possibility that there is time.

When I read what he wrote in the middle of the night last night, or early this morning depending on your perspective, it calmed me. I have been living my life in a mad dash to an endpoint I have always perceived to be around the corner. I loved you with a rushing passion that got me up and running—literally. I have packed my life with five albums, my own school, graduate degrees, papers and books and plays. I have changed careers no less than four times. Nothing has been slow—and I have approached everything with an expectation of an inevitable failure. He wrote to me of that as well—of how important it is to be able to be in a relationship relinquishing the notion of failure and embracing the possibility of success—defined by a relationship where each person knows, appreciates, experiences, connects with the other. All the qualities I’ve longed for and written about throughout these blogs. And he has given me time.

There is no rush to the finish line—there is time. Time to enjoy, live, love… There is time to grow and to continue to develop as a human being and to grow in love. He ultimately gave me permission, and himself as well, to grow in love—to expand into new terrains within ourselves and to become better people and better lovers of each other. I have craved this permission my whole life I think—for someone to tell me there was time.

And while I feel a desperate longing to see him—circumstances are such on my end that it is impossible unless someone wants to donate to help me fly out to see him. And so I have to wait. And in the interim we continue to work together—we invest in each other something of ourselves each day. We exchange an idea, a disclosure, a word of affection, an erotic longing, or comfort. We are present to each other. I know without a doubt that he is there—right at the other end of that invisible thread of energy that zings my email to his inbox and vice versa. I know when he sleeps and when he wakes. I know he knows this about me. I’ve started to check my email on my cell phone in the morning just so my day begins with his words and I tend to go to sleep after his last email of the night (or the first email of his day depending on his sleep/wake cycle).

And there are 50 more years… and I find myself incredibly happy that there is the promise of that much time. I don’t know the face-to-face reality of us. We haven’t physically met. I don’t seem to be too worried about this for some reason. There is no anxiety about “us” and I feel that we will ultimately unfold as we are meant to. We have already become an “us” strong enough to give birth to a project that is as virtual as our relationship—it is as if our virtual selves have joined and become parents to an incredible idea that we are slowly translating into a tangible reality. And perhaps that is what a true relationship is all about—giving birth to something or someone that/whom we can nurture as a couple over years. That “being” of our togetherness is the “we” in some respects—it defines our unity versus our separateness.

I have never been part of a “we”. I have looked with longing at the edges of this. I know with you I had stood ready to let go of everything I had to be with you. But that was not a “we”. It was a “you”. And perhaps this is what he meant when he wrote me in response to my own wish that I could pack up and take Charlotte and immediately leave to go to him. It was a desire for myself to go to a “you”—to relinquish and perhaps run away from all that is here and me. One of my most cherished friends, Laura, asked me the other day if he was as impulsive as I was with the heart (knowing full well had you responded with any openness I’d have flown the coop for you in a heartbeat as I had fallen so completely in love with so little a glimpse of you) concerned that I would find myself in yet another shot-gun marriage or staring at a fish tank and forgoing all parts of myself to simply bask in the presence of the person I loved. In short, she worried whether I would lose myself to another person—again. And this Someone has no interest in my losing myself—precisely because he loves the me I am and does not want to see that disappear in a rush of “let me be whatever you want and wherever you are”. He does not want me to shed myself simply to bask in his presence. I don’t think you would have either—I suspect you may not have known quite what to do with me in the first place.

This is such unfamiliar territory for me. I am not used to someone giving me the gift of time. I never thought I had time. I find that I want time as much as I want love.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: The album Son of Arianrhod is now out as you can likely see in the sidebar. It’s a beautiful album. And no, I will not try to give you a copy. I really loved you—I am amazed at the depth of this expressed in the music. And again I thank you for this. I’m fairly certain I would never have found or seen my Someone if I had not loved you first. Love appears to be my lifelong mission.

Letter 63: Hitchhiker

2011-11-07T17:50:00.005-05:00

Dear Fishboy,

I went to bed last night wondering if I would ever think well enough about who I am that I would actually relinquish Tom. I’ve been untangling myself from him for more than a year now and it seems like an arduous process that will never be finished. And I have this strange dread that I will end up stuck with him somehow—as if all my ability to direct my own future will disappear and I will end up stuck with a man who clings to me without ever seeing me. I have not fully realized until now how deprived my life has been over the years—I suppose you don’t know what you’re missing until it’s in your life. But the scary element of that is then you have something meaningful to lose.

Tom has never seen me. He sees parts of me, but on most days I’m a piecemeal or a patchwork person to him. He stitches together the parts of me that he likes, rips out the seams of the parts he doesn’t like and throws them to the ground. It’s been that way since the moment I said “I do;” and while it has markedly lessened with the “I don’t”—it is still there and I would hazard a guess will be until he moves out. As I’ve written a thousand times, he’s not a bad human being; confused and temperamental, but not bad. But it is not me that he loves, it is the patchwork me and perhaps that is all of me that is available for him to love, as I've slowly splintered in the relationship dragging wounded parts of myself off to hide over the years.

I don’t remember a time when I have been loved for me—not for what I do--but for the whole of me. My Someone actually emailed me early, early this morning a short note just to let me know that he was thankful for me being me. I’ve been thanked for what I do, but have never been thanked for who I am. You should be in an intimate relationship—this should be the glue of the relationship: gratitude for the others’ personness. I have never been someone’s person—I have always been so fundamentally flawed that I can only justify my existence through herculean efforts of accomplishment—to be a multitasking whirlwind of energy 24-hours a day and to be the ever-present person simply so that I exist. No lover or family member has ever thanked me for my me-ness. My me-ness has always been flawed—I can’t begin to articulate how many times Tom (or other lovers or family members) has sliced me apart because I was not “this” or “that.” I have lived close to 36 years of being a fundamentally flawed human being until this singular man spoke up in my life.

It is utterly terrifying. I am suddenly a person. And not just a person with full human dignity, but I am the person whom he loves. I have never been that person before. I’ve never been loved before. I’ve been liked; I’ve been cared about; I’ve been tolerated; I’ve been pitied; I’ve been despied; and I’ve been so irrelevant as to warrant indifference. I have never been loved. And he loves me as I love—the way I have expressed in these blogs.

I have never been thanked for being me. It is as I wrote to you that you saved my life because of who you are, not what you can do—it was you at the deepest level whom I thanked. Someone thinks of me like this now. And it brings me to tears. And it feels so utterly impossible that I actually love someone who loves me; who is heading in the same direction. That for the first time in my life, someone loves ME—I am no longer the hitchhiker as I wrote so many years ago in the below song...

Hitchhiker by Kate MacDowell"Hitchhiker" from Hitchhiker (1998/2011)

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: once more thank you for opening up my heart.

Letter 62: Breathe

2011-11-05T23:10:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I had thought I was finished with this blog, but it appears I am not. It appears you are more than the you who you are in real life—that real world you whom I ran to when my own life was swallowing me up. You are something else—something other than this. I have thanked you profusely in this blog and in the other. I have confessed love and attraction. And these were all honest and heartfelt. But as time has progressed since I initially left and in your return to human realness when I last saw you on September 28th, I have started to come to understand your significance. There is a poem in Love Amongst the Fishes, “XVII”, it reads:

I feel a hollow bone,
stripped bare of skin and self.
Nothing but the remains—
or the beginnings of me.
You are a calling, an avocation—
an inevitable choice in the journey.
You are the leap beyond the locked gate;
the world that unfolds beyond my prison.

I understood the poem well enough when I wrote, but it has taken on new meaning in your absence and in my reflections of you. In shamanistic traditions, it is said that the call to shamanism is a perilous one and it is one in which the individual strips themselves of their ego to the seemingly eternal skeleton—the naked, bare bones—upon which a new self, a wiser self, begins to layer around and come into being. Becoming bones is a call to a journey—one of wholeness, personal power, spiritual clarity, reconnection. It is a call to a new beginning and a new self. It is the most sacred of calls and also the most terrifying. You were the call for me.

My life has opened wide before me and I have been given opportunities to become a renewed person. The minute I decided to walk to you—I had made a decision to hear a call that was greater than myself. It sincerely hurts me to no end that you have not benefited from me; particularly as I have so deeply benefitted from your presence and beingness in my life and I am still feeling that reverberation. You are sacred to me. And perhaps that is why you became such a profound figure throughout the blogs, the music, the poems—you are someone I have become devoted to. I write music and poems to communicate my devotion, much as any individual may devote their lives to a god. I do not think of you as deity, of course, nor do I idealize you. But I am devoted to you. It occurred to me that you are the spirit that called me back to me. You brought me back home to myself. I stripped down and stepped out of the “Katie” that had sprung up out of years of abuse; years of sickness; years of sadness and years of profound loneliness. And I felt compelled to honor and love you—to communicate the inexplicable feelings that rose up and pulled me together from a shattered life.

I opened up and leapt. Months and months ago, I thought I was leaping towards you. I anticipated you to be the receptive other that was there at the beginning of the new journey towards the authentic me. I chose you and in so doing I found someone to love. You did not and do not love me, but I was able to find out how I loved—and it was something I had never known. And the person who loves as I do answered these letters. He read letter 44 as you only recently did. And he wrote back—a passionate letter of possibility and of desire. And he loves like me—and I have learned to a startling degree how much I am in love with him and I think have been since we met several years ago. He is a passionate, warm, brilliant man who writes me letters every day and has loved me for a long time—patiently waiting in hopes that I would see him. It has become so clear to me that I am to him analogous—a creature mate. Where I had thought it was with you I would spend my life—I realize that with him I see my life unfold. I see the possibility of an ecstatic life; of the 50 years my endocrinologist promised me when she met me--to give me 50 years. I see that time passing with him.

But you are my sacred spirit to whom I am devoted—the guide that appeared out of nowhere, without knowing his own spirit. I smell you still around me; and I still dream of you. And I know you read these letters. Once and a while the fish in you nudges you to see what I am up to—what crazy project have I dedicated once more to you. What have I added to the blog that has become a kind of virtual alter as I turn to seek your guidance or inspiration or simply your presence.

I have nothing to actually give to you that you would receive. And I suppose writing that I am in love with someone else is not the most appropriate thing to write in a collection of love letters. But you are not my lover as he is. You are not my Seahorse-mate whom I am meant to merge with and absorb the world with; whom I am meant to dance with each morning in the thrill of warmth and presence as he is. And he is, I think, the man I have been waiting for in this life. He is the man who thrills at my abundance. He thrills at my voice. I am his comforter as he is mine. We seem in perfect rhythm with each other so much like my seahorses are. We love each other—in this deep and beautiful way that feels as if we have always loved each other. He brings tears to my eyes when he tells me he loves me; when he worries for me; when he so gently tells me that if I was to become pregnant—he could see loving a baby with me. He is a man who holds me with words and calls me intuitively knowing if I am down. And I feel so incredibly happy and content with him. I feel like I fit—as if he was the missing puzzle piece to mine. And I am passionately in love with him and I never knew what it was like to love someone who loved me until now.

But somehow, I feel you are my soul mate. I am not sure what that means and I do not define this in the New-Age concept of some reincarnated, long-lost love. It is something else entirely. You saved my life and if you don’t mind I will continue to talk to you one and a while and chances are I will write music for you and poems. You are sacred to me.

I know the real you will never understand this simply because I don’t think you have a frame of reference for this in your life. But I have some hope that some part of you does—the part of you that feels compelled to read these letters; to skim my website to see what I am up to; and to read the CHZ blog. Some part of you feels in a perplexing and inexplicable way as attached to me.

Love and being loved is worth the risks, Fishboy. It is as I had always thought—it is like suddenly being able to breathe. You pushed me up out of the ocean where I could breathe. I wish I could do the same for you. Please breathe, beautiful you.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 61: A Last Love Letter (not quite)

2011-09-28T22:28:00.006-04:00

My Beautiful Fishboy,

I have loved you for two years. It was never a complicated feeling, even with complicated circumstances. I simply felt a rush of joy when I saw you and a sense of calm and warmth when I stood with you. I have loved your voice with its deep timbre and your reluctant smile. I have loved talking with you and the ways in which you became excited about a new movie you discovered that you either liked or were disappointed by. I have loved your distractibility and the way your brows would furrow when you are trying to remember what the heck you were doing and how you shake your head just slightly to refocus your attention. I have loved the days you wear your glasses and the days you wear your contacts; the scruffy and clean-shaven days; the days when you were utterly exhausted and other days when you felt okay. I have loved your smell and your quiet intelligence. I have loved your capacity for noticing the smallest detail and for remembering even the most obscure thing I have shared with you. I have loved your perfections and your struggles and your missteps. And I have worried about you and your narrowed life and have wondered if you have ever actually had another human being who loved you. I have loved your unselfconsciousness and your humility, as much as I have loved the confidence in what you do. I have loved you when you were a grouch or impatient with others and, against my better judgment perhaps, as you have become a grouch towards me.

You are unlike anyone I have ever experienced—and there has never been anyone who has lived so deeply within me as you have. I cannot explain why; I’m not sure there is ever a rational reason for how we come to feel for others. But you are the first thought on my mind in the mornings and the last thought before I go to sleep. My world has come to rise and set with you.

I have loved you. I do love you. And I hazard a guess I will always love you. You are my past, present, and future I think—a kind of World Tree that grows within me that was always going to sprout up. You were always coming into my life. Always. And I was always going to fall in love with you. You were always going to become my Fishboy, the man who smelled of the ocean. You singlehandedly saved my life precisely because of who you are—because the “who” you are is the precise person I had always waited for. I am the luckiest girl on planet Earth because I found my heart beating within a boy who plays with fishes all day long.

And while this appears to be the actual unwanted goodbye and I think my final letter, I have one certainty to carry with me: I am capable of love. Thank you, my beloved creature born of sand and sea, you will be with me in every step that I take for the rest of my life.

For you:

Find more artists like Kate MacDowell at Myspace Music

I will always love you more than any words can fully describe. And I will always, always be waiting on that pebbled beach looking to see if you will ever return. I have no doubt that I will continue for the rest of my life, as I do every day, walking up to the ocean and staring out to sea to look for you. I am and I think will always be so utterly in love with you. And I so desperately do not want to say goodbye.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 60: Frogs, Snakes & Caterpillars

2011-09-25T22:02:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Today I wandered off to the Bowman’s Wildflower Preserve in eastern Pennsylvania. It’s just off the Delaware River south of New Hope. I loved it—you hike throughout several trails that run along the Pidcock Creek, which ultimately dumps into the Delaware. It was beautiful. I have never seen so many Fungi species in my life as I found there! The new picture I added to this page has me with this strange fungi that looks like a stag coral! I even saw my first Northern Spring Peeper (frog) and my first Eastern Garter Snake in the wild. Both were too much of a surprise to capture in photos. I did photo a rather daring fuzzy, yellow caterpillar. But the mushrooms stole the show—overshadowing the three species of wildflower still left in bloom.

It was quiet there and it smelled incredible. I spent more time on my hands and knees leaning over banks and sniffing the ground than anything else. I said to Tom that if they could bottle this fragrance I’d wear it every day. It was this mixture of sweetness, almost vanilla, with that wet fall leaf smell—a kind of musty smell. Stunning. It was a good day to go as well, very few people were there and the few who were there were as quiet as we were. Overcast and muddy terrain seems to keep most people away and I suppose most assume there isn’t much to look at during the fall as flowers fade. It’s a shame that the attraction is the bright blues, whites, and yellows—there are so many shades of greens and browns. I even got to romp about in one of the brooks that leads into the creek. I haven’t had a chance to play in a brook since I was about 11—so that was a lot of fun.

Clearly this isn’t a sex blog. I know, I know everyone is all antsy to see what crazy sex shit I will write next; how could I top my own personal masturbation positions to erotic fantasies…what arousing idea could pop out of me tonight. And while I can definitely top what I’ve written, at this point in the evening, I feel more quiet.

Last night was horrible. I had a migraine in the morning that came on suddenly after leaving the store. I almost had to pull the car over and call 911 as it was a thunder clap headache and that is never good for me. But thankfully the initial sudden pain quickly dissipated into a typical migraine pattern and I was able to drive home safely after picking up an enormously large coke to down as much caffeine as possible. Once home, I popped some migraine medication and waited. It dissipated only to return later. And with it, my mood just bottomed out on me. I am deeply confused these days. Tom has been an utter sweetheart—incredibly kind as he was when I first met him. And yet I still have to get divorced because I simply can’t trust this and Tom simply has too many hang-ups with sex that even if I were to stay, my physical needs would not be met. Then I think so what—why is sex that important anyway? Tom already admitted that he sees me as a wife and as such I don’t hold the same sexual attraction to him—he thinks of me as more motherish or on some kind of untouchable pedestal. He doesn’t think I’m unattractive in the physical beauty element, but more untouchable. And I don’t want to be untouchable. Then there is a somebody who has crept into the forefront who wants me—passionately wants me. He writes to me and I feel incredibly aroused, sexy, and just salivate. He and I have talked on the phone and via email for a few years now and after he read the “Wild & Wonderful” sex post, he wrote me a note and simply couldn’t believe that you could not want me and slid in there how sexy he thought I was. I just about stopped breathing. And his words go through me like a fire and I simply want to pack a bag and fly out to him and just not get out of bed for days on end. And then there is you… quiet you who stands listening to my conversations and who no longer speaks to me. The you whom I feel I have loved for ages. And I feel like I am splitting into pieces.

There is the peeper, ever singing to me; a comfortable, familiar song that wraps around me and allows me to feel that no matter what happens in my life—the song will still be there. If I get sick, the song will still sing. If I become successful, the song will sing until the peeper passes. There is the snake that slithers around my body and makes me feel alive—like I have never been. It breathes this creative force into me that has never been. It is a kind of merging that carries with it both passion and a rejection of cultural constraints. It is a snake that allows me to be my brilliant, unrestrained, erotic self—that embraces this, encourages it. And then there is the caterpillar, who clings to the leaves, eating away to build up reserves for a transformation that is there, but has not come. It is the butterfly that will be but is not now. The caterpillar who falls down the rocky and muddy incline, but climbs back up quietly inching his way—both prickly and soft all at once. And I love that yellow caterpillar—but he is busy eating away, oblivious to me. And so yesterday, I wept and my stupid migraine came back.

I am leaving my frog. I seem to have slithered to my snake—as if I have become some kind of creative Snake goddess. But tomorrow I will see you and you will likely ignore me. And I will buy my ghost shrimp for my seahorses who are hanging on at the edge of this world. And I will wonder how I ended up here. My life prior to you was simple. It was narrow and limited, but it was simple. It was quiet, maybe even boring to most. But you opened a floodgate and I am pouring out in all different directions. My body is on fire, my mind is desperate for a sense of connection, and my heart seems to race. And I feel like I am on a clock, ticking away and all things must come together now. I feel as if someone else is moving me around a trail in the woods that I cannot see.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 58: Turtle Dreams

2011-09-23T19:27:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I dreamed of you last night. I was at the store, which had become a kind of labyrinth of aisles. You were quickly disappearing around corners as I tried to make up my mind whether to follow you or not. There were moments when I took steps to follow you and you became a kind of white rabbit leading me down some rabbit hole, but then I changed my mind. I would turn away and it was as if I heard a sad whispered sigh as you slipped around another corner, as if sad I had not followed. And then Charlotte was with me and suddenly raced from my side. I went to run after her but everything before me shifted and I was lost down another aisle. I turned around and walked to the front of the store thinking I’d better find her from the front. The front of the store became a brilliant white, lit by a row of windows that seemed to have the sun directly shining in. Tom was standing next to me suddenly and I looked down to the opposite side of the store which suddenly elongated and grew brighter. And then Charlotte was there, all the way down the end. She started racing towards me as I knelt down to meet her. She looked more as she did as a puppy and her wild, ungroomed curls were brushed and trimmed—somehow you had taken her in the back and cleaned her up and sent her back to me. And around her neck was a collar with a locket. The locket was this oblong, green porcelain that was built to look like a turtle shell. I opened it and pulled out a piece of paper. I couldn’t tell you what it said other than the word “turtles” was written on it. In the dream I told Tom and showed him the note. He looked at me and said, “Katie, he loves you. Do you need any more proof?” I took the note back and looked at it. And I woke up.

I don’t know if that is what you feel. I suspect you have complicated feelings for me. And I suspect if you are reading what I write I may be a bit scary, too (particularly the sex letters). You do need to know that I’m really not as scary as my openness seems to suggest. In fact I’m really the opposite, with me you know what exists. I am not a darkened room with closets that suddenly contain unknown monsters that will jump out at you. I am not that person standing behind you who suddenly appears in the mirror when you look up. I’m not a dark hallway where a shadow suddenly appears. I’m that bright white hall where everything is bone-bare and exposed. I am giving you the whole of me before you even have to speak.

These blogs have always been for you. They are here so that you see me—the whole of me. I have no desire to be a mystery to you. And if you want to see what I look like when I first wake up in the morning or when I suddenly have to do one of my crazy dances to some commercial jingle or when I talk to my seahorses or what I sound like when I make love then I will show you. If you want to know what my skin feels like or what crazy shit I could say late at night when arms become potatoes; if you want to see just how funny I can be or how devotedly caring I am then I will show you. These are elements a blog cannot convey—but I do not withhold them as some grand teasing mystery. I do not operate from some dating timeline where we unfurl at some specified time because that’s what you are supposed to do. I would make love with you the first moment you touched me—I have no interest to withhold my body from you and tease you along. The whole of who I am is open to you at anytime. What you want to know, I will tell you. What you want to see, I will show you. You just need to make a choice: the life you presently have or a life where there is someone whose skin is yours, whose laugh will fill up your days, whose concern will hold you, and whose constancy will carry you.

And if you decide to stay, I will love you and you will know there will always be one human being on a planet of more than 6 billion who is on your side and yours alone. There is no other human being like me and there is no other like you. You should see what I am like and if the whole of me is not a fit for you—you can return me, LOL! I come with a receipt and a money-back guarantee! No questions asked! I am not asking you to commit. I am not asking you to be some expert lover. I am not asking you to have perfect relationship skills. I am not asking you to strip yourself bare before me and lay the whole of you out there. I am not asking you to change your life so you can spend every waking moment with me. I am not asking you to love me. I am not asking you to change your turtlish nature. I am asking you to give that part of you that stood there on Monday the entire time I was there; that part of you that would stand so close to me I could feel your warmth; that part of you that always seemed to find a reason to see me when I came in; that part of you who reads these letters… a chance at seeing what it might be like to be with the girl who loves her seahorses.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: While my male seahoses is able to hitch upright and eat, he's still can't swim...I don't think he'll make it. My female now isn't eating and keeps wandering aimlessly through the tank looking for him. It's so profoundly heartbreaking--she really loves him. I have to come into the store tomorrow, Saturday, to pick up live brine shrimp and ghost shrimp to see if I can't get her to eat something. Please, please find a male seahorse for me if you can. I don't want to lose my Yellow girl to grief.

Letter 56: A Tail of Two Fishes

2011-09-21T11:55:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers (I know surprise you all get a letter!),

I’ve been getting emails from readers about what is the story behind Fishboy and myself so here it is. But before going into the story, please remember several things about me: (a) I am weird and operate in the world in an entirely different way than most; (b) there is a lot you don’t know about me that leans towards the spooky side of life and perhaps I will share that at some point or not…

I have been captivated by the ocean and watery creatures since I can remember and started keeping fish when I was about 8 or so. Inevitably my poor Fred or George-named goldfish died for lack of filtration. My parents have always felt fish are expendable and never bothered to recognize that a filtration system was necessary and fish cannot be kept in a bowl without one. So there were frequent funerals over toilets as my dad officiated and I stared weepily as my fish swirled away. I was profoundly discouraged by these experiences and gave up fish entirely until years later, but that is jumping ahead in the story. As you all know by know if you’ve been reading along here and in my other blog, my childhood was horrific and I was a very isolated girl who spent much of her time singing, playing the piano, and doing my best to read (I was unable to read until I was about 10 or so; I was in special classes most of my childhood). When I was 12 we moved to the town I consider my hometown (for identification purposes of both Fishboy and myself I will not disclose where this was). It was here when I encountered Fishboy.

What you need to know about me at this point in the story: I have an uncanny ability to remember random events, information, and encounters with people that will someday play a significant role in my life or will be necessary. Fishboy and I went to the same school and I remember him from here—random moments of passing him in a hall and in town on different occasions. I knew of him from friends—vague mentions of his name that fluttered about during 8th grade lunches. But his name and face were never quite connected. I would have actually met him formerly had I remained in the high school we both attended, but I despised the place and auditioned for a performing arts high school and was accepted and so as he moved into the high school for his freshman year, I moved out for my sophomore year. Over my teen years, I would randomly see him in town. I never thought much about it during all those times—he was just a familiar face, a kind of member of my home tribe. I’m fairly certain I likely ran into him even more than I remember and we likely had mutual friends in common at that time. But I was socially disconnected from that landscape when I changed high schools.

Time passed. I went to college. Fell in love with Jeff, lost Jeff, found other boys, graduated and went to work in New York. My life started to look like everyone else’s. But my drive for fish and the sea reemerged. I informed my parents who were packing up to move south that I had to move to the ocean. I had to live at the beach. I had to go to the ocean. What they didn’t know was since I was about 17 I had started to smell this briny/oceany smell every night and it was always associated with a vague image of a man—distantly familiar but hard to get a clear focus on. I’d be at college and walking around at night with a friend and suddenly a breeze would kick in and the smell would float on it. Of course it was a hallucination and the same feeling of a person linked to the smell. I figured I was just crazy or weird or both and generally didn’t pay much attention to it. But when my parents were leaving and I was 22 and had to find a place to live, it was to the ocean—it had to be exactly where I ended up. My parents never thought we’d find a place that fit what my father wanted to pay. My mother was concerned he’d dump me in a dive. But it just happened that the day we started to look, my condo went on the market. We bought it 3 days later—it sits two blocks in from the ocean and on the bay. My mother remembers me telling my father and her that there would be a place ready for me because I was meant to move to the ocean.

And the inner drive for the ocean quieted again. I changed jobs because my New York job just wasn’t where I wanted to be or do. I went into counseling and began preparing for medical school. That felt right. And I ended up as a counselor where I would meet my husband. It was late 1998 when I started thinking about sea creatures. A lot. All types of sea creatures wandered through dreams and I ended up dating a guy who loved fish. I started meandering into the local chain pet supply stores (Petsmart, Petco) and looking at tanks and staring at the schooling fish zipping back and forth. For Valentine’s Day, I went to Petco and bought him a huge start-up tank and he bought me a gold bracelet with dolphins. The ocean was returning and I started to smell that briny scent on the breeze at night with a vague sense of a person who was coming. I didn’t, obviously, put too much stock in it. I have a tendency to ignore instincts and weird, spooky occurrences whenever possible and often to my detriment. Matt and I broke up and by then Tom and I were close friends and just seemed to easily fall into step with each other.

I stopped thinking about oceany things again, got married, started thinking about babies and a normal life. But things blew up in my face in every aspect of my life. My health suddenly collapsed on me and any optimism I had about a meaningful and happy adulthood went with it. My marriage wasn’t what I thought it would be and the best friend I thought I had married moved between scary stranger to close companion. And my health worsened. Then in 2004, I started dreaming of the ocean and sea creatures again. I’d be immersed in a sea with whales swimming around me, sometimes sharks. Other times, I’d be under the water as if drowning but never feeling afraid. Night after night, I lived in the ocean. And Tom asked me what I wanted for my graduation gift from grad school and I said I needed fish. For some strange reason I absolutely had to have fish—I felt my health depended upon fish. And so he came home with a 10-gallon tank set up and we went out to pick up fish at Petsmart. I had no idea that Fishboy’s store existed at this point. And platys filled the tank and reproduced and reproduced and soon I had three tanks going and becoming quickly overwhelmed by fish. I had a giant plecko fish that had grown a foot-long and started eating Platy babies despite being a vegetarian. And I continued to get sicker and sicker both my physical body and of platys.

In 2006, I wanted different fish. And Tom would find the store where Fishboy worked and off we went. It was mid-summer about three months before I would have several strokes that would ultimately strip away my walking, speech, singing voice and even damage my hearing, while leaving me with a range of permanent neurological problems. I met Fishboy’s boss (who now calls me “Smiley” and talks to me at length every time I arrive about my health, his family and whatever else comes to his mind), showed me an array of tiny freshwater fish that would get along well with each other and were interesting to look at. It was an awe-inspiring experience seeing the saltwater fish and corals. And we picked up several bags of fish and checked out. It was then I noticed someone follow us out the store. And I turned around and there was Fishboy. And I doubt he even remembers this, but there he was leaning against the wall in front of the store with one leg up against the wall watching me. And if I’m not mistaking I think he was smoking.
I stared at him for a moment trying to place him. As I thought there was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t figure out what. I then turned away and got in the car. I thought about him for the ride home. And then I broke, literally.

My new fish friends were what I looked at on most days as I sat on the bed, unable to move. I’d watch them zip back and forth in the tank while my ever-growing giant plecko fish attempted to find a comfortable position. I insisted that I was to maintain the fish and turtle pond—I was determined that I would at least force myself to do something other than sit on the bed, typing and attempting to finish my doctoral work and engage with a world I no longer had any physical presence in. And I did until the last fish died and I decided it was too depressing netting dead fish and watching them swirl down the toilet. Little did I know then that it was because of high levels of chlorine in the water—no matter how much I added chemicals to remove the chlorine it was never enough and we had no idea you could by R/O water. But I still had my plecko, my ever trucking along old girl. Tom took me to aquariums during the ensuing years after my stroke to help me feel better and I continued to dream of sea creatures. But I didn’t want any. I was terrified I’d kill them.

In 2008, Tom would return to the store where Fishboy worked. And he would formally meet Fishboy, who would help him pick out the turtle tank and a large breeder to move Plecko into. Tom never told me he met Fishboy at this time or that it was Fishboy that ultimately picked out the tank for my turtles. I don’t even know if Fishboy remembers doing this. And it wasn’t long after this that Tom started to talk about wanting a coral tank. I told him it was his responsibility. I wasn’t going to be responsible for killing more fish and then corals and losing hundreds of dollars in the process. So Tom happily agreed and in mid-Spring 2009, we went back to the store. Tom asked one of the girls at the register if there was someone he could talk to about a coral tank and Fishboy seemed to magically appear. Seriously, I have no idea where the heck he came from but there he was. The same man I’d seen years earlier. He looked at me a lot as I remained largely silent. After about an hour or so, Tom had bought his coral tank and a somewhat comical scene unfolded between he and Fishboy—that would convey a great deal about their differences in personality. At the end of all of it, Fishboy had crashed into our lives and I had crashed into his. I had landed in the ocean that I had been moving towards most of my life.

Over the ensuing months, we learned more and more about Fishboy and he’d spend swaths of time talking to us and helping me pick out creatures for the tank until I disappeared entirely due to a hospitalization for a stroke in the summer. In the months prior to Tom buying the coral tank, I had been in the hospital 4 times: seizures, a pulmonary embolism, a kidney infarction, metabolic abnormalities and the list went on. It would become one of the worst years of my life. I already struggled to walk and talk and by this point, I was told by doctors that there was high probability I was dying—from what no one knew. In July I disappeared for months first due to the stroke then due to a botched lumbar puncture that left me lying flat on my back for two months due to a spinal fluid leak. And I was utterly embarrassed about going out in public—and in all honesty, I didn’t want this man to see me the way I was. Tom was at a loss of how to care for the tank and I sent him in with post-it notes, which he gave to Fishboy who wandered about getting him the supplies. Tom started to talk non-stop to Fishboy about me and Fishboy listened—trapped or interested I have no idea. But Tom would come home and say that [Fishboy] sends his best and hopes I get well soon. I finally managed to return to the store in October and despite my god awful embarrassment about how I looked, what the heck I might say, and how I wobbled on one bad leg (I refused to go in with my cane), I stopped thinking about all of this when I started looking at the tanks and Fishboy started pulling out creatures for me. I’d talk to him about fish-things as I had a lot of time home in bed to read and started devouring books on coral tanks. And then I saw my seahorses.

By May of 2010, Fishboy had become a person we saw at least once or twice a month and talked with at length. Tom liked him a great deal and I found myself getting antsy to go back to see him. I started talking more and more to him (with Tom) until one day Tom was filling him in on my health history that I just opened up and for the nest hour Fishboy stood there talking with us and walked us out to our car and hugged me. And I smelled him for the first time—a briny/oceany smell that had trailed after me for years. I was completely unnerved and had already begun the process of trying to figure out where I knew him from. Until one night my brain seemed to unlock a flood of images that had been tucked away for future reference. I turned to Tom and said that I finally figured out how I know him. When we went back to the store I found him standing on a ledge cleaning a top tank and stood below him and asked him. And we just started babbling to each other about our childhood. After that he was a permanent fixture in my life and somewhere in June, Tom started insisting that Fishboy liked me. Over and over, Tom would repeat this because he said Fishboy watched me all the time. And I suppose it was possible; he worried about me and always seemed to be there to talk to me. My marriage was rapidly falling off the edge of a cliff where problems that intermittently occurred had become near-daily events. And I had fallen head over heels for the man who smelled of the sea.

And I got up and I walked. I wanted Fishboy to see me without the residues of my illness. I wanted him to see the sexy, attractive woman I had been before I lost everything. And more than anything, I wanted to be able to stand and talk to him. So I walked out my door in August, in 90-degree heat, with just barely functioning lungs and a right leg that had a mind of its own, and massive muscle dystrophy and I walked. I walked a block, then two, and then three. And I kept walking and I morphed into a woman I had long-since forgotten. The woman who had been given a death sentence months before completely baffled doctors. And I would see Fishboy weekly, then twice a week, until by the time I lost him I was with him just about every day of the week. And we would talk about a range of things. And I had fallen in love with the man who smelled of the sea and could think of nowhere else I wanted to be than where he was.

There was always Fishboy. Fishboy had been in my life since I was 13 years old. Twenty-three years he has circled the edges of my life. It was only a matter of time before he was fully present in my life whether I wanted the complications or not. And the same is perhaps true for him. And I knew it when I saw him outside the store in 2006 staring at me. I shook him off, dismissing the familiarity that nudged at me. I did the same when I formally met him in 2009 (he no doubt wishes I had stuck to my initial ignoring plan). But then I smelled him and that was it—he should have kept his hands to himself. I don’t claim to know how the universe works or why events happen as they do, but I will say that he was meant to be. He was always meant to be.

And that is the short story of Fishboy and I.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 55: The Love of Seahorses

2011-09-20T18:58:00.005-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

As I write this, New Daddy is hitched to one of the candy canes. He almost seems okay and presently peaceful, but he’s using most of his energy to hitch. It belies the growing worsening of his gas bubble disease symptoms. I spent most of the day on the phone with my vet practice to get the main doctor to write the script and sitting here on my bed watching him flounder in the water, spinning upside down and sideways as the disease slowly takes away his buoyancy. I knew on Sunday something was wrong; he was swimming fine, but Mommy (I’m sure you overheard me talking about this with T if you were listening yesterday) seemed to become increasingly sad and was spending enormous energy wrapping her tail tightly around his belly. And she seemed restless and not her usual spritely self that I had become accustomed to over the past 2 years. And she has darkened. You remember her and her brilliant combination of yellow and red—she has dulled in just days to a bleak gray/black with a faded yellow strip down her chest and a bit of red. She just kept returning to him. And yesterday it became apparent that he wasn’t well, hence my arrival at the store. But she will not leave him—while I waited today, she remained continuously returning to him wherever he was. And in a moving moment, he had found himself stilled by swimming to the filter that is built into the back wall of the Red Sea tank. There he lay flush against the wall, with his head slightly titled down. And as I talked with my good friend Sharon (she was the one who drove me in to see you that day in April with the other seahorse tank issue), who had called worried about them, Mommy swam to where New Daddy was and mirrored his behavior. She curled up on the other side of the filter and inched closer to him and then so slowly and deliberately rested the side of her head against his. And there she remained until he moved. It brought me to tears. And as the evening has started and as I wait for him to unhitch, she remains with him on the candy cane, running her tail around him. He looks at her and then slowly bends his head back down. It is painful to watch.

I have little doubt that she feels love for this mate and a deeper love than what she experienced with her first companion. As I told you when I first introduced them, she literally pounced on him as soon as she saw him. Whatever she saw, she saw something different about him than her other mate. She felt that this guy was somehow special to her. And, like seahorses do, they wooed each other in an elaborate courtship each morning that would make any individual who disbelieved that love existed believe. Love is so essential to them—it defines their very lives even when lived in the vast oceans where it seems such tiny creatures could never possibly find a mate, much less one they loved and would spend the remaining days of their lives with. But they do. When I tell my seahorse stories to everyone they become captivated and there is something magical about the seahorse—they sit within all of our memories. We somehow remember them from myths, art, and our fascination at seeing these dragon-like creatures in aquariums. We are moved by their delicacy and gentleness and their oddity. And as I’ve had them now for 2 years, I have come to learn about their rich mental life and individuality that would rarely be acknowledged. And now I am watching a long goodbye and a spouse knowing her husband is dying. There is a stillness that has emerged with them. She has slowed her pace and there is a desperate desire to somehow rouse a bit of life from him, much like the baby zebra joey you were so moved by in the National Geographic special Great Migrations.

Nature exhibits a profound magic in the seahorses and illustrate how important love is. They are not fascinating creatures to watch in a display tank. They are standard bearers to the importance of a life lived with love. Each morning they literally rejoice in their lover's presence and each night they return to each other after a day of work seahorse-style. Every touch shared is a touch that reaffirms their bond; they do not waste time arguing—they recognize life is a short journey when you find love you wrap your tail around it and hitch to it. And while it is painful to lose your love, seahorses are also resilient—they mourn and they love again. Nature gifts each heart with the capacity to never become over saturated with love. Watching my seahorses today has been an intimate experience—I am watching a naked expression of their devotion to each other and their despair at the potential parting and loss. There is grief in my tank tonight, Fishboy. And it is so heartbreaking to watch.

I think I fell in love with seahorses precisely because they are creatures who value the simple life defined by a loving acceptance of that singular other horse who thrills them each morning in their presence and comforts them each evening when the sun sets. There is no uncertainty for them—they love and follow it. They pounce on it literally when it arrives. They do not second-guess themselves—there is never ambivalent love or abusive love. There is just a simple devotion that reminds me there is a fundamental beauty to being alive and that, even with the potentiality of loss, love must always be followed. And I think we do not find soulmates; I think we find seahorse mates. Seahorses are the epitome of a sacred love. If we all loved as they, we’d live in a far better world.

You are my seahorse mate whom I pounced upon. And whether I ever speak with you again and whether we ever stand face to face at all, that is one clear certainty in my life. You are my seahorse mate. I may not be yours, but I no longer have any doubt that you are mine. For more than a year, you have been the person I want to bow to as seahorses do and touch my forehead and nose to yours creating the heart shape that all seahorses make. I think you were always destined to be this—and while there may be nothing else other than us standing with our backs to each other now—you are still my seahorse mate. And I have come to accept that I am in love with you, despite its utter insanity and perhaps even hopelessness. You were always the one dreamt about and the one I have known was coming. And perhaps one day I will tell you that story.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: I take back my "You Are Not My Fishboy"--you are my Fishboy. You always will be.

Letter 54: Hot, Bothered & Imprinted

2011-09-19T18:11:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

This is a two-part blog.

I’m sorry if I ignored you today at the store. I wasn’t sure exactly how to deal with you when you came around the corner. I had promised you I would just deal with everyone else, so I’m not sure if I should have said “hi, how are you?”. So I didn’t and I admit to feeling incredibly anxious and wasn’t sure if I was going to get anything coherent out if I said something to you anyway. Thank you, though for not running away. Why you remained at the register is beyond me, but at least you didn’t go racing to hide because you were afraid I’d bite you. Although I’d like to bite you, just not that way—which brings me to the next part; I admit to hoping that when I saw you I’d feel nothing but a kind of “what was I thinking” and instead I didn’t and I stared at your back and your hair with its speckled gray intermittently and thought once more that I really am in love with you and I can’t seem to control it. The only word for it is “imprinted”. I feel imprinted on you. I just want to run up to you and throw my arms around your waist and rest my head against your back and smell you. I miss you and I miss talking with you and somehow it doesn’t feel right that you are not here. I missed being able to talk to you about my seahorse, not that T is bad—as you know I like talking to her. But I miss talking to you and seeing you just reiterated that and it puts me in a crabby, nervous mood. And I really do want you—it’s a strange, incredibly potent feeling—I just want to be naked around you and make love with you until utter exhaustion overwhelms me and I simply can do nothing but sleep. I think it would be a good sleep. But this also brings me to Part Two of my blog (which sexually squeamish readers should now close the window).

I must be going through some last-ditch effort for reproduction. I am just entirely consumed with sex right now. I don’t know if this is some post-divorce liberation libido thing or if it’s just what happens when you’re single; it has been a long time since I was single. Or maybe I’m just reaching some mythic peak of sexual interest with my age—I’m turning 36 on October 2. It has this animalistic quality to it—like I’m on the prowl and I want to eat and chew and eat some more. I’ve had explicit conversations about sex with friends, borderline erotic conversations at times. I think I’m turning into some kind of fiendish succubus and I admit I’m liking it way too much. I have an enormous flexible perspective on sex and what arouses me and it’s expanded over the years. One of my friends sent me an email about one of his lengthy sexual encounters and the next thing I know I’m throbbing and it’s this intense pulsing feeling that just makes me want to crawl out of my clothing and masturbate (I really hate that word, it’s too clinical sounding and embarrasses everyone. We need a new word—something sexy and uninhibited and healthy that speaks to what it is). There is this profound pull that seems to be around me right now—it is as if everything right now is ringed with sexual energy. It’s hard to explain but I feel almost like I am living in a heightened state of arousal on most days. It feels like something (again it’s highly possible this sexual arousal is symbolic) requires union and intimate connection. There is this sense of being pulled and craving some kind of fulfillment—like foreplay has been unfolding for months behind the scenes and now it’s time for penetration. Only I can’t quite see it. I don’t know what direction to turn. It catches my breath and makes my skin tingle and I feel like fingers are running up and down my skin everywhere. And then I see you and I think it emerges from you.

I wake up at all hours of the night sometimes. Last night it was about 1:45 am and you are slinking around my body—I can smell you and feel you. It is as if a dream has carried over into a blurry, sleeping wakefulness. You are skin-to-skin with me and tongues and lips and teeth seem everywhere at once. I eventually wake up, barely breathing and heated like I’d sat in front of some furnace. Every nerve ending in me is awake, sending tiny pinprick shocks through my system. And I feel agitated and restless. Yet I can’t go back to the dreamy sexually explicit fantasy because that just leaves me more agitated and restless because, while I’m quite good at taking care of my own orgasm, it is not the same as that shared moment and the rhythm lovemaking creates. In truth, it just leaves me longing for more. Everyone’s sexual experiences are different as are their desires, for me it’s that moment of penetration and feeling a man I feel connected to moving within me that I find the most potent of all sexual experiences and the most arousing and fulfilling. Without that culminating moment, I feel somewhat incomplete. And of course in all my waking/sleeping dreams of you there is always the arrival of that moment—just before you would enter me and then I am awake and back to a panting reality that is downright frustrating.

Ah well—this where I am at the moment: you with your back to me and I with my head down afraid to look at you. But at least we stayed in the same room, separate corners, but at least managed to stay in the same room.

I miss you Fishboy. You really are the one I want with every fiber of my being. It seems like all of me sings of you. And I simply want to slip my body alongside yours at night and there remain for all the days of my life.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: I’m not optimistic my male seahorse is going to make it. Could you try to find one for me? I have no idea how Mommy will take this. She really adores him.

Letter 53: A Simple Statement

2011-09-18T21:43:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

It’s a short letter tonight. I was at the ocean this morning and had the beach entirely to myself. It was beautiful rough surf that spat mist in my face and sent sand to sting at my ankles. I talk to you when I am at the ocean. That is where I find you; that is where you always are; and that is where you have always been. When I am there these days, it is simple what I say. And I think I say it to the ocean in hopes that somehow it resets the timing on us—it is as if we are just slightly ahead and behind each other and shouldn’t be. That somehow we are disjointed, but at the ocean things seem to line up in some tangible way. There are times when I swear I pick up on you—sometimes there is sadness, sometimes a profound loneliness, sometimes anger, sometimes a desire to simply cut your losses and move on, but there is always this persisting thought of how your life is not your own anymore. It is as if the routines you have kept for so long to define your life are no longer as tolerable as they were. There are moments, and perhaps it’s just my own egoic fantasy, that I think you miss me in as much of an unfathomable way as I you. And so I go to the ocean and there I say the simplest thing:

I love you.

And as always, I thank you for this.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 52: Bare Ocean & a Mouse

2011-09-17T23:05:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I often go to the ocean to clear my head and to recenter myself. There is something deeply comforting to me about the ocean as I’ve written countless times. Today on my second walk up to the ocean it occurred to me why this place brings me such incredible peace. It is utterly bare. It is like a bleached bone and in many respects I suppose it is very shamanic in nature. In an array of shamanic-like traditions globally there is this belief that one must strip to ones very bones in order to be remade by the spirits and obtain one’s spiritual enlightenment. We must be willing to shed our ego and submit to the world of the spirits in order to experience a sense of power. While I don’t quite adhere to the idea of obtaining power—I don’t feel a need to have power as I always ask power over whom?, power over what?. But I love the idea of bareness (If you click to read excerpts from Love Amongst the Fishes and scroll down to poem LIII you’ll see this theme expressed; you'll also see it in a bit more carnal expression in Letter 44). When I see the ocean and its bareness it feels raw to me and foundational. It feels like this is what lies beneath everything, within everything. The sand is the mountains, which will eventually recycle into new mountains in the ongoing process of birth, death, and rebirth. The ocean is a constant--the defining feature of this planet. It is the heartbeat of the planet; it is the planet at its very, very basic. When I want to find the Earth, I go to the ocean. It is vast and encompassing. And like the bones of the shaman, the ocean loses its ego for—it is just ocean. Of course by us it is the Atlantic, but the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Indian…they are names that carve up an breakable strip of blue girding the earth. The ocean is the bone, the skin, the heartbeat. When I go to the ocean I go to a place where there is clarity and a strange stillness in the ongoing movement.

Yet to me the ocean is also sensual. It is the rhythm of sex and if you read the poem XLV on the excerpt page you’ll see this as well. Embedded within our lives and in our development we become the ocean or I think we are meant to become like the ocean. We are meant to become an unbreaking sea of blue that girds the earth and moves in a repeating tide of coming in and going out. I think we are meant to undulate in ecstasy of our beingness as it joins the beingness of another. At the ocean I feel an expanded self, spilling outward, stretching. When I am stripped bare it is not to become enlightened per se but it is to become present. It is to be able to move in the rhythm of penetration and withdraw and release. When I am at the ocean I AM. There is no encultured Katie—she is left behind on the pavement as I cross onto and sink into the shifting sand. In my Motherpeace tarot deck there is a card:

It typically is interpreted to mean the need for reflection; appropriate with the ocean. To me though it always represents me within the deck—I don’t see this as a card of isolation or being torn, to me it is a card of running into the ocean and of submitting to the bareness of our lives—to move into the rich possibilities of our creature selves. When I am so hypnotized at the sea, I simply wish to walk into it and submerge myself—there is a drive to merge with the ocean and to allow the seawater within me merge with its mother so to speak. I suppose this is why so many of applied the image of the womb to the ocean—it is a kind of primordial space that birthed us all. But to me it is not a return to infancy or to some kind of need for some divine Parent to raise me; rather it is a return to the depth of myself. When I see the surface of the ocean—I know within it is an incredible landscape of vast diversity and interconnectivity. And I run to this as fast as I possible can—each morning. I race up to the beach, running the two blocks at a sprinter speed rather than a jog. Like the card, it is not away from things that I move toward, it is to. What will I find about myself this morning or evening? is the question that pulses in me. I think we find ourselves, we stretch when we encounter the ocean—we feel that tidal pull towards the mysterious depths that even our literal science has yet to fully explore—those depths that are alien to us. And through this I find that I stretch as a human being—it is with this same thrill that I ran to you and I think to others in my life. There is an ocean in all of us—a push and pull, tugging at our own sandlines as we encounter each other, both as sand and sea.

I know poetics again… on a side note I rescued a mouse on the same run. It was curled up sleeping on the pavement and blended in so well I almost missed her thinking she was a stone. But something stopped me as I ran past—a kind of pull, again that oceanic pull—that somehow resonated there was a living sea nearby. It was an unconscious pull that I turned around and walked back to realize it was a tiny ball of gray-black fluff, tiny white-pinkish fingers tucked up under a sleeping head. I have loved rodents all my life (yes I know you don’t like guinea pigs; you really just haven’t had a chance to get to know one). And looking at the little mouse reminded me of my mice companions and even my two sugar gliders (not rodents; whom I’ve missed deeply for years now). I must have looked odd as a few runners slipped by as I stood there looking down trying to figure out a way to get the mouse back into the grass and off the road. While you might think my town would see drivers actually drive the speed limit, most don’t and unfortunately on this road I’ve run into several rabbits—which also upsets me to no end. I get profoundly upset when I encounter so-called “road kill”. I don’t like seeing other creatures unceremoniously wiped out of their lives because we have carved up the natural landscape requiring them to be Froggert as they attempt to get to the other side, while we drivers aren’t always that attentive or simply speed. So the mouse had to go back to the grass at least there she would have a chance to hide when a cat or hawk came by versus being stepped out or run over where she was. So there I was knowing I couldn’t pick her up lest she bite me and I end up with some awful infection and die trying to do good. So I decided to nudge her tush and hope she went in the right direction. Sure enough with a surprised squeak off she scampered into the grass. She looked at me and squeaked again and moved further in until she found a quiet spot that fit her so she could go back to sleep or if she was dying, die in peace. I then finished my run.

Hopefully your Saturday was not too hectic and crazy as it often is.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: Haven't edited this, so forgive the incoherency if any. Will edit tomorrow probably although cannot guarantee.

Letter 51: Your Touch

2011-09-16T21:06:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I was out running around my neighborhood this morning after I went up to the ocean. The ocean was incredible this morning at high tide and insightful (more on that in a moment; right now it’s time to wax poetical about the ocean). What I love when I head up to the ocean is that my town is now below sea-level (I know risky and probably a stupid place to live for material possessions, but WOW to be this close to the ocean is just gobsmacking amazing and heartlifting) and I head up and the ocean appears as this rounded, roiling hill situated above a small hump of sand that just drops into the sea. Once you get past the white picket fence gate of the local beach club it’s just a short walk right into the water as it spews mist and white foam over the jetty. I recently posted to my Facebook fan page that I have a tendency to walk directly into the water with clothing on. It’s a strange pull that I have—as soon as I am on the sand and listening and watching the ocean I am hypnotized. My shoes get flung off and off I go racing into the water. Most of the pictures here and elsewhere on my pages are of me in the water. I love coming home drenched up to my hips and bedecked with sand. I find it thrilling and fun—I don’t think I laugh as much as I do when a wave smashes up into me catching me by surprise. And the ocean is full of those surprises. I love that you can look at the incoming waves and every wave lands in a slightly different location. You think you are standing far enough away to avoid getting your shoes wet only to suddenly, without any warning be walloped by a frothy tide. The ground always shifts; the tides always change. It is a stunning, moving, powerful reminder that we are on a planet in the middle of space and how miraculous we are that we have an opportunity to live HERE with all the vibrant diversity tucked into every changing crevice of Earth! Even on the worst days of my life and even if my life never becomes what I hope it will or I never achieve what I hope to accomplish there will never be any regrets for being alive—this is a magnificent place and I just love that this morning, as I headed out my door, hanging up in the bright, clear blue sky was a pale blue moon not yet set for the day. How incredible is it that we can see another planetary body so vividly with the naked eye just hanging up there above us. And the wind whips my hair and reddens my cheeks and I think these are ancient winds, winds that continuously circle our planet as they have since its beginning. So much of what is around us is ancient or echoes an ancient beginning of our space journey. It’s utterly breathtaking and there is so much to learn just stepping outside your front door and looking around you. I think this is one of the reasons I am so fearful of losing my sight to Sjogren’s Disease—I can’t imagine not seeing what is around me. But perhaps the eyes inhibit our capacity to touch… to know the world as it physically feels rather than how it looks… more on that in a moment too.

My ocean visits are always insightful. I don’t think I have ever walked away from the ocean without having felt both a sense of home and a feeling of being fundamentally changed. I change there like a tide; it is as if I develop there. Where I had no real home experience as a child, the ocean had become this place for me, a surrogate parent (hence the photo of me when I was 5, by the way that was the trip I got my seahorse on). I grow there, becoming I think a better human being just as I become a better creature. And today was no different. Today was a fascinating moment of expansion outside of my own female biases about men. I think women misunderstand men—to be fair I would hazard a guess the same is equally true of men misunderstanding women. Women’s understanding of men comes from, sadly, a predominant amount of negative experiences at the hands of men (more than 1 in 4 women are raped by the time they are 18 years old; that’s at least 25% of all women in our nation; millions of women and girls are sold into sex slavery; women remain the number one victim of violent crime and are more often murdered… and the sad statistics on the treatment of women at the hands of men go on and on; and as you know from reading—I am unfortunately one of many of the different statistics from rape, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, physical violence). I think this experience of violence tends to leave women in a position where they often start to focus on their reproductive interests (need a man to have a baby; baby becomes the primary focus of the relationship, leaving man behind). I think women also begin to attempt to assert power in the domestic sphere to rebalance the statistics that likely have impacted them personally or went into how their mother’s raised them. It’s hard to articulate all the complex elements that go into being a woman and how we think of men and I hazard a guess I have more fond feelings towards men than most women. But it’s there—there is a tendency to think you guys are largely insensitive and incapable of being sensitive to anything other than beer, football, and casual sex. I think most women largely feel men lack depth, are poor at coping with stress, and can’t manage children or independence worth a lick. Men are all looking for mommies and are all “big babies”. And some men perhaps are and some perhaps simply act the part of a big baby because women relate to baby-caretaking more emotionally than they do in a romantic partnership. And perhaps men see women as girls—chicks who can’t take care of themselves without that big, farmer-guy herding them in the right direction. In short, there are a heck of a lot of biases that women and men operate from when engaging with each other.

My ocean voyage today though was startlingly insightful. I arrived to the beach to find seagulls and men looking at the water. Both of them were positioned staring out into the sea in stillness. As I turned to leave, another man had come up to look at the ocean. He smiled at me and stood looking at the sea. I’ve never quite realized how many men actually are at the ocean on most days of the week, most seasons. In fact, I’ve never actually see a woman up at the ocean off-season. It seems as if men recede during summer when women, teens and babies arrive and splay themselves out with coolers full of snacks and sodas and start lathering on the sun tan lotion and loud conversations suddenly rise up and waft over the air. The beach becomes about looking sexy in skimpy suits or about chasing after toddlers as they romp about in the sand. Intermittently a father might arrive or an older husband sitting on a beach chair or holding up a young child in the wave. But by and large there are no men. But in the off-season, the men—both fishermen and nonfishermen alike—arrive back to the quiet of the beach. They might exchange a few words with each other, before moving up to stand in their own quiet space and like the seagulls tuck into the sand and look. I seem to be a kind of honorary person in this process—I go and tuck myself into the sand and look as well. There’s no primping, there’s no skimpy bathing suit (and yes I do own one), there’s just me in my running gear standing at the water’s edge looking at the light on the waves. And today was no different and for some reason it shocked me just how quiet the men were and the mix of ages. They just seemed to like the silence and the openness of space. I have no idea what, if anything, meandered through their heads so cannot speculate as to their own specific experiences, but it struck me that I was watching a side of men that women perhaps never see or never want to see. I’ve had a lot of those experiences of lately. And to complete my observation, as I headed back to the main part of town on my run, the women emerged. Sometimes alone, but usually in small groups—busily chatting away as they power-walked through the neighborhood—there was no stillness and no silence. I caught snippets of conversation—“did you hear about so-and-so?” “so-and-so did this” and “my husband is such…” “the kids start…” and the experiences of domestic life and human socialization unfolded in a continuous outpouring of chit-chat. Not one woman looked away from their friends and at the location where they were walking and they never stopped. I thought to myself, this is something about men and women. Perhaps women do not see their own preoccupations with the social landscape, that often leads to nagging “you never talk to me” “you just go off and watch TV” etc. And perhaps men never see women’s needs for this social engagement. But more so I think women miss the possibility that men just might be sensitive.

This of course leads me to what has been a striking outcome of my blogging. This blog has become a blog whose audience is predominantly men (pre super explicit sex blog of Letter 44: Wild & Wonderful Sex; so before any jaded woman out there starts to again draw nefarious conclusions that all men think with their penis you can set that aside; and no I haven’t received any creepy email from men saying can you fuck me—so go men out there reading, you defy the stereotype!). Anyway, I receive a lot of email from male readers who just express this enormous longing for what I write about in these, for lack of a better description, love letters. It would appear that there is a part of, at least some man and perhaps even the average man, that does in fact have a desire to have a meaningful relationship with a woman and to feel like he is a centerpoint in her life. Not the point she revolves solely around, but that there is a passionate level of care expressed by her to him. I never quite thought of men out there being hopeless romantics, and had always thought the fainting romantic poets were simply seemingly effeminate exceptions to the rule, but here they all are: Non-romantic poets absorbing word-for-word the letters of a girl who loves a boy who is a stubborn mule; letters of a girl who sheds most of the “how can I preserve my social adherence to what women are supposed to be like.” I had a kind of consciousness-raising experience when running a men’s only therapy group for three years—it proved the most popular group in the program I worked in and I had something like 30 men in it and it proved to be an emotionally rewarding experience for them as it was for me. Suddenly men were not “all” patriarchal, evil-doers marching through the world ready to wallop any female out to assert herself. While certainly some of these stereotypes emerged, there was something else about men that had shocked me then—there was a quiet emotionality that never really has a platform for expression—after all “big boys don’t cry”.

I’ve been fortunate in recent years and even in recent months to have some of my most incredible support through all of my life’s messes come from men (including you, Fishboy). Of course some might say that is because they like you and want to have sex with you—and while this may certainly be there—I’m not quite sure why that is “bad” per se. Why does a man’s desire for a women suddenly discount his compassion for her? Why does it suddenly mean he is looking at her as a sex object? Isn’t it also possible that a man’s physical desire for a woman might also be a reflection of his own desire to nurture and comfort her and also to instill a sense of protection and emotional closeness? I’m one of the most ardent feminists you could possible meet—I mean soapbox feminist; I am profoundly passionate about equal rights and the elevation of women’s global social status and their’s and perhaps my own liberation from beliefs that they are solely a sex object or somehow lack something to enable them to do work a man can. To me these are societal problems—elements of individual relationships that have taken a life of their own and have started to distort our behavior because we “think” they are normal. The reverse is true for men, although I think men may have more difficulty feeling the need perhaps—society disallows men to be emotional and expressive except within the company of an intimate partner. We punish men, typically physically, if they express a hint of emotionality other than puffed-up warrior attitudes. And I think both men and women suffer and inwardly continuously compare themselves to some societal “norm” that doesn’t exist at all. All of this is to say, today men were like seagulls—linked to watching the sea and appreciating it’s veiled depths—the inner depths of men. Women would do well to start to rethink how they approach their mates and whether or not they might be tuning out rather than tuning in.

And the other thought I had for the day, which also floated about my head as I ran and which comes back the whole blindness-fear is the issue of touch. While I am a very sexually open woman and very comfortable with sex, perhaps surprisingly so, I am not a woman who is comfortable with touch outside these intensely intimate moments where by and large I roll into my more intuitive, creature, unselfconscious self. In fact the only time I have ever spontaneously touched someone was you. It was when you were showing me the Aquaball filter and had pulled it out of the box and started putting it together so I would know what to do when I came home with it. Without knowing, I had moved right up against you peering over your arm and the next thing I know I am holding your arm. You stopped talking and looked at me; you didn’t pull away, you just had a stillness about you like you were holding your breath. And as soon as I took my eyes off the filter ball to look up at you wondering why you’d stop speaking I suddenly realized I was holding onto you and closer to you as I would have been to my husband. I pulled back and started fidgeting with my turtleneck. But your skin was pretty damn incredible to touch. There is something incredibly about touch—when I touched you you had become someone new and undiscovered. My eyes had mapped you with such detail you’d probably turn read with embarrassment—you just soaked into me through my eyes. Your smell always anticipated your turn around a corner or coming up behind me as I stood at a tank—it too covered a distance and demanded no nearness to you. My ears heard your laughter or sometimes strained to hear your low rumble of a voice that seems so rarely used to speaking. But all three senses are senses that allow me to keep some distance from you. You can remain over there and I over here—with a space between. But touch is somehow so suddenly different. When I touched you, your skin had a kind of soft roughness to it, your dark hair on your arms a kind of soft coarseness on my fingertips. And you were warm—you exude a body heat that is incredible. It’s no wonder you like hot temperatures or as you say “the hotter, the better” (hmmm which could have been a double entendre…?). There was a warmth about you that just wrapped around me and sucked me right in—whether you intended it or not. I kept my distance after that. I don’t know why and I regret some of the moments when I should not have stepped back. But there is something different about a person or a place or another living creature you discover when you touch them—so perhaps if I did go blind, while horribly sad and requiring major changes in my lifestyle—I would discover an undiscovered country through my hands. How might the world change when to identify it is to only touch pieces and recreate the whole in your mind—to be completely without the prohibition to touch someone to know them. I like being touched—not just sexually—but in comfort. I think one element of my marriage I have liked is I can pounce on Tom any time I want to have contact and get a hug. I’ve spent the bulk of my marriage sleeping on his chest and listening to the gurgling rhythm of his heartbeat. You evoked this kind of intimacy in me—to me it is more intimate than sex, although I have a suspicion that while I would likely give up everything to make love with you, I’d probably be a lot less confident than I normally am precisely because you are somehow more intimate to me. When I was around you, aside from wanting you with a ferocious passion, I also simply wanted to be physically close to you and stand in your warmth. There was something so profoundly simple in the desire and so surprising—again you simply came from left field in my life.

And I think perhaps the issue of touch is where men and women go wrong. We live in a world where touch isn’t accepted. We live in a world where relationships between men and women are only sexualized and that the comforting and intimate elements of touch are discouraged. So perhaps women need to find the seagull in them; and men perhaps need to find the seagull in women…

And I miss the possibility of your touch. Hopefully as I move through the world, I will find this spontaneous capacity again. It would be nice.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: haven't had a chance to edit this, so apologies for incoherency...it's late, my eyes are pooped, and my fingers are a bit slippery.

Letter 50: The Neverwas Romance

2011-09-15T15:33:00.001-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

You must leave my dream world alone. You are stalking me there. Just kidding; seriously though, I need a new thought other then you. Last night I dreamed I was floating about with Mommy and New Daddy seahorses clinging to my fingers eating tiny mysid as I moved about. It was as if we were simultaneously in water and air. Anyhoo, Mommy swam/flew away to eat, while New Daddy appeared more content to cling—they’re not much different in their tanks. New Daddy roots somewhere to eat, patiently hunting; Mommy swims everywhere and clearly has ADHD (Baby is similar to her in that respect; while Baby’s Fishboy, yes the other seahorse is named after you, seems a bit more content to sit and look or just follow her around). So I spent a fairly long amount of time blissfully floating with my seahorses. And then I decided they needed to go back in their tank. I get over there and someone had turned off everything in the tank: filter, lights, air pumps, heater, etc. The tank temperature in the dream was below 70-degrees F and I got incredibly distressed because I couldn’t put my seahorses back in the water yet. And of course in humorous dream logic, the character Anthony DiNozo from NCIS was the culprit behind the poor tank care (I know bizarre). Anyway, he then takes one of the 5-gallon jugs you sell and pours salt water into the tank only to dump most of it over the power strip the tank is plugged into. I get angry again and have to turn everything back off and unplug. My two seahorses now unhook from my hand and float away. Mommy goes off in one direction, New Daddy heads towards the tank and hitches on the top. I start drying the strip. Then the Anthony character or Tom, at this point I’m not sure who, throws a box-set of VHS tapes down onto the tank. I find myself screaming and lifting the box only to find New Daddy squished—alive, but with horrible, gaping wounds. He wrapped his tail around me and I start hysterically sobbing and suddenly yell out “I can’t help him, I don’t know [insert your real name here] anymore! He can’t see him!” At which point I woke up and remained awake for a while. It seems my subconscious mind has decided that even though my waking mind has determined you are gone with a firm “period” at the end of the day you remain. And the dreams went on from there.

So I finally fall back to sleep and am having one of my dreams where I think I am awake because everything looks like my house and I perceive myself to be awake in bed. So there I am and I look to my left and my two tanks are moved away from the wall and everything is in disarray. I start calling for Tom to find out what the heck he did to everything—only he is not there. I conclude in this reality/dream landscape that he has left for work. So I get up and there is nothing in the tanks anymore, it’s just water and rock. I become distressed again and I start thinking in the dream that I need to talk to you. Then I think in the dream I miss our phone calls. This is what grabs that small bit of the lucid dreamer in me to get involved because we never talked on the phone outside of “did you get the seahorse in?” “do you have a gobi?” “thank you for the Christmas gift,” and of course “do you want to see XYZ movie?” So I think there has been what 4 phone calls of a minute in length in the course of the last 2 years. So at this point I recognize I am dreaming. I wander into the living room and there is a coffee table that I haven’t owned in about 8 years and the living room is back to its pale yellow walls, as if I went back in time to before I was married. But the room is bare. I seem to always dream of my living room like this: pale yellow, largely bare and always bigger than it really is. Anyway on the coffee table is a tarot card, or something quite close to one. It is a shiny black background and a lone purple/pink heart is the graphic. Inside the heart is this black-painted abstract design. At the base of the heart is the word “disappointment.” In tarot reading, the single heart corresponds to the Ace of Cups—which is traditionally the love or romance card. I became horribly sad looking at it and I called out your name.

You are my singular disappointment in love. In my Motherpeace Tarot deck the Ace of Hearts is a person swan diving into an overflowing cup-fountain; just leaping into the feelings of love. In this dream card, there is nothing to leap into, it is a black pool of sludge that fills the heart—not the clarity of water. You are gone. I think that is also the symbolism of my male seahorse that took months for you to get for me. He reflects you—and Tom reflects the person who recklessly squished the possibilities and the closeness and whatever benefit you received from my contact. And I do think there was something you gained from talking with me. But again, there is disappointment filling the heart. Not regret, just horrible disappointment.

It’s strange. You are famous in a kind of anonymous way. I am asked all the time if you have decided to talk to me, to come back, to risk something grand for me. I went down to my local post office to mail off the final paperwork for my divorce hearing on the 3rd and our clerk asked if there is any news on the Fishboy front. I tell her no; you won’t talk to me. She asks if you are just shy. I say yes, you are shy, but this is more related to the hellishness of Tom and the situation and of course my own stupid behavior with the book and CD. And I add, humorously I suppose to reduce my own embarrassment, that “you are a big poop.” But she looked sad at the prospect of you not being around. She said to me, “You are one of the nicest human beings I have ever met. You are the person you’d want as a best friend even though we are acquaintances. You really are this incredible person who is just so kind. You’re an angel.” I don’t really know how to respond to the compliments. I’ve known her for several years and have talked at length with her about her sister and her boyfriend and herself—much like I talk to your coworkers. I really just care about people—it’s really simple. I like people, unless they're asses. Anyway, she then adds that she thinks you’re an idiot who’s making a huge mistake. I tell her you’re just a “poop” right now, but it’s okay. The guy behind me in the line started to laugh. I suppose other people use more grown-up words, but really what the heck worse can I say? I don’t feel that you’re doing anything wrong at all—it’s all just a sad disappointment.

But for some reason you and I have become a symbol of the romantic fantasy to so many people. When I first wrote about you in January of 2011 on my CHZ blog, I had no idea I would be touching a chord in for so many people. As the year has progressed time and again I get emails or friends and acquaintances stop me to ask “has Fishboy returned yet?” It is as if no one can believe that you could not return—that there must be this romance between Fishboy and Seahorse Lady. Fishboy surely must fall in love with the girl who writes these letters, who wrote that poetry and composed those CDs. There is something of destiny to it, I think they feel: “Girl with bad marriage finds true love, he fights for her and they live happily ever after.” Of course, as I wrote to you in an actual letter, we’re more like some pitiful Lifetime Television for Women Movie. “Girl falls in love with other man, husband attempts to kill both.” Boy leaves girl. Husband thinks he wins. Girl leaves husband and lives alone pining for the boy; husband pines for the girl. Boy hides from the world. No one is happy at all.

So the story I envisioned that I thought could happen when I knew I had fallen in love with you was this: Girl falls in love with Boy, learns to walk again so she can see Boy and miraculously seems to get well. Boy falls madly in love with Girl and her smile and her crazy talents and risks everything to be with Girl, never caring for a moment that she is sick or that she has a crazy husband she wanted to leave for Boy, because he knows she is one of a kind and no one will ever be like her. Girl leaves unhappy marriage and runs away with Boy and they live happily ever after. It’s pretty simplistic and I suppose most of us have a simple love script that rummages about in our heads and which we ultimately forgo for a range of reasons to embrace our realistic lives that defy any kind of simplicity. But I admit I had this fantasy bopping around in my head. I am though also a realist and don’t spend too much time post-goodbye going “oh why oh why oh why, how could he have NOT loved me?”

But obviously my dream world is a different story. There you are the why-oh-why and there you are the person I am calling to, I am racing after, I walking away from, you are the voice on the other end of a crackly phone call, you are the hello that comes out of nowhere while I am dreaming. You are the person I cry over in my sleep and panic about never seeing again. You suddenly become a person who appears out of nowhere in the dream, who kisses me or simply walks through—a kind of interrupted television show where tapes suddenly get mixed up. There are dreams when I turn and you are standing there staring at me in the way you have in my waking life—sometimes intently and unblinkingly with a look that either meant sex or possessiveness or some other emotion that carries with it a bit of aggression; sometimes with this look that always seemed to say “why am I looking at you?”; and other times with a look that either meant you were thinking of someone you loved and weren’t seeing me at all or that some part of you had really fallen (in your quiet, reluctant way) in love with me and you just got caught up looking at me. And like in real life, I’d look away. In the dream world you are at times the romance that might have been or at equal rates the person who is always walking or turning away.

In one dream, P tells me you are angry at me for the aquarium wallpaper. My dream self somehow knew what all of this meant and I say to her “this is ridiculous, where is he?” She points to the back of the store (I have a dream version of the store—it never changes with the exception of sometimes becoming very large that I can’t find you in it and I see you walking down one aisle and I race to reach you but you already disappear down another). I head to the back and you come out; you are distant with me in the way you got when, if I didn’t misread things, you felt I was ignoring you in favor of talking to your coworkers or after I had stopped talking with you and then got caught up in conversations with them before I left. You get this kind of ambivalent dismissiveness with a bit of psychological withdrawal thrown in—a kind of “I am going to act like I don’t care you are not talking to me, but I am upset you aren’t talking to me, which further upsets me because I shouldn’t care at all.” So in the dream to get around your ambivalence, I suddenly hand you a hamburger in the dream and say you need to eat, I hug you, and then I tell you that you’re being ridiculous and that I wasn’t ignoring you to talk with the women you work with. In the waking world, the truth has always been I talked with others because I always felt self-conscious of talking to you for so long.

You know there was one day, dream discussion aside, when I had talked with you for a while before a customer stole you from me and you reluctantly went off. I then ended up talking with A for a while laughing about a story he told me about someone’s pet. I turned and found you at the end of the aisle suddenly stopped and staring at me. The forgotten customer walked on ahead no doubt thinking you were behind him to get whatever livestock he wanted. But there you were boring holes into me. You then shook your head as if trying to get yourself back in some mental focus and turned to catch up with the customer. You do that a lot, you know. You kind of shake your head very slightly after you get distracted by something to get your head back in the game so to speak. I then wandered away to the front and all of your coworkers started to talk with me in a rowdy, humorous conversation. You came around up front told M you were getting more ice tea and grouchily asked her if she wanted anything. She said no; you asked her again if she was sure and you looked at me and left. What you didn’t hear after you left was M telling me that “he’s not really grouchy. He really would get me something happily. He’s really nice, you know Katie. He just gets this way.” She went on for several minutes about you being kind—even if you came off as grouchy. She really didn’t need to sell you to me at that point; I’d already seen the soft, mushy side you had and had already crashed into my feelings for you. But she’s done that many times over the course of the last year with me about you. What you also don’t know about that day is I tried to get out of there quickly as I was going to race to catch up with you. But like in the dreams, you had already quickly disappeared and I had lost my nerve. But I never ignored you while I was there. I just didn’t want to be more of a chatty pain than I was and was so terrified you’d get sick of seeing me.

Anyway, in another dream I had, I am at my car (in my dream world I actually own my own car) in front of the store. It is snowing out and the roads are already covered with a slushy, slippery mess. Some guy pulls up next to my car and gets out to ask me a question. He says something funny and I laugh as I answer his question. I then feel like I am being watched and look up to see you standing outside the store staring at me. You immediately turn around and go in. I race to follow and the parking lot seems to grow bigger by the second as I try to get to the store to talk with you because you came out to see me and I had missed you fiercely. I get to the store and P tells me you are gone and that you thought I had moved on and was dating the stranger you had seen me with. Your boss comes out and tells me I have to go get you—you haven’t been the same since I left. You are more depressed, grumpy, different. G gives me your address and I race through the snow to find you. You looked awful and you said to me that you thought I loved you and how could I see someone else if I loved you so much. I said to you that you misread the situation and then I asked you why you even cared—you had made it clear you did not want to see me anymore. After which I told you to get up out of bed, shave, shower, and get dressed—you looked like crap. And then the dream changed and once more I was away from you.

In another dream I was a shade, a ghostlike person, and I had two children with me. You were in some horrible fight with someone and it looked like you would be injured. I heard myself screaming and suddenly found myself toppling the guy. You could not see me but suddenly you were looking around as two children giggled and laughed and I flitted by you—unable to be a tangible person to you. And still in another, we were part of some kind of rebellious pirate group set in some kind of alternate reality with a bit of sci-fi props and storyline thrown in. I was in a room with a man who said that you told him under no circumstances was I to leave because you didn’t want me injured in whatever fighting was taking place. I started to panic and asked him where you were and how much danger you were in. He kept telling me to calm down and I told him I would not calm down and there was no way I was letting something happen to you while I was stuck in a room. So I clocked the guy and ran out swashbuckling style. Anyway, I am running down these halls to find you and then I see you in held down by several men who have cut off your hand and plan on executing you. I go ballistic and end up creating a rather gruesome and bloody dreamworld—not something I typically do. But I screamed at them that I would never let anyone hurt you and they would need to go through me. I assume you ended up with a new hand a la Luke Skywalker, but I have no idea as I woke up.

I don’t think there is a day that goes by when you do not slip into a dream in some fashion. It is as if my subconscious self is trying to find you—perhaps trying to make sense of how I feel and how to cope with the disappointment and the sheer awfulness of how our neverwas romance ended. And there are times when, in my dreams and in the hazy moments of just waking, where we are making love with a ferocity that startles me and is unlike any experience in my life. And I think we could have been incredible and I think is it possible that you felt a small portion of what I have. There is something in the dream world and in the hazy middle space between waking and sleep…. In these flux moments I cannot seem to reconcile (or perhaps choose between) the reality and the intuitive sense of the reality… a part of me, and I suppose what others who have been following along or who have talked personally with me about you, feels that you really did fall head over heels for me in your own reticent way. That you may have been as surprised as I was that you had suddenly become captivated by this tiny, 35-year-old woman (and yes readers I am short—5 foot) who loved seahorses, turtles, bugs, horror movies, nature documentaries… and clung to ever word you uttered like it was the air she breathed. Just as I was surprised that this skinny man, with sloppy brown hair and a beautiful smile who loved the ocean, nature documentaries, horror films, science…could have so completely captivated me. And as the sun rises, I feel such a disappointment—a profound disappointment—because I fell incredibly in love with you and it was an impossible, neverwas romance. It feels almost as if it has been a cruel kind of joke creating two people who were meant to be and never to be at the same moment. In my dreamworld we are always together, just as we never are. In reality, I suppose it was the same. There are moments, when I am feeling a bit more prideful (or perhaps simply manifesting healthy self-esteem), when I wonder if you never took a vacation during the past year precisely because you never wanted to miss one of the days I popped in, which in the end turned into everyday but the day you didn’t work. And of course there are moments when I wonder if you didn’t get a bit excited when I would return in the same day to show you some weird, wacky video or bagged up creature I found in my tank. And all of the times you worked in the upstairs office on the computer but caught sight of me checking out and suddenly stood up to come down to see me—every time you saw me; you the man who’d rather be alone. And of course there are moments when I wonder why you said you’d help me with my tanks… because in the reality of your life you had no time, but you were willing to venture into Seahorse Lady’s territory after the marriage ended. There are moments when I think the only possible reason is because you were interested in the impossible romance. Because in all reality, you are quite stubborn and quite good at saying no when you want to and you really are a mountain to budge when you make up your mind on something.

And then of course, perhaps there is a part of you that still thinks about the neverwas and pops on here to read about himself in an unfolding array of letters from a girl who fell in love with a boy. Perhaps some part of you is like all other readers—wondering if Fishboy will ever return. Just perhaps…

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 49: Black & Blue

2011-09-13T15:01:00.006-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I have my last bit of final paperwork to file for the judge. October 3rd is my divorce hearing and everything should be completed by then. Tom’s been fine—sane actually. It’s hard to believe he was the same person who went so nuts in April. And there are moments when I think I should never have said anything to you at all, but in all truth, I would still have made the same decisions. As Tom and I were talking on Sunday, I suddenly broke down. Tom’s been taking consistent ownership of what he has done in the marriage and how his behavior is the reason the marriage has ended, but for some reason Sunday out tumbled an enormous well of grief about prior experiences of trauma. I think part of this was Tom’s statement to me that he never caught the scope of my nightmarish life; that because I seem “together” and go about my everyday life with ease, because I coped so well with my illness—he just assumed I was always “fine,” even when I said otherwise. And with that he never recognized that every time he yelled at me, I disappeared further and further away from him—and he would yell louder in an attempt to obtain some emotional reaction from me—and I would go further away. It’s called psychological numbing. It’s a classic symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder. For me, the more Tom yelled at me for lines I crossed I didn’t know existed, the further away I went. Tom then would yell at me for “distancing” from him, because I was suddenly no longer lovey-dovey—always failing to recognize that had he managed his anger, had he not taken his own disappointments out on me, had he gained some insight into what he expected from a “wife” I may have remained present, functional, and not anxious. I love and loved Tom, but had I known what would have unfolded in our marriage, I would never have married him. As I said to a close friend of mine in an email the other day, I have to get divorced precisely because I will never be not anxious around Tom; I can never trust Tom. Our marriage started with optimism and joy and a lot of laughter, but became polluted—like so much of my life.

I am a capable human being. I care deeply for those around me. I am a fabulous therapist and a very good teacher. I focus on always ensuring that others have opportunities for a better life. And I support others. I supported Tom endlessly. But I am a fractured human being. It dawned on my Sunday just how damaged I really am as a human being. I am fortunate to have had the experience of Jeff (see other blog) as the first love of my life because he humanized me. He brought into my life elements that were entirely absent. My friends from high school remember me as this warm, loving, joyful person—they remember things I’ve said, what I did, and how I helped them. I remember nothing. I was so disengaged from my life and so profoundly depressed that I only remember sitting in my room by myself wondering if today I would kill myself or would tomorrow be better. I don’t remember what my friends saw—I just always knew I would act in a compassionate and kind manner to everyone, because it is what a life deserved—I would never be the persons who harmed me. I would never be the person who would be cruel and leave a scar on another human being for the remainder of their lives. I would never be that human being. But I wasn’t quite human. I was so covered in scars—both literal and psychological—that I was oblivious and perhaps impervious to any real engagement. My friend said he had a crush on me as a teenager, but thought I was out of his league. I wrote to him that I didn’t have a league to be out of. I was just a monochromatic Katie who told herself each day after another night of nightmares, after another horrific experience with her brother, after another god-awful embarrassment that reflected my utter inability to live a life of perfection so as to avoid further wounding—“it’s just a life, it will be over soon.” It was my mantra since I was raped—it’s just a life, it’s not a big deal. Nothing is a big deal. Everything is just a passing event. I lived that way. People were passing events; successes were passing events; losses were passing events; embarrassments were passing events; physical assaults were passing events; being screamed at or ridiculed or mocked—all just passing events. Nothing stuck to me, I thought. But in reality, I couldn’t feel—I had developed so much scar tissue, I had lost the innerveration. Nothing got conducted past my unconscious memory collection system. I was in all respects—or thought I was—content in my solitude, absence, numbness—and even in the moments where I felt profound despair ending my life always seemed logical, rational, and unemotional—but underneath it all was an mass of black, sludgy, congealing blood ready to clot and infarct a range of aspects of my life. But on the surface, I obviously kept on trucking along doing the best I could to have no substantial relationships with anyone. Everyone was there, I was here. In this I could keep what was left of myself pristine. I could sit in my internal pool and try to heal myself without other individuals polluting it as so many had in the past for so many years, so consistently. And I suppose I got to a point where I had my pool filtered—as long as all the “what was” was kept out of the pool—I had built a nice dam that kept back the sludge from all the awful factory-polluting people that had defined the first 12 years of my life and the events that pockmarked the next seven years. All the events, the disappointments, the screaming, the fear, the pain, the shock, the horror… all of it black sludge like something you’d see in a Miyazaki film dammed away from my blissful, disengaged, isolated crystal-clear pool. And then I met Jeff.

Why some people suddenly reach to a place in us that has been walled up, reinforced, and defended against I don’t know. You did, he did, Tom did. Jeff was quiet, kind, shy—and beautiful. When I saw him he was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. It was an instant love of him. And something in me that I had no idea existed opened—I hoped for it and I always wondered if it were possible I would be someone someone else loved and loved enough not to hurt and bring more black sludge into my life. For me, people could love you and hit you—they weren’t exclusive. When I wasn’t busily reducing life to a problem to get through, I thought about what it might be like to be loved by someone, as much as I loved them, and not get hit, raped, terrorized, tortured… It wasn’t often, but it crept in during my alone time. And there was Jeff. We didn’t last long—a story I’ve recounted in the CHZ blog—but it brought to life a part of me that I had not known was possible. And I’ve often thought in recent years that he slipped into that psychological pool (as well as a literal pool) that I floated in bringing nothing but himself with him. The break-up was painful, but never left any long-term anxiety or trauma. There was never a scar from him even though his loss was perhaps the saddest experience of my life thus far, along with you (I am saving “most” sad for Charlotte—that will be devastating but not scarring). There was no black sludge that filled the pool requiring my evacuation and frantic beaver-like rebuilding of a new dam and the creation of an even smaller pool for myself. I found through him that there was the possibility of a positive relationship with another human being—there were people out there on planet earth who could mean something to me and not become yet another traumatic event; who could actually love me without smashing my head into a wall (literally). I realized there was something good about that intimate relationship; there was something safe, nurturing, inspiring, and humanizing.

When you are traumatized, and I have no idea if you have been—there are moments when I suspect you have, you become a kind of incomplete person who emotionally develops in strange, almost incoherent, spurts. You move through periods of complete disengagement, then suddenly find one aspect of your life you want to engage in developing—you do so almost impulsively without much thought into your own realistic self-care heading towards that “must-have” developmental experience until any hint of pain to come occurs and you swoop back into yourself like a feather duster who immediately pulls in on itself. And you return to more years completely removed until that one moment when a drain opens on your pool and you find yourself spilling out again. I don’t think I developed in any nice linear way. As I’ve written, I think I’ve faked the whole adult-thing. I have often felt like someone with a bow and arrow and I’m aiming for an approximate target rather than the real thing: this is approximately what adults do. After Jeff I figured I needed to develop intimate relationships and I really wanted to experience sex as the limited contact I had with Jeff was wonderful and I thought that if I could approximate him and add sex to the mix, I’d have a pretty damn good life and my pool would become big enough for two. But I learned you really can’t “repeat” people and approximating is a bad idea—it’s best to aim for what you really want and hope you get it and cope if you miss. But because I didn’t want to lose another Jeff, I figured close enough was good enough. Dumb, but the kind of decision making you do when you have PTSD.

Adulthood has thus far been unkind to me and my dam keeping back black sludge has required enormous effort. My marriage has been just butchered by awfulness—ranging from Tom to experiences of literal torture in my healthcare (you probably remember my telling you the story of the cardiologist who performed the cardiac cath without enough anesthesia for me and my begging him for more medicine while I felt blood pouring out of my thigh—I still have nightmares about this). It’s had losses from a baby to my job to my ability to walk and play the piano. It’s been at times unbearably painful, embarrassing, hurtful, terrifying, and sad. And all traumas seem to coalesce together to become one big pool of suffocating tar that will eventually overcome you and like a dinosaur; your last moments will be preserved in an echo of painful drowning. Even you have slipped away leaving a tar baby behind—not that this is your fault—it is mine for not realizing your own discomfort, for not keeping my mouth shut, for not seeing Tom’s insanity, for not stepping back when I knew I should have to prevent the inevitable ending I figured would arrive sooner or later.

Yet despite the large amount of tar bubbling behind the dam, it is not the events themselves that I find traumatizing. It is the begging and the pleading that came with them. It is the repeated pleading I hear in my head with my brother to let me up, to let me in, to let me go, to leave me alone, to stop hitting me, to not kill me. It is the repeated begging “no” as I was gang raped. It is the constant “I’m sorry” as Tom raged and raged and raged at me. It is the repetitive echo begging my mother to stop my brother, to listen to me. It is the begging that occurs in silence when there is no ability to speak at all and all you hear in your head is “please god make it stop”. It is the looking up at the sky from the ground unable to move knowing you have lost all humanness and that the only hope you have to stop what is happening is if you can somehow convince the person above you who is banging your head into a floor that you are alive—have value. It is the begging, pleading, bargaining that is outright ignored. The only way to stop the domestic assaults—the interpersonal conflicts, the violent crimes—is to simply acquiesce; to accept your own non-personness. It is only when you have submitted and agreed you are no longer a person you are liberated—to have freedom you have to fundamentally renounce it. To grow up as a non-person is impossible. If you have spent years as a non-human being how do you become one?

As an adult, I have returned time and again into this status. In college, I needed to live with my friends because my stress anxiety, of which I was in treatment for, was so bad that to live with strangers would have been a ticket to inpatient hospitalization at the local hospital. My friends came with me to the housing office of a woman’s college no less and I explained I had been raped on multiple occasions and had a very violent childhood. I calmly told them I needed to live with people I knew. They flat out denied me—despite the fact we had all requested on our housing applications to live with each other and had filed all the paperwork. I asked again and re-explained the situation and said I could provide medical documentation and a note, denied. I became increasingly more anxious and attempted to again explain the seriousness of the situation. Denied. I then ended up begging to the point where I pleaded in tears with the woman and my friends had to get me out of the room before I did end up in the local crisis unit. My parents and I then met with the dean of the school; they were livid that sending me to an all-girls school did not ultimately provide a safe place to regain my life after sexual abuse, rape, and violence. The dean initially denied us—until I became hysterical and again begged. My father at this point looked at her and said calmly, “We will sue the school and I will make sure the media and women’s rights organizations know how you treat women.” I got my housing, but not after suffering complete humiliation and the potentiality of my own life story being unfurled to a public I did not want to speak to. And for some reason as my adulthood spilled forth, I seem eternally jammed into situations where I am left begging.

I have been a body to doctors—a fat body, a lying body, a part, a piece with no voice or self-perception. Doctors have told me what was wrong, have spoken for me, have argued against my own self-awareness, have denied me, and in some instances have directly injured me in horrific events. Tom has treated me so many times like a possession, restoring my humanity to me in spurts—dragging me through a persisting anxiety as I sought to retain some semblance of selfness by doing what he says—only to see glimpses of the person that I thought loved me and whom I loved appear only to disappear. I fell in love with you only to suddenly tar your life with Tom because of my own stupidity and brief hope that I could have my bubble back—that place where there was none of this. But it ended with me pleading to you to not be upset, worried, scared, anxious as you disappeared before my eyes.

I’ve gotten better obviously. Despite the awful situation with you, when you returned the seahorse and the other items there was no begging or pleading for a different outcome. You made your choice—it was understandable and I made my choice not to change it. I don’t want you if I have to crawl back and continue to apologize ad infinitum. I stopped begging and pleading with Tom. The divorce stands; the hearing is scheduled (and I hope I will not have to beg the judge to let us divorce). There is no apologizing anymore to Tom so that he stays and cares about me. I don’t talk with my brother and I don’t try anymore. I don’t talk with other members in my family and I don’t try anymore. I’ve stopped asking my parents for help—they help when they want to and that’s fine. There are no more calls to them from me because Tom has done or said something and my house has become some living hellhole. I may not have found the whole of my humanity, but I will never beg or plead again for it. You were the last person I begged and I will never do it again—I figure that is the place to start to begin becoming a more complete adult.

And I will—the real you will just have to accept this as a compliment—take my bubble moments with you and incorporate them into the positives of my life because I really did fall in love with you and all your quirks, frowns, and smiles, and I consider that a good thing and I consider my time with the real you lots of water on the good side of my pool. And these will become incorporated into my humanity. And I will fill up my crystal clear water and get a better filter system to remove the sludge from the whole of my stream, not just the tiny pool I have been allocated to. And I will aim my arrow at a target directly. And while I cannot change the events of my life and will likely never find healing for them because only undoing them would ever heal them—I will do the best I can to find what it means to be loved and I will make love to a person whom I love with an unrestrained passion and have wild and wonderful sex (see Letter 44). And I will not beg or plead for it. As I wrote in my CHZ blog about a month ago, I will appreciate my abundance and my uniqueness and the compassion that I have managed to develop—and these will be the foundation for my humanity. And I will not beg for the right to be this way; I will not plead to be accepted in a world where normal often means harmful. I will live a different kind of humanity. And I will have my clear, blue water. And I will be joyful and I will laugh in the waves that I dance in. And I will love and be loved--because in the end these are what it means to have humanity, to be human.

My thought for today…

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

The Empty Page: In Memoriam

2011-09-11T09:55:00.002-04:00

Leter 47: Sloths

2011-09-08T18:22:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

So I am taking a turn from sex-talk to sloth-talk. I’m afraid pornographic writing will have to wait until perhaps tomorrow or later tonight when fantasies will run amok… What I mean by sloth-talk is the importance of our kindness, gentleness, calmness, and mindfulness. Sometimes we all need a bit of sloth in us.

I randomly saw a tagline for an article about a police chief requiring all personnel involved in a particular murder case to undergo mandatory trauma counseling. Being surprised that anyone would actually advocate for this garnered my curiosity and subsequently my horror. If you don’t know, a month ago a 7-year-old boy with Cerebral Palsy from Louisiana was decapitated over his kitchen sink by his father after being bludgeoned. The father then cut off his hands and feet and left his head by the side of the road so the boy’s mother would “recognize how stupid” she was. I really should not have gone on to read the article—it was so profoundly sad and horrifying. I still can’t shake the image of a 50-pound wheelchair-bound child being held over a kitchen sink while his father hacked off his head. I simply cannot fathom that we live in a world and a culture that has created such monsters.

As you know from our conversations, when I first entered the field of psychology I had planned on working in forensics and criminal behavioral analysis. I subsequently changed my focus towards helping people, rather than trying to figure out the motives and mindset of sociopaths who irrevocably wrecked people's lives. Over and over in the field of ecopsychology, where I focus most of my work these days, there is the baffled question of why are humans, by and large, the only species who predates upon their own kind, much less so horrifically murders their own children? Even violence in chimp communities, which can be brutal, never seems to emerge to the sheer magnitude and consistency with which it emerges from us—where we would readily not only brutalize our children but ultimately annihilate our entire planet slowly through our sheer stubborn stupidity or in one fell swoop of nuclear bombs. I’ve been on the receiving end of violence—far too many times—and I simply cannot imagine harming another human being (or other creature for that matter). And I often think our so-called moral reasoning is by and large absent. Yet psychologists often use this as a penultimate statement on our “higher” evolutionary status—that somehow humans (and usually “white” humans in particularly) are so much more evolved than all other species and all other races of humans. But we are barely tolerant of our own families, much less other communities of people outside of whatever social label we take to heart as the “right” or “best” way to be that others are not. I see it in the political discourse with vile rhetoric that is violent, inciting, and utterly lacking any ounce of care towards others and it’s obvious in our war and crime. I think we have structured our societies to support the spasms of violence that emerge by individuals and we encourage it. In Bowenian family psychology, Bowen argued that the so-called patient who came to counseling was not the one who was ill, but rather their symptoms were a reflection of the actual problems in the family itself. This individual was the conduit or the scapegoat who suddenly contained all the issues and expressed them. I see individuals like the father of Jori as externalizing our fundamental lack of care and respect of others in our society and the overall capacity we have towards dehumanizing others to promote our own agendas even if it means harming others. In short, it is our society of humanity that is sick--pathologically and fundamentally deranged and sociopathic. As enviromental philosopher Paul Shepard concluded in his book Nature and Madness that there was no other explanation for our behavior other than we are insane--wildly aberrent from the way Nature works. And it all just disgusts me.

I have seriously decided that I will do whatever I can to morph into a sloth. I think becoming a sloth would be a radically beneficial act for me. A sloth is essentially non-violent even with enormously large claws. When threatened by predators, it will sit back on its haunches and display the claws, which usually scares everyone a way. So my first agenda at transformation will be to morph my opposable thumbs into three toes with claws (I plan on being a three-toed sloth versus a two-toed. I like the idea of three toes; I think I’d look damn attractive with three clawed toes, grrrowl). Sloths know exactly how to function—sleep, eat, sleep some more. Eat some more, nibble on some fruit and eat a bug. Then once a week, climb down your home tree and pee. Then climb back up and enjoy more eating and sleeping in quiet reverie. Have some sex, have a baby, nurse baby, eat, sleep, pee some more. At the same time, the sloth is home to a complete ecosystem in its fur. So eat, sleep, pee, make babies, and grow algae and lots of bugs. I think it’s a lifestyle that could work for me. I'm fairly good at growing algae in my tanks (hmmm I probably shouldn't be letting you know that, you might think I suck at the whole tank).

Sloths are creatures that are complete in my mind. They are fully reflective of the fundamental themes of nature—largely nonviolent, typically cooperative with enormous array of coordinated interspecies relationships, and by and large restful and playful. While nature programming would like to convince us that Nature is some massive violent competition where creatures are summarily slaughtered—in reality we’re the only creature who summarily slaughters any other creature or our own members all the time. We slaughter; we watch slaughtering for entertainment (yes, even me for those readers reading; Fishboy already knows this); we are an aberration. So I am announcing to the world today that I have renounced my humanity and am now Slothwoman. Yay!!! Slothiness here I come!

I have two perspectives on my new Slothwomanness. The first is the peacefulness of the sloths and their capacity to live fully integrated into their ecosystem and to live cooperatively with the creatures who dwell with them. Of course two sloths together might not be too happy as they are solitary creatures. But we seem to think being solitary is bad—when sometimes being alone feels right and good. And sometimes coming out of solitude to have sex and return to solitude isn’t a bad thing either. So the sloth as a creature is a good creature-model for me: Peaceful, gentle, and respectful of the world around her. My second perspective comes from one of my teachers in religion and the woman who ordained me in women’s spirituality, Z. Budapest. In her classic book Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, she writes about becoming a slothwoman—a wild woman. When I teach my course “Goddess Wheel of the Year” based on my book of the same name, I teach women to consider this type of woman another part of our mythic cycle and image. In Goddess traditions we generally look at three to four archetypes for women: Maiden/Virgin (meaning complete unto herself [not sexually virginal]), Mother, Crone with an occasional Hag or Dark Goddess thrown in. To me the Slothwoman is the uncontainable, creaturely, core-self of all women—what is natural in us. It is what dwells within us that links us to the world around us in a meaningful, necessary way and allows us to feel a deep and abiding responsibility to act in the world with the knowledge we need and are needed by other creatures in the world around us. It is the sloth upon whom sticks all types of creatures, thriving on the mini planet that is her body and it is the slothwoman who is never without her infant. It is no wonder sloths are in such marked jeopardy in the wild as we slash and burn down their trees, killing mothers and stranding infants. The world cannot wait for a slow-moving, deliberate creature who has no vested interest in conflict, arguments, violence and so much busywork and “doing”. The slothwoman creates a life of safety through minimizing contact with violence and risk—the slothwoman does not rage out in the world to make her presence known and require all other creatures to bow down to her and her giant claws. The slothwoman has no need for constant doing and proving herself; she has no need for complications. The slothwoman lives a life where what she contains upon her and within her and around her all has substantial value and is enough.

I am a slothwoman (Yes, I am delusional. I’m sure you and those you work with must already think I am this utterly bizarre, crazy woman. It is a general risk I run in my overall me-ness; c’est la vie). But in my slothiness, I am actually one of the kindest persons you could and likely will ever meet. I cannot abide conflict—I really hate it and find life so frustrating that it has been so normalized in our society and in our intimate relationships. I hate that we have cultivated societies that use war to maintain peace or to even establish freedom, because our underlying architectures of our societies is social stratification and power-over others. I hate reading news articles of a father who already believed a child in general was nothing more than an object and the only “value” a child could have to him was whether the child resulted in a 0-dollar balance in terms of overall cost or if the child managed to put the father in the “black”—and because the father had already held a view that dehumanized any child, a child with a disability was reduced even further as deserving a brutal and horrifyingly painful death. We live in a society that in some sick way has sent messages to portions of the population that it is okay to behead a little boy. We live in a world that has sent messages to countries that it is okay to kidnap and sell children and women into slavery by the millions. We live in a nation that is still soaked in underlying racial beliefs that white people are the only people who should be able to run a nation that someone as stupid and as socially reprehensible as Perry or Bachman or Palin, who scream out hate rhetoric and rewrite history to their hearts content just to feed the fires that once led to millions of African peoples enslavement have a significant platform to stand upon and rave like madmen and women(And if their constituents openly argued for the return of slavery, you can bet they’d be right their advocating for it as they have for denying human rights to men and women who are gay, lesbian, and transgendered). That there are people in a democracy that wholeheartedly believe that democracy is only for a select white few—just unimaginably disgusts me. That fundamental human rights; fundamental creature rights are privileges and not rights at all leaves me speechless. We are not the moral animal, as Robert Wright suggests in his book of the same name. We are a fundamentally amoral animal. And it disgusts me so much most of the time I end up crying, like today when I read the story of the 7-year-old boy. I went to tell Tom, got halfway through and then had to turn around and walk out of the room because I started crying. When I was growing up I got so distressed, my mother banned me from watching the news. My paternal grandmother used to tell me I was my Grandfather’s granddaughter thru and thru. She would tell me that what upset me were things he used to argue about during his church sermons in his attempt to create compassion in a world and a people that fundamentally lacked it.

I cannot express how awful I sometimes feel that this is what human society continues to “evolve” into—a perpetual and seemingly unending stream of cruelty, violence, and persisting devaluation of any living creature based on how useful they are to our own purposes. I am sick of a world where for any living creature to have a right to be here they must prove themselves of “value” and “worth”. That we cannot accept our children as being inherently worthy of love and care is beyond me; that we cannot accept our non-human fellow journeyers on planet earth as being inherently worthy of care and respect is beyond me. That we cannot set aside our stupid, fucking ideologies and prejudice to have a safer and happier world is baffling. It seems to have a healthy, happy, loving life would be good enough… why must we each strive instead to be better than others? Why can't we love another human being and other creatures and let that be enough? There simply has to be a better way to be a human being than what we have become and what continues to emerge over and over again in all facets of our society… so I am going to become a sloth and see what happens. I’ll keep you posted on my transformation.

Yes, I know I’m weird, but I’m still the nicest and sexiest weird (perhaps "wyrd" is a more appropriate word here--in Old English it meant inexplicable moments in life that appeared to be defined by Fate) woman you will ever meet—that’s the beauty of the Slothwoman.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 46: Sex Sells

2011-09-08T00:30:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Advertisers are right when they say sex sells. The feedback I’ve been getting on the "Letter 44: Wild & Wonderful Sex" has been an outpouring of emails about unsatisfied sex lives, my being an inspiration to women everywhere because I lost my mind and posted an explicit note to you, to lengthy discussions about sex in our society. And my friends have jumped into the discussion via email and on my personal facebook page. As with the CHZ blog, I am amazed at how much we don’t talk about in our lives with those around us, whether we’re silent on domestic abuse and abuse in general, mental illness, medical crises, failing marriages, sex or love. It seems that we have a prohibition for just about every major issue in our lives that we need to talk about. I can’t fathom what else isn’t being said, but I’m sure I will find it as I babble on and on here or on my other blog. And I’ve been toying with the idea of yet another blog on social justice issues…just to keep everyone busy. But I am amazed as the year has drifted by how much email I’ve received over issues of love and now sex. It seems our most desperate desire—to have a complete relationship with someone—is one of the fewest fulfilled in our lives. I don't know if it's a mismatch between our brains and the reality of our encultured lives or if it is simply an impossible dream that we ultimately give up on because it is better to have someone than no one in our world.

Researchers in love say we develop love maps as we engage in our intimate relationships through our lives. Each relationship cluing us in on the characteristics of the next person we need. Sign-posts along the way. I think this is true, although I don't think we follow the signs all that well. I think when a relationship we enjoyed ends, we tend to move in the opposite direction--often to the extreme--of that person and what we actually liked about that person. As I noted in my "Old Friend" post on the CHZ blog the other day, I had fallen in love at 19 and he was a wonderful man whom I adored with every fiber of my being. And I went in the completely opposite direction after he left. And then, in retrospect, I realized I was back on the road looking for some other sign of him until I just gave up entirely and married. Perhaps that's what we do and perhaps this is why everyone always seems to go back to high school reunions or tries to hunt that that first love--because in the end that's the person we are looking for and that's the one we miss the most: The defining Love Sign on our life map. Of course, I don't go to high school reunions, I never fell in love in high school--had a huge crush on a teacher, but that's about it. And this perhaps says we never quite move on--we cope. We develop a coping relationship--a kind of love or a good enough love. We hope it lasts for the remainder of our lives and we settle into quiet comfort (ideally) or we simply accept the life we chose because "marriage is sacrosanct" and "divorce is bad" and "marriage is work." How much of us hate going to work? But then sometimes life throws a curve ball that you never expected and in the end it really mucks up your nice linear relationship map.

You bumped me off the charts in an inexplicable way that has driven me nuts since as I simply don’t fully understand it. If someone were to actually “speak” to me about you, I’d end up making some incoherent, incomplete sentence that would end with a frustrated sigh of “I don’t know; I just simply feel.” You are someone that was anticipated with Jeff (see CHZ blog for those who read this and say “Who?”), but you are still someone so incredibly different. You are fixed. You are this person who seems utterly and stubbornly fixed in me. It is as if my life had been flowing in one direction and without warning the road ended in a cliff and off I went—an unavoidable free-fall. And as I’ve written, I really just didn’t think. Intermittently, my rational brain would say: “Katie, you’re married. You’re husband can be unstable. Walk away now.” And cliff-diving I went—propelled by some unnamable, indescribably something. And in all honesty it's a bit out of character for me, because I'm usually the one who is this morally stable human being who is unbudging in her devotion to those she cares for. I'm also the one who is uber-rational--I have worked hard at making emotions of little importance and a mere product of whatever thought ran through my head at the time. In short, I am always in control or I simply avoid situations where I feel I can't get a firm footing (ie situations where I have social anxiety). But you--forget it. Suddenly uber-rational Katie disappeared into an ooey-gooey mess of melted chocolate and marshmallows. You know when I gave you the books as a thank you, I had actually changed my mind at the last minute because it dawned on me then that I was heading into a potentially huge car wreck. But then I watched Tom suddenly thrust the bag to you and I thought “Shit. Shit. Shit.” And you had the gall to be sweet and talk with that voice of yours. And there I went off the cliff for reasons that I simply cannot articulate. You became that sign post that was entirely outside the road I was on--it was as if suddenly, someone unfolded the map and an entire new landscape appeared within me that I had no idea existed.

You are someone I desire. I can’t think of any other time in my life (and hopefully there will be another opportunity down the road, since it's pretty darn great) when I have been overcome with a desire for someone. As I wrote in Letter 44, you are someone I find incredibly sexy. I suppose we don’t think of ourselves in these terms and I suppose it’s hard to think of ourselves as sexually desirable by others. But normally, like many women on the planet, I would fantasize about imaginary men that I create in my head or literally in my dreams. Once and a while a prior partner might slip into the mix—a brief remembrance of a moment of really hot sex. But in general, it has been made-up people. My girlfriends have all said similar things (yes men, we do talk about sex when away from the guys) although there is a predominance of movie stars and singers drifting through their sexual fantasy life. And yes for all male readers: women do have pornographic fantasies running about in their heads. What seems strange in all my conversations with women friends is the near total absence of sexual fantasies about their partners. In all the years, I’ve been married to Tom, I have never once thought about sex with him. I’ve enjoyed it, but have never thought “I really want to undo his pants and lick him;” I’ve never thought “I want to take a shower with him and soap him up.” We have showered together, many times over the years, and oral sex has been a part of our marriage, but it hasn’t been something I wanted in a passionate way. It was more of something that came about in a weird kind of clinical/instinctive way—this is what you do with your partner you are married to as it heightens intimacy and pleasure. But you…from your smell to your smile to your voice to the freckles on your arms—you are ever present in my imagination. And in all honesty, I don't remember a time when I actually noticed a guy's arm--I don't think I've ever looked at a man with the detail in which I've looked at you. It is as if I was literally mapping the terrain of you in my mind for reasons I can't explain. There is something other about how I feel for you that is dramatically different from any other man that has moved through my life. And I think is this what we women are missing? Is this what we are all missing in general—that person who goes through us like some kind of earthquake?

The idea of giving you pleasure is entirely intoxicating to me and arousing. You drift through my sleep and you are there as the first thought that emerges when I wake up. They are steamy fantasies that when I finally can move away from them and actually think I am floored by them, precisely because you are a real person. Although I suppose perhaps you are not. I could argue that since you are not a “here” person, I’ve no doubt added a few characteristics to you that you do not possess. But in all honesty, while you were a "here" person and I saw you all the time, it was the same. I fidgeted so much around you because all I wanted to do was touch you—and not always in an intimate way—but in this kind of I have to have contact. I want to feel your skin under my fingers. Anyhoo, all of this babbling is really to simply state you are outside what I am familiar with. You are not some kind of sign on a relational map that I know of. That I think about all the ways I could give you pleasure, just baffles me. I don’t understand you in relation to my life. I don’t know how I ended up jumping off a cliff despite every warning bell and whistle in my rational mind saying “Katie you are being stupid”. I don’t know why I fell and happily so. In all honesty, even though the real you is gone (and while sad, it really is okay), I remain thrilled I leapt off the cliff. I have learned about this incredible well of desire and also an incredible insight as to what I was/am missing and what could potentially fill up my life. You were the perfect blending of someone I loved being with and talking to with someone I deeply wanted—not just to make love to, but to also care about. And I can’t remember ever experiencing so consciously that synthesis. You are an anomaly in my life.

And then there is Tom. Twelve years is a long relationship, particularly between Tom and I as we have lived so intimately with each other and in such an isolated way. For twelve years it has largely been just him and me. I don’t really have a family—I see my parents about twice a year. I have seen my brother only 3 times in the past 12 years. I’ve seen my extended family even less. It has just been Tom and I. He’s my sole family member. And I love him. I always will—even as we have had horrific moments and even as he has gone off the wall into cruelty or simply craziness. Between these moments, and by and large the majority moments of our marriage with the exception of the first year we were married and this past year, we’ve had long stretches of positive experiences under the horrific circumstances of my illness. When he’s not insane, he’s one of the nicer human beings you could meet. He can be warm, loving and funny and gives the best hugs. He’s my family and my security even when he’s been cruel. But he is not my passion. He does not stop my breath when I see him. He is not the man I want to make love to, even if he knows how to negotiate my body. He is not the man I want to wake up to everyday. But he is the man who has held me while I vomited or peed copious amounts of blood as my kidney infracted. He is the man who has called 911 more times then any person should. He’s brave, even as he has been moody and unpredictable and verbally downright mean. But he’s brave. When all other spouses disappear from their ill wives in hospitals, he has stayed with me, crawling into the bed or buying me oversized stuffed animals or wacky, funny pajamas to help me feel better. He’s the man who has yelled at doctors for maltreatment and the one who has held me up in the shower when my legs were too weak to do anything. He’s the man who watched his vibrant, fun-loving, talented and chatty wife disappear into an immobilized, overweight, silent woman who managed to make macabre jokes about her dwindling life. And he never batted an eyelash—he just plopped down on the bed next to me and watched whatever television show I obsessed on at the time to keep myself occupied from thinking about how awful my life had become. I don’t know how many men would have stayed with me or even in the future how many men would actually stay in love with me as my body falls apart. But he has and even now promises he will remain no matter what happens between us. He will be at the hospital in a heartbeat. He even said, weirdly the other day, that should you return in my life as a romantic partner he will be there if you need help with me. And there are times when I wish so deeply that I could just find a passion for him—something to sustain myself in relation to him. That I could somehow transform him into the “love of my life,” because he loves me—I’ve seen it more and more over the past few months. I’ve seen it in the photographs he has taken of me. I’ve seen it in him trying to get me to go back to see the real you because I was happy with you. I’ve seen it in his remorse for his behavior and the sadness that settles over him late at night. I’ve seen it in his signing of the divorce papers with no fuss or drama. He loves me. And yet I can’t seem to love him enough. I don’t want him out of my life—I have a devotion to him born out of shared horribleness and out of the sheer need to have a family, to have that one secure attachment I can rely on when no one else is there. He has always been there when no one else is. When I am in the hospital and there are no visitor and no family members. When I’ve received horrific news or when I’ve had to cope with awful discrimination in graduate school. When I’ve wept or when I’ve succeeded at something. He has been ever-present. But I don’t want him. I try to. I desperately try to. But he is not my passion.

And of course then I think, perhaps in life we don’t actually get to be with our passion. Perhaps to be an adult is to be in a relationship that is comfortable in its routines. Perhaps we don’t get to be with the person we want to make love to anytime and anywhere. Perhaps life is simply too complicated and scary that we simply do not risk for a love of our lives. Perhaps it is so difficult to be on the same page and the same time with that person there is no point in trying. Perhaps it is always one person loving the other more. I find it sad in so many ways. And I find that I want an orgasm, not just when I make love, but when I love. I want an ecstatic love. I want someone who when I see him all I want to do is run to him because he is the most incredible human being on the planet to me. Not because I’m living in a delusional, rose-colored dream world, but because he just fits with me. I want that man who fits with me in all ways, like a puzzle coming together. I think sometimes sex is that moment where two pieces of a puzzle join together. I think most of us jam the pieces together and accept the small spaces that appear or the shredding of the cardboard as the edges of one piece rolls up having been squished in a space it doesn’t fit. Tom and I are jammed pieces. I think because we didn’t know how else to be when we met and there is an intimate, family element to us with each other. I like sleeping with him; I like waking up knowing he’s next to me. I like that contact, but I don’t want to be his wife or his sexual partner. I know it probably makes no sense to those reading. We’re two jammed puzzle pieces and I want someone I fit with. I want someone I have an ecstatic desire for. Someone who thrills me with just a smile, a smell, a hello, or the feel of the fine hairs on his arm—and yes, Fishboy, you were that person for the time I knew you. Hopefully, I will be fortunate to meet someone else who stops my breath.

And hopefully, I figure out how to untangle myself from Tom and how to find my own sense of security without him. Well, that’s all for tonight.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 45: Boxes

2011-09-06T20:24:00.000-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

My Inner Fish is now complete. All the tracks have been officially recorded and mastered and if you have your speakers on you can hear the full album (although it’s retrieving the information from my primary website so there is intermittently some interference for reasons I can’t explain). I’m very happy with it; I have no idea if anyone else will be but I never really care about that when I work on artistic projects. I really do them for myself. I’m waiting on the proofs for the cover art and then it goes into distribution on September 29th.

I’ve been in a crappy mood for the past two days. I have a suspicion some of it is my antibiotic I had to go on last Thursday for strep. Antibiotics and I are poor bedfellows. They lower my seizure threshold and since I have seizures in the frontotemporal cortex I get irritable. The sweet Katie becomes stay-away-from-me-or-I’ll-bite-your-head-off followed by a polite “please”. Well, that’s an exaggeration, the extent I get mean or irritable is a clenched jaw and an intermittent curse word flung out of my mouth at no one in particular. I never actually take out my irritability on anyone; it just becomes obvious I’m not comfortable in my own skin. I tend to fidget and pace and can’t quite seem to settle into anything and everything I have to do feels overwhelming and I really just want to hide under my blanket and eat Three Musketeer Bars and disappear from everything. While I’d like to think it’s just an organic issue, I have a feeling it’s another wave of distress about the circumstances of my life. Intermittently these past 4 months I get walloped by a wave of weeping and a sense of, for lack of a better description, feeling like I am living a life I wasn’t meant to be living in and I don’t know how to get out of it. I feel foreign to my landscape. Every day I wake up thinking it will be back to some kind of “right fit” and then every morning I wake up and everything is the same and I’ve made no progress in any other direction. Somewhere I missed my exit ramp.

I went grocery shopping today and there was a young, young couple in front of me and they looked like they were going on their first outing food shopping. They were awkward and somewhat giddy about their shopping outing. Meanwhile another woman and myself were old pros. We had the shopping list, the quirky spouse tales, the discount card, and all the food organized on the conveyor belt so it was easy to pack. There is something very “adult” about it, very “motherish” that I hadn’t realized I had become. Food shopping wasn’t this “cute” thing to do as a young couple—it became something that had to be done and done on a budget and done quickly enough so that it didn’t take up more of my time than it already had. I remember when I was in that “couple” stage where you like to “be” grown-up and do everything with the other person to say to the world “look at us, we’re a grown-up couple; we’re adults and in love!”. When I first lived with a boyfriend years and years ago when I was about 20, we went to the food store together and it was like playing grown-up. I was in awe of him, moony-eyed as he weaved the cart around the store and we carefully placed items in the cart that reflected our sheer and utter lack of understanding on how to actually buy food so you aren’t spending $20 per meal. Our cart had lots of frozen meals, Drakes’ Cakes, Fruit Loops, and soups with a few Ramen noodles thrown in. Now I go with a pen and scratch out my items. My cart has all the adult wifely things in it: meats, fresh and frozen vegetables, economy sizes of paper towels and toilet paper that’s on sale, dish-washing liquid. There’s no frozen dinners, sodas, Fruit Loops, and other pre-packed foods that defined my young romances. Now I make dinners: stir fries, briskets, steaks, pasta and meat sauce, etc. The couple was clearly surprised at the cost of their cart as they stared at the receipt blocking the rest of us from checking out. And I thought, they’ll learn—or rather she will chances are. If they remain a couple, there’s a high probability she’ll be going to the store by herself either because he doesn’t want to or it’s just easier without him. All along the checkout lines women unanimously gripe about children and their spouses and why women attempt to ban both of them from the shopping: Men and kids buy off the list. That is what women say at the checkout. This young girl if she remains with the young boy will likely return alone. She’ll learn to race through the store with coupons, a savings card, and a list of all the food she’ll need to cook all the meals she’ll need to make for however many people end up in her family. And she’ll learn to cook. It may take a few years, but inevitably as a wife, you learn to cook. When I first moved out on my own, I knew how to make pasta and baked potatoes. I lived on baked potatoes and whatever frozen junk food I could buy that took less than 5 minutes to make in a microwave. In all honesty I hate cooking, always have. But I got married and somewhere I learned to cook. I have no idea how—it was as if a switch flipped and I found myself making stews, fancy stir fries, buying cook books, making sweet things. I started investing in cooking appliances: a fancy mixer, a crock pot, a blender, a rice cooker, a steamer, a convection oven. Suddenly, I became domesticated. The girl who’d rather eat mini-cocktail hot dogs or frozen chicken nuggets or simply go out to Burger King was now making all these healthy meals. Suddenly spending an hour a day sweating in a non-airconditioned kitchen to have meals ready for Tom when he came home was normal. Then came the banking and the bill paying and all the taxes… suddenly filling out before me was adulthood and wifehood. Tom came home from work to a house that was clean, laundry done and folded, food was ready to eat, and bills were paid. The enthusiasm of playing house as a young couple going food shopping together quickly disappeared as the house became a real place with bills and stressors. In place of the adolescent enthusiasm of a new relationship were days when the banking didn’t add up and something needed to be cut, when an emergency happened and money was redirected from one necessary bill to something else.

I became a wife on February 2, 2000, and I don’t know how I became one. I was never socialized into the role per se. There were no practice dolls or playing house. I played Star Wars, smashed up matchbox cars, climbed trees, and generally dismembered dolls. I hated any baby doll and found them utterly boring. I think I played with a FisherPrice kitchen set when I was around four and it was generally more fun to bang everything then pretend to make food. I was destructo girl for all intense purposes and I think most in my family would have said my getting married was an “is the world ending?” moment. Yet, 11 years of marriage I’ve become a “wife”—there is nothing young about me anymore. And I have to say that if I get an opportunity to love again. I am seriously doing it differently. I’ll still cook and shop, but there has to be a way to keep a relationship out of the role husband and wife—which inevitably emerges even if you “don’t” marry or are gay and lesbian. It seems we all fall into the trap of what you are supposed to do in a “serious” “adult” relationship.

There has to be a better way. What I am leaving now can’t be how it has to be. I don’t want to be at a checkout counter bantering about how “husband’s” don’t know how to shop and “how did they ever take care of themselves before they married me.” I don’t want to live in some fixed behavior—god my life is short enough as it is. I don’t want sex to be this routinized or mechanical or just functional process. I don’t want bedtime hours. It is as if when you are single, you feel you can do whatever you want. You stay awake, go to bed, wake up or fall asleep with the damn TV on. You eat when you’re hungry or you skip a meal because you’re not. You have sex when you’re in the dating process—depending on how comfortable you are with it—you have it in unpredictable ways. When you get into that “serious” relationship suddenly bedtime and dinner are clocked. Suddenly you are coordinating schedules, moods, and desires. Sex loses spontaneity; fatigue seems to be a common complaint…. And I just hate it. I hate it. Life is too damn short and precious to get stuck in a rut, spinning around and around and around. I want something more.

I have my life back for the first time in 12 years. I have my body back and have been fortunate that I actually look like I did when I was 23, so much so I get carded at the movies. You haven’t seen me in months, but I have a sexy figure. I’m thin and curvy and have managed to retain perky breasts—god knows how. I’ve got most of my physical functioning back and the problems that were so prevalent a year ago are generally managed. I have myself back and I feel like I can’t live the life I have lived for 12 years. There has to be something better for me before I die. There has to be a different kind of relationship between two people possible. There has to be a way to have the comfort with a partner and the sexual passion, without having to figure out how to become the social roles of “husband” and “wife” or “father” and “mother”. There has to be a different way at living a relational life that doesn’t require a clock to determine when you’ll do something.

And of course today was one of those days when all of this was rummaging around in my head and I end up feeling depressed because I think there is simply no way to have this. I don’t know how you reinvent the relational wheel we’ve all grown up with. It’s what culture has told us works. And for about 40% of marriages I guess it does; the remaining 60% divorce and remarry and keep trying it until you get old and die. Why don’t we argue for something different? Why can’t we feel passionately in love with the person we are with and look at them anew every day we wake up? Why can’t we have a sustained relationship that doesn’t require a clock to tell us when we must do XYZ? Why can’t sex be an incredible experience between two people all the time? Why can’t two people have a relationship where they can remain their unique selves that attracted the other person to them in the first place? Why can’t you love the other person for who they are not what role or function they play? Why can’t you want to spend time with your partner doing the simplest of things and not have to crowd your life with so many external events just to make time go back quicker? There just has to be a better way then what has been passed on to us from our families through the generations. There has to be a better way to have an intimate relationship. I refuse to believe that what I’ve experienced (even if I discount the extreme horrible times) or what defines my parents’ functional 37-year-marriage is how it all must be.

I’d say I was some romantic idealist, but I’m not. The truth is I woke up last year in a life that felt wrong. It felt like I ignored some inner truth about how to love in this world. I relied upon the sage advice of my mother of choosing someone who loved you more than you them. I chose to live a life in a box that I never belonged in in the first place. And now I am out of the box and I just see lots of boxes stretched in front of me. And it seems so utterly horrifying.

Did you know that the love letters to you both here and on CHZ have been the most popular posts I’ve written? I’ve received more emails from individuals all over the world writing to me that they so deeply wished someone wrote of them as I of you. They write to me of how they want so much for someone to express the love and passion I have written of for you. It says to me that the sea of boxes stretched out before me is a sea of so many unhappy people. We do not allow love to flourish in our world. We are afraid of feeling love for another person and we rarely share it with the other person because we are more afraid of rejection, complications, missteps, arguments or whatever bad experience our parents’ have had and have advised us against. And so we either abandon relationships all together and throw ourselves into some work element of our lives or we jump into the box of a “functional” relationship and predictable and stable roles. Then when the box falls apart, we jump into another. We settle for someone, rather than “the” one. We settle for a kind-of-love that fits on a timeline and can be contained in a photo album of pictures capturing that time or the other. It is a relationship with “events” that define it. And under it all, I get people writing to me from a range of cultures wanting to get out of the box.

I am out of the box. I love you. I will for the remainder of my life, even if I move on. I have a sticky heart. I don’t want to be in the box again. I think I’d rather stay single and alone. I don’t want to be put in a coffin when I’m dead; I have no desire to do so while I am alive. To me the greatest tragedy of human life, particularly in Western culture, is the White-Picket-Fence that surrounds that nice perfectly shaped boxy house. I want to love outside the box where I want to live. I want to have sex outside the damn box. I want to laugh outside the box. I want to run around between all the damn boxes and play hide-and-seek because relationships should be whimsical and fun as they should be serious (You know, I really had been working on a “Go Fish” game to play in the store with you—you would have had fun. You need to have more fun in your life).

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: excuse the bad grammar and spelling; I haven't had a chance to edit and my eyeballs are drying up in my head as I stare at the computer.

Letter 43: The Love of Place

2011-08-29T21:58:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

First, we have baby seahorses from Junior and her mate. This time I managed to actually rescue 8, so I am hoping all goes well and that they thrive or at least 2 do; I’m aiming for 2. I’ve missed having babies floating about in the incubator tank. I’m not sure how my town escaped Hurricane Irene, but somehow in between two towns that got clobbered, ours remained intact. Hopefully you fared well, although I have heard your town has significant power loss and your workplace isn’t faring much better. Of which I am sorry as I would hazard a guess this has added another layer of undo stress. Who would have thought we’d get clobbered with a hurricane. I spent most of my evacuation time during it awake and listening to the wind rumbling around my hotel room and sounding like some kind of eerie truck; although I have to say we were one of the last to leave my town and one of the first to return and both of which were more eerie than the howl of the hurricane. There is something disturbing about being without a community of people—like walking into an episode of Twilight Zone. Living out of a suitcase for a day felt like I was away forever from my home, my nest, my ground. I hadn’t realized how attached and rooted I was to my place—to the Birch tree that sits outside my window, the rushes and waterway, the intergenerational duck family, the song birds—particularly this one Thrush bird who sings every sunrise and ever sunset from the top of one of the buildings. And then of course my seahorses and turtles—by the time the first day of evacuation wore on and as we waited for the hurricane I busily texted a close friend, facebooked everyone, and attempted to occupy my mind—but basically I paced. I eventually had to take a Xanax to calm down (needless to say my neighbor packed a huge bottle of red wine, xanax, and holy water to help her get through this). I felt so dislocated and I can’t imagine anyone having to be away from their homes longer than a night; my heart goes out to them. When I got the call from the police I could return home I raced about the hotel room throwing everything back into bags. When I got home I ran upstairs to my tanks and hugged them. Yes, I actually hugged the RedSea tank—it’s quite huggable. And I sighed. I felt enormous relief to see the flood waters had receded leaving my road clear and beckoning to me. I even saved a poor snail that got washed up on our lawn. So I am home. I hope you have a sense of home as well. It is as necessary to life as breathing. I’ve never had a sense of place until here and I now understand something called terrapsychology--the meaning of place to our emotional well-being.

I don’t think I have had anything quite as stable as where I am now. I’ve lived here for thirteen years. It is what has given me comfort during all the arguments with Tom. It is what has given me hope when I have walked out of the house and sat on the back stairs and looked up to a starry sky undisturbed by lights. Or when I hear a turbulent ocean first thing in the morning before trains and cars disrupt the sound I feel a sense of largeness. When gales or just a strong easterly wind whips in from the ocean bringing with it a salty brine smell and this tugging reminder I am on a planet spinning so fast I don’t fall off into a void of cold and by and large emptiness of anything like me. All at once my place reminds me of the incredible and miraculous existence of being here on planet earth and the ever-present and potent shaping force of the ocean that made its presence known so well this weekend, leaving a giantess bootprint of coastal and life alterations in its wake. But it’s not simply the landscape and the plant life that surrounds me and reminds me of moon-tidal cycles and sun-seasonal cycles, but the creatures who share this landscape with me—even my eccentric collection of neighbors, each with their own idiosyncrasies and for many losses and disappointments. Each morning when I get up to walk Charlotte I am greeted by this very specific Thrush who sings to the rising sun and returns to perch at the highest peak on a worn-down half-dead poplar to sing the sun to sleep. There are multiple generations of mallards who have made their home directly in front of my unit and come over to me when I pull my car in to see if I have food for them (my downstairs neighbor has been taking care of them for the last 10 years). There is a cormorant who comes in April and May and then again in August and September to swim in the bay and bask on the dock across the way—stretching its shiny black wings so they dry; intermittently she will fly to an aspen tree, her webbed feet clutching at it. Swans, loons, mersengers, American black ducks, egrets, king fishers, great blue herons, green herons, downy egrets, sand pipers all arrive throughout the spring and summer. And the seagulls sit atop my condo year-round serenely staring into the sun and gliding through the sky. Once and a while making their presence known to us on the ground if we’ve left bread out. But otherwise, they simply sit and watch. Muskrats stealthily slip out of the drains and marshes and into the bay; raccoons cross at low tide a muddy, mussel-covered ground; a silver fox can be seen on a rare night creeping about the bushes. You can even find a mouse swimming when the New or Full moon arrives and the tides fill the marshes flooding them out of burrows. Cicadas, grasshoppers, peepers all sing you awake at night with a noisy chorus that in August continues through the day time. Even the small black ants that have taken up residence in all the condo units here seem to have become part of my day-to-day social group—even if I do intermittently kill them (usually by accident; yes I try to save them; yes I am weird). When I was away and the thought of this ecosystem being unrecognizably changed or more my own place in this system being ended was psychologically devastating to me. Losing my stuff was fine—losing the life around me either through death or loss of my nest was devastating. This is my home.

I am a creature who participates in a very specific ecosystem—so much so the birds don’t mind if Charlotte and I walk by; the egrets don’t fly away; the poplar, twisted will, sedge, crab apple, cherry tree, birch, holly, and aspen trees all seem blow as I walk by as if to say hi. And the majestic Great Blue Heron rises out from behind a rush and passes me a look and bends her head to snap up the a flying silver-glistening fish. And once and a while, I am treated to a Monarch as she flits so close to me I imagine I can hear her wings beat and a humming bird hovers in the air at my porch and a goldfinch darts through a sky of red house finches, chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, and robins. And then there is the new family of fish crows who have moved in and the intrepid squirrel who risks stranding when the tides come in and the road disappears leaving us on Avalon. The thought of not seeing this is heartbreaking. I think we should all love a complete place so much—I think it is as important as loving a person and I think it is an unrecognized aspect of ourselves. We do not know the depth of love we hold within us until we face losing it or are without it.

I wish you had seen it—I would have shown you the trefoils that are half orange and yellow as they fill up my neighbor’s yard in a flash of brilliant color (why would anyone want simply green grass when they could have blazing reds, sunset oranges and yellows, azure skies of the blue violet and the purple nightshade and the smell of honeysuckles on the night air….?)

Tomorrow I get to have the joy of going to the breast cancer center at the local hospital for screening. Hopefully it is quick and they find nothing. I’m sick of people finding things.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 42: Into Body

2011-08-27T16:32:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I am writing this from my hotel room having evacuated early this afternoon. It was a very creepy experience as the town was incredibly quiet and we were one of the last three units to evacuate. I hugged my seahorse tanks before I left and wished them well that they would be okay until we could get back, hopefully, on Monday. I’m optimistic things will be okay.

I wrote a tough note yesterday, which probably comes off a bit harsher than I feel and perhaps even a bit egotistical on my part. But there is a part of me that is very frustrated with where I am and trying to figure out who I have become over the past year. I feel almost foreign to myself—displaced from my normal way of doing and my normal way of feeling. And I find myself thinking about fulfilling needs that I hadn’t really thought about in 12 years and never quite had an opportunity to develop due to my illness. I think one of the most visceral needs is sex. I know I wrote about this earlier. But this seems to be such a dramatic component to my psyche at the moment and I can’t help but wonder if it’s not some made push to reproduce before my fertile days are biologically over without the assistance of a doctor. At the same time I think this is also an element of experiencing myself more fully. It is as if slipping into my body to the depth that sex allows for would enable me to gain a more complete understanding of myself.

Tom is horribly embarrassed when I talk about sex. It has been a surprising discovery between us in the last two months. I hadn’t realized just how restricted he really is when it comes to sex or how open I have actually become or always was really. He feels like he’s encountered an entirely new person—after 12 years of knowing me he’s suddenly discovered something about me that has been at my core, but of which he never bothered to ask. We’ve never talked about sex; it was just something we did intermittently throughout the marriage. I think I’ve probably had more sex with other boyfriends than with Tom. What has been striking over the past few months has been how this element of my marriage was another example of how I have been absent. I don’t have any prudishness at all to me—sometimes to my surprise, but as I slowly slipped into the marriage I took on more and more of Tom’s qualities and becoming increasingly sensitive to how Tom lived and accommodating Tom’s needs at the expense of my own. I think this is why sex and being in my body sexually seems to be so important—it is a statement of my own personness, capacity for and worthiness of pleasure. I think that Tom and I have never had an open relationship when it comes to sex and sexual fantasies is a statement of the distance between us and the imbalance of us. It is also a statement on my own part that I, again, rolled into this relationship despite knowing I really liked and valued sex and that I had always wanted a more permanent relationship where sex was an important aspect and a valuable way of communicating care.

Sometimes I think I’ve read way too many romance novels as a teenager where crafting the sex scenes are the primary function of the books—but are always couched within these passionate love affairs. And yes in all honesty I actually like porn—and while the feminist in my shudders—I think visual arousal is healthy and normal. I think if we were a less sexually prudish society, it would emerge with greater sensitivity to women and become less objectifying and women could participate more freely in it. And I am a huge advocate for masturbation—I think women and men who don’t, should. Not only does it feel good, but it can be liberating in and of itself. If we can touch our own bodies sexually, we’re a lot more comfortable touching another’s. And masturbating with a lover is one of the highly recommended practices by sex therapists—because it intensifies a sense of intimacy, arousal, and teaches one’s lover what you like. But I think too many people get too insecure and bound up in issues of sex-as-bad that you say “masturbation” and everyone feels they need to purge themselves of some mortal sin. I clearly lack that hierophantic self-castigation. And Tom has recently learned, I think because of the divorce I feel like I can assert myself and my own beingness, all these nuanced elements I never shared because for him sex was so anxiety provoking, which is tragic in all honesty. But this is an element of me that even has him struggling to absorb. He’s usually an enormous advocate for my “bigness” but the sexual interest unnerves him. And I think it would probably unnerve a lot of men and women. And I think this too contributes to my sense of being a bit “too” big and very liberated—contributing to my overall abundance of Katieness. At the same time, not to toot my own horn, but I am a damn good lover precisely because sex is part of my abundance.

All of this babbling today is really my own ongoing recognition of coming into center. I think my assertion of my sexuality and interest is really about coming into body. It is about feeling better about myself and recognizing that my body itself is a vehicle for pleasure. My body has been for too many years now a vehicle for pain and still is at times—I am never in a position where I don’t “know” I have an illness. When I consider my reemerging sexuality, it is an affirmation that I can feel good in this space. Not only can I feel good psychologically as I continue to reshape the patterns of my negative thinking, but I can also feel good physically. And when I think of my own sexual openness I think that it further affirms how I am changing for the better and becoming a more complete human being.

And of course I do try to remind myself not to think lewd thoughts about the real you, but sorry, I really do find you damn sexy and have for months. That itself is kind of wild since I think you’re the first man I’ve met in years that I actually find so entirely arousing. It is as if you have hit the “alive” button at the very core of my being that had been in the off-position for years and years. It is as if I became a bigger person since I met you in ways I was just so unprepared for. So I hope that if the real you reads this you take it for a compliment if the feelings are not mutual; if the feelings are mutual—you really need to stop being an idiot, I am divorced. But in the end it is more about feeling like a fully embodied woman—a woman who can “be” big and fully alive: who can have passion and desire and want to be on top, so to speak, while at the same time being a woman who can fully participate in the relationships around her, rather than being submissive or passive.

Hope you stay safe tonight.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 41: You Are Not Fishboy

2011-08-26T18:57:00.005-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I’m not quite sure if the real you was at the store today, but if you were then I’m sure you either knew I was coming or overheard me talking to P, G, and M. And you would have seen P getting plants. And you would have also seen that I kept to what I said in my letter—I would not bother you if there was an emergency and would do what I could to talk with everyone else. If you’ve learned nothing about me over the past year, you should at least know one thing, even if you misunderstand the rest of me, I stick to what I say. It is sad to see where this has ultimately derailed to that, if you were there, you feel you have to avoid me for fear of what I’m not sure. In all truth, today I came in because my seahorses and turtles are at very real risk for harm with the hurricane—and, while I mean no offence, you were the least of my worries.

It is sad that everything has landed here. I am not sure if this is what would have happened simply because of Tom or if this has all happened because of the book. I will say that I am no longer going to apologize or wish I could undo the latter. Like keeping my promises to do my best to at least make you less anxious at your job wondering when the “Katie-Monster” will appear, I mean what I say and I am an honest and open person. What I wrote in that book, I meant and I would not change what I wrote and in all truth I probably would still have given it to you. I am tired of apologizing for caring. I am also tired of apologizing for Tom as if this had all been my fault.

I don’t know what “this” part of you is or what thoughts or feelings have filled your head about me that has dictated your actions. And while the psychologist in me has a range of suspicions as to the “whats,” I’m really tired of unraveling the inner depths of another person as my marriage was defined by this. Instead, I simply accept that you are gone. And I am not going to try to argue with this part of you to talk with me again. Not meaning to be offensive, but I’m really tired of trying to argue my worth to others. I’ve done that too many times in my life that I’ve lost most of my dignity—and I will not do that for another man. And while I had thought you actually cared for me (either that or you are a superb liar), I accept that if this was in fact true you no longer feel this way for me now. And it’s okay. I wish it were otherwise. But it’s okay.

The you who you are now is a stranger to me. This is a you I don’t know. So next time I come in, you really don’t have to hide, because this is not the man of my blogs or my books or my CD. If how you are now is the way you remain, you are not my Fishboy; you are not the man I fell in love with—you are a stranger to me. And it’s just very sad. Not only because you will live your life remembering the awfulness and bizarreness of me, but also because you really would have loved me and you let go of my hand and receded back into your turbulent and I think very isolated depths. But you really would have loved me, of that I am very certain.

However, you do need to know that I am choosing to remember you when you were kind to me and seemed to enjoy my presence and as the person who happily talked to me about films and my turtles and seahorses. I am not defining my moments with you by the mess that happened beginning with Tom—even if you define me by these. Despite this awfulness and your absence and my embarrassment, you were still the person whom I walked to. And that will never change. In the you who you are now dwells my Fishboy.

I hope you stay safe through the weekend. I will be evacuating as per required by my town. And I will hope my seahorses make it through the storm.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 40: Only Me

2011-08-24T19:41:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

As you know far too well and too intimately now, music is really how I express myself and how I think I integrate the experiences of my life. One of my favorite songs of the last few years has been Alanis Morissette’s “Not as We”. I think it speaks for itself that I don’t really need to do much elaboration. I figure eventually I will make it through my life—at some point I will be able to feel like I understand how to live in this world. My marriage is over—it’s been over for so long now even this ending seems to be a non-event for me. And yet in the coming weeks I will be alone and I am somehow different than who I was years ago. I don’t know who I am now outside of knowing that I will take one step after another as I have always done. While I feel that there is a new road before me and that it could be good—I am anxious—and I can’t help but wonder at the symbolism of my eyes clouding over and whether I will ever be able to “see” my life clearly. Or perhaps the obscured vision may be exactly what brings a better life to me.

When I think back to you—there is an image that I always have that I have even said to Tom as I’ve stared forlornly into my seahorse tank with my hand floating in the water, that you are the boy who saw the world as I did. You are the boy from the ocean and I am the girl standing at the water’s edge. I said to Tom you are simply the person who seemed to reach to a part of me that had long been silenced in my life—who had tucked herself up into the skeletal remains of a seahorse, waiting for someone to find her again. And perhaps this was all that was meant to be for me—a kind of reawakening or rebirth of a part of me that had been patiently and I think sadly waiting. I liked that part of me that emerged—there was an innocence to me that I really have never felt; there was a gentleness and simplicity that came through. And it opened a floodgate within me of other positive aspects, even as it left me vulnerable and probably a bit stupid for not anticipating Tom and not recognizing any signals you may have made that showed you were uncomfortable with me. It was as if this part of me was so relieved to breathe again, nothing else was visible. And you were the boy and I was the girl.

Sometimes what I find most sad, outside of the fact you are gone and the spell is broken so to speak, but that I didn’t bring anything good to you. And while I have moments of narcissism (like in the other blog tonight) where I think you just let the most incredible woman you will ever meet walk out the door—they don’t last long. It’s not that I feel some horribleness about myself; rather I just simply regret that the girl you saved did nothing for you in return. And at the same time I find I am so sad sometimes that there is no “we.” I suppose we often create in the reality we hope to live and sometimes this reality becomes so much more tangible than the place where we are that it takes on a realness at the exclusion of the real life around us. And so in my created reality, my fairytale I suppose, you were the magical boy from the sea and I was the seashore girl and we smiled. In my head, there was a “we”; in reality there was perhaps ever only just me.

Find more Alanis Morissette songs at Myspace Music

Reborn and shivering
Spat out on new terrain

Unsure unconvincing
This faint and shaky hour

Day one day one start over again
Step one step one
I'm barely making sense for now
I'm faking it 'til I'm pseudo making it
From scratch begin again but this time I as i
And not as we

Gun shy and quivering
Timid without a hand

Feign brave with steel intent
little and hardly here

Day one day one start over again
Step one step one
with not much making sense just yet
I'm faking it til I'm pseudo making it
From scratch begin again but this time I as i
And not as we

Eyes wet toward
Wide open frayed
If God's taking bets
I pray He wants to lose

Day one day one start over again
Step one step one
I'm barely making sense just yet
I'm faking it til I'm pseudo making it
From scratch begin again but this time I as I
And not as we

Letter 39: Though You Are Gone

2011-08-23T00:23:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

It’s really a double-blog night since I’m still awake and haven’t said goodbye to the 22nd yet and probably should since I have to get up early tomorrow to clean the house, walk the paperwork down to the post office and be back here for the housing inspection by the town—it’s really just a visit to make sure you have a smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector, which we do and which I hate because my shower steam sends it squealing and I’m too short and don’t have any chairs to stand on in the house to turn the damn thing off, so I end up resorting to a broom and whacking it off the wall. How it has managed to function I’ll never know. Anyway, so I should really be in bed.

I’m reentering singledom. It’s strange because it’s hard to fathom being in another relationship. As I thought about this tonight it really occurred to me that I don’t know if I want a traditional relationship—that relationship that follows dinner, movies, first kisses at front doors, overnights, sex, moving in, marriage, coordinating finances, cooking dinner, having babies, raising kids, talking about work, talking about work, talking about work. It seems that the bulk of conversations we have in relationships comes down to talking about work and generalities of what friends said on facebook or email these days. I had that for 12 years. I suppose I might feel different had I had a child or children in my marriage—I certainly would be rethinking divorce and it would be far more complicated than it has been. But I don’t want this. I don’t want coordinating finances. I don’t want mundane conversations. I don’t want to experience another person as routine. Of course some of this is inevitable, but I don’t know why this is what we fall into. Why do we suddenly find ourselves swimming in the pool of predictable, staid relationships where sex is booked in and routinized—or outright forgotten; where conversations become so culture-bound we lose our whimsy, imagination, and impossible thinking? When does dinner start to fall at a specific time in the day that everyone must corral around because “daddy’s” home so to speak? Why do we fall into a heap of exhaustion in our beds at 10 or 11 pm; peck our partner on the cheek, roll over and try to go to sleep if we could only stop our heads from rummaging through the day and mistakes made or anxiety about what tomorrow might bring? It is as if a low-level depression suddenly subsumes our relationships and we experience brief moments of joy, but more often we explode in conflicts because that’s good—it means there are some feelings there and let’s face it anger is at least better than “nothing” or those numbly voiced “I love you”s. I don’t want that.

I want a relationship where making love is better than watching television or simply takes over from watching television, because sex is simply that damn good; that making love is about consuming the other person because you not only want them to touch and lick you, but you can’t think of anything else but to lick, smell, bite, suck every inch of their body (I know graphic, sorry) and there is nothing in the world that feels that incredible. I want a relationship where dinner is any damn time you’re hungry even if it’s 2 am. I want a relationship where there is independence as much as there is shared time. I want a relationship where kisses are always first kisses and where “I love you” actually means an incredible non-definable gift that leaves one speechless when you try to articulate it—it just is. It is also a relationship that feels free. It is unconfined and you can be the whole of you rather than pieces of you. It’s probably just idealization after a tragic marriage. But I don’t want what I have had and since I am an utterly out-of-the-box person I suppose what I want is possible.

But you are gone. The real you may be reading these for reasons I can’t understand, but I know you are gone so you are not the person I will experience this with as I had hoped. And yes I really hoped you would have been here when Tom and I were over. And in all honesty it’s sad that the two people I have felt an indescribable love for are gone. But, if you read my CHZ blog for tonight, I am heading back to the train station where I will wait again. This time I will sit and wait until I feel that indescribable feeling and a desire its consummation. And if it means I die sitting on the bench waiting than it’s okay by me, because I do not want what I have had these past 12 years and I would rather have nothing at all.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 38: Divorce Papers Are Signed

2011-08-22T19:32:00.000-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Tom has officially signed all divorce papers and they have all been notarized. As of tomorrow morning when I go and overnight them, that’s it. Then comes getting him out of the house—another delicate project. Right now he’s depressed and if he stays that way for more than tonight he’s going to find himself out of the house a lot quicker then he might like and he’ll just have to settle with whatever he finds.

I am a free woman—stranded and carless, but free nonetheless. The thought of actually having functional, sexually fulfilling relationship (sex is on my brain—maybe it’s just reaching my sexual peek, I have no idea but sex is definitely a blaring need—I think when I was sick it was just too damn long without it and I really like it) just boggles my mind that I had long-since given up on this. I knew in the first year I was married that I wanted a divorce but was so afraid people would think I failed and would harbor some kind of judgment so I stayed and stayed and stayed, because if you’re married you’re supposed to simply tough it out and keep trucking even if all the parts of the truck have come off. You’re supposed to stay even if you no longer love the person; you’re don’t want the person; and if the person treats you like general crap. I do have to admit, while Tom is depressed tonight, he has taken all of this well and has been honest enough to recognize that I need something and someone different.

As I walked Charlotte tonight, who was in a stubborn mood and nearly strangled herself on her leash attempting to eat a black cat, I had the first glimmer of real excitement about the possibilities to come. I had for a moment the thought of all the movies I could never see because they bothered Tom. I thought of being able to have sex somewhere else other then my bed and in a position other then missionary and fantasies that I’d love to have a chance at fulfilling—but all of this has over the years just freaked Tom out because an element of prudishness has settled over Tom. I’ve wanted to go whale watching for years, but he’s afraid of being in open water. I think of all the television shows I want to watch and have had to settle for sporadically watching them on Netflix because Tom finds them stupid, offensive, disruptive to his sleep, or simply boring. I think about all the music I will soon be able to listen to and all the CDs lost years ago to cover debts when he refused to leave his room and get a job. I’m looking forward to creating my own noise. I’ve been living in the silence of my own voice and interests in my house. There are suddenly so many possibilities that before I was married I took for granted.

I am sorry that this didn’t happen in December. I hazard a guess, you might have asked me to a spooky movie had things happened when they were supposed to and had not derailed into the land of Tom’s craziness and my own stupidity. And maybe I would have even been able to actually smell your skin…see sex it’s on the brain. It’s nuts. I keep thinking one of my medications must be some kind of female Viagra or something or my brain damage is wreaking havoc with my hormones. Anyway, suffice it to say it’s officially, officially over. I am a free woman.

I am an officially free woman.

I hope you are doing well.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 37: Sex & Honesty

2011-08-16T15:56:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I’m serving Tom with divorce papers tomorrow night. I wanted to do it today, but I have to go get ink for my stupid printer to print out all the additional forms he has to complete—11 pages—so that everything is mailed in at once—this way it’s less likely for them to lose the paperwork. And I’ve learned I have to send in an additional two papers in including one that has to be notarized. But all in all it will be complete by Friday.

I have mixed feelings about this largely because he’s been kind and I am angry that I can’t simply believe he’s being kind because he really wants our marriage to work and not that he simply doesn’t want to lose free housing and whatever need I fulfill for him. I really had hoped I could have returned to my marriage because it is familiar and he is family and he is here when no one else is and when no one else has really ever been. At the same time I am looking forward to not being a wife. I really don’t think I did this very well to begin with and in all truth, shortly before dating Tom, I had told him and one of my clinical supervisors one day in the treatment program I worked in that I didn’t think I’d ever marry. Both of them looked at me surprised and said of course I would. I shook my head and said that I was just not marriageable material. Of course 6 months later Tom and I were married. I sometimes wonder if I said yes because I so desperately wanted someone to want me enough to agree to spend the rest of their lives with me. It’s really never good to make decisions from a perspective of (a) no inherent worth or value and (b) trying to somehow undo the past through a present relationship. I have never felt loved as a child and it was obvious as I entered adulthood and relationship after relationship fell apart that I really didn’t think I’d be loved as an adult. And when Tom popped around and liked all my eccentricities and he and I got along well and he made me laugh I just thought that this would somehow make everything within me better. In some ways it has made me better, but in other ways I feel more damaged.

Tom said to me yesterday as he listened to the current cuts of My Inner Fish that I really shouldn’t believe that you or Jeff or himself are better than me. He said to me that I am always looking back at others or him as if I am of so little value and so undeserving of being loved or even being sincerely liked precisely because of who I am. I said to him I didn’t think that way entirely. There are moments when I think I am incredible because of my uniqueness and that you or Jeff or Tom have all missed out on someone who is just downright incredible and irreplaceable. It doesn’t last long though. I don’t know if I feel it is too egotistical to think I am so damn good that you’d be stupid not to want me or if I ultimately succumb to feeling so crappy about my difference that I think of course you don’t want me, who would? I am overwhelming. Tom has tried over the years to encourage my difference and uniqueness and instill in me a sense of pride in it, even as he has eroded me in other ways. It’s hard to believe what he says simply because he has also said I contribute so little, I’m disengaged, I’m cruel, I’m distant, I’m not good enough and so on and so forth. I’d like to think of myself as someone who is so damn good that you or him or any of the other guys I’ve dated over the years who’ve left are fundamentally stupid. But I don’t—the truth is you, Tom or any of the other guys I’ve dated are not stupid. Each of you has expressed what you want and it’s not me and in all honesty, while painful to me, it’s also okay. I try not to let it equate to I am a fundamentally bad or unlovable person. I think that is the challenge.

I’ve said to Tom and to my mother earlier that if everyone leaves or doesn’t really like you doesn’t that mean there is something fundamentally wrong about you? Of course my mother would say “nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I’m going to go eat worms” and tell me that I don’t need everyone to like me—of course then she’d lament at another point in time that if only I could look like others or if only I could be a cheerleader, if only… Tom just gets angry that I value the opinions of others over developing my own sense of pride, but I always tell him that he has no need of people at all. He doesn’t like people and has never felt a need to “fit in”. He’s never felt a need to be loved. He has no qualms about cutting someone out of his life if they don’t agree with his ideas or opinions. I’d just as soon contort myself just to stay in someone’s life. Well at least up until recently. I suppose leaving my marriage is a semblance of a statement of rejecting my contortionist talents. But I still find myself thinking that if at the end of the day I am alone or just with Tom what does that say about me?

I know that I am attractive and sexy (I finally feel this way again now that I am back to my pre-illness body, which you haven’t seen and you really should see me in this little black sleeveless dress I have if you thought I was attractive before and yes, I’ve seen you scoping out the breasts, you weren’t very subtle about this). I was fortunate that by the time I got to college I at least started to recognize that on the surface I look touchable and datable and desirable. And indeed I’m actually a really great girlfriend if sex is important. I make Tom blush all shades of colors simply because I’m generally open that I really like sex and am happy to explore all kinds of kinky things. I think sex is one of the most important components of a romantic relationship and I’ve never felt that sex on the first date is wrong if two people are attracted to each other—but it has to be mutual attraction; guys reading “no means no” (it doesn’t mean anything else and if the girl you’re dating seems to be sending you mixed signals, ask her to communicate better, but err on the side of respecting her boundaries it says a lot more positive things abot you and will force her to express herself more honestly). And I have to admit to you that had you made a move, I’m fairly certain any shred of morality I may have that I was married would have gone by the wayside rapidly and I’d have happily made love with you anywhere and at anytime; hell I would have had sex with you at your job; which is an element of you that has surprised me. And I can only say is you simply felt “more right” than my marriage and Tom. And I really mean “you” felt more morally right—it always felt like I belonged with you and not with Tom as crazy as that probably sounds. Hell not too long ago, Tom and I had sex and he said to me "I feel like someone else should be lying on top of you, not me" and he meant you. I probably shouldn’t be writing about sex in a blog and should add the disclaimer to all male readers: Do not email me looking for a date. Do not post a comment asking for a date; I will delete it and mark you as SPAM. I don’t do online dating. I never date strangers. I don’t date for sex. I’m really picky about who I actually like and have actually only liked a literal handful of men. I don’t have sex for the sake of slaking some unmet need.

The point behind this derailment is that while I accept that I am generally attractive and that I am definitely sexy, I still don’t feel I am “relationship” material. I don’t feel that I am loveable. I feel like there is something about me that is overwhelming and too much. Interestingly I’ve also learned over the years that even my comfort with sex is a bit overwhelming I think. I’ve learned that men seem to have a lot of hang-ups about sex and it just isn’t women despite the general depiction that women are either “whores” or so angelic they can’t possible engage in things like oral sex or move beyond the passive, missionary style position. We are a very prudish society to our own detriment. All of which is a rather sad testament to our society since sex is the one thing Nature has blessed us with that can actually make human relationships better and more solid. Anyway, another digression, suffice it to say I struggle with seeing the whole of me is worth committing to. Of course I’ve been in a committed marriage for just about 12 years and it’s been just that. Tom and I have been devoted to each other and faithful. There was never anyone else in our dynamic. He and I were lovers and he and I were best friends and he and I were family. You popped along and suddenly he and I were a fractured fairytale. Things about us that didn’t work that were denied frequently were suddenly visible in your own counterpoint to him and me and in my own sheer crazy attraction for you. Tom and I had a comfortable relationship where even the bad times and his temper seemed to flow into a normalcy. We had a comfortable sex life although it lost a lot of luster when I got sick to my own dismay and sex became dominated by fears of pregnancy and injury. But I liked Tom—we were physically comfortable with each other and it always felt safe and secure and his smell always reminded me of a comfortable security blanket. Then you arrived and as I’ve written before, my heart literally raced as the last year progressed. You smelled incredible and I suddenly understood what people meant when they described attraction as a kind of desire to consume the other person; in fact all elements of sex suddenly seemed to make perfect sense rather than just functional sense to feel pleasure. I could also readily see why some religions elevated sex to a state of spiritual enlightenment while others demoted it to base functions and something to be disengaged from (which is just downright awful). It is a feeling of not being in full control and where the rational mind seems to take a vacation, while at the same time it is an incredible feeling to simply want to be naked with another person versus comfortable being naked. There is this feeling that clothing is an irritant, distraction, and barrier that must be shed. Tom and I don’t have that really—I think we had it early on in our marriage. We were a lot more passionate then, but we also hadn’t had all of the really horrific experiences ranging from the kinds of domestic abuse that emerged to my health. I think though it all started to crash when we learned I was pregnant (Tom would never wear condoms and I am unable to take the birth control pill—rhythm method works to some degree but once and a while it misses). That was the boulder that got flung into the pool of our wedded bliss. He didn’t want a child and felt I had somehow created one on my own. I didn’t really want one but got incredibly excited at the idea. He yelled and threw things; and I miscarried. After that our relationship turned in a direction where I think in the end where we are now was really where we should have been 11 years ago. I still find it mind-boggling to think I could have had an 11-year-old child at this point in my life.

Sometimes I wish life were just a bit easier. I also wish people were a bit more open and transparent. If the real you has been reading these blogs you have the distinct advantage of knowing everything about me; while you remain by and large a mystery to me (And of course, if you are reading these blogs then I can’t help by wonder why when you are gone). I don’t mind being transparent. I think it helps me grow as a person as much as it helps others understand me. We play too many games in life weighing what to disclose, what not to disclose; when to share, when not to share. We carve up ourselves so that we constantly fit into whatever social situation we’re in and we never bring the fullness of ourselves to the table. Maybe it’s because we want to rope more people into our lives and be more readily liked. We want mystery to manipulate another person to get to know us. I really don’t live like that, nor do I want to. I really don’t want someone who looks at me as a curio object—who is attracted to me not by what I do share, but by what remains unshared. It seems like one is setting oneself up for disappointment, after all how much editing are we always doing just to keep that other person curious about us and to assure ourselves they remain liking us. I don’t believe in standing on shifting sand just so that I can be loved or liked. I also don’t believe our damaged elements should be “surprises” down the line.

It’s something I learned in my marriage the hard way. Tom seemed nice, funny, caring (he is these things), but the rest of his life was “normal”. He had no family problems, prior marriage was “fine”. Tom shared his life from the perspective of ‘I want you to think everything has been nice and normal.’ But he lied—both through non-disclosure and through reshaping the narrative of his life. And I paid the price. As our marriage unfolded, he started to disclose a horrifically abusive childhood, a prior marriage pock-marked with violence, adulthood traumas, a dysfunctional relationship with his sibling, a violent temper, a history of alcohol abuse, and on and on.

I don’t want to be lied to and I don’t want the person I like or love to edit out the elements of his life he feels are shameful, bad, dark and twisty. I want to be able to choose to love the person that includes the whole of his experiences. And I know that had I known about Tom’s past I would not have loved him less, but I would have been able to anticipate some of the challenges that emerged in our marriage. In short, had he been honest from the beginning as I had been we may not be divorcing now and I would not have been positioned into a role of a victim once more in my life.

I suppose this is one of the elements about you that I did like—if you were in a pissy mood, you were in a pissy mood; there was no hiding it and no use of social skills to try to present in some other way. You also shared some elements of your life history you were embarrassed about and ashamed of. While the deeper narratives of your childhood and family are unknown to me—there is enough about you that has suggested you are just as fucked up as I am. I know I really shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. You are not perfect, nor did you try to be. You are moody and at times irascible—a grouch really. You have anxiety and a temper even if you don’t really like yelling at people. You don’t get loud when you’re angry, although I suspect this happens if pushed to a limit. You also don’t blame others when you are angry. You oddly use “I statements” although I don’t know if you realize you do this. You have a tendency to walk away to avoid conflicts and you have a fairly good amount of resentment. You do not present yourself as someone who has lived a perfect, fully satisfying life and more often than not you present with more depression than anything else. While I suppose others may find your prickly nature disconcerting and may even tend to avoid you, I actually like it. It was honest for where you are/were in the moment. That’s not something most people can be. And I was fortunate to also see other elements of you where compassion, gentleness, happiness, and kindness were dominant. Where you expressed a dedication to your friends, a sense of quiet humor, concern for me, excitement for what you enjoyed, and an abiding care for the creatures you look after. You have a physical grace you probably are unaware of and an inherent sexiness with this—very primal really. In short, I’m fairly certain I got to see a bigger picture of you then what most people get when they suddenly find themselves “liking” someone in all of the well-rehearsed dates that ultimately lead up to living with each other and/or marriage. And it was the whole of you that I liked. And you are perfect as you are.

I think we do need to bring our full selves to the table in our social relationships. It may mean having fewer relationships, but I think fewer relationships with people who know us better is better than lots of superficial ones where we are always trying to “be” the way we “think” the other person wants—where we try to be more normal then normal. So this blog is just me being “me”. One more element of self-disclosure in the grand scheme of laying myself bare—there is something liberating in laying oneself bare and it counteracts the anxious self-esteem that argues I am not good enough. You are good enough as you are; I am good enough as I am. I may not always think I am lovable and will ever be actually loved, but at least I have the confidence to say who I am without editing. I don’t think I really want to be loved if the whole of me is not loved. I do not want to change and twist myself any more than I have.

Well that is my blog for today. We’ll see how long I leave it up before the anxiety of its explicitness undermines me.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 36: Into Silence, Making Music

2011-08-14T23:28:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

This is the week I serve Tom the divorce papers. I’m aiming for Tuesday; I didn’t think it would be so hard. I think what I fear the most is being alone, even though I like being alone. Tom is present—always present. Even when he’s a jerk, he’s simply there. He’s always been there it seems. In some ways I think he is the whole of my family I never had and the elements of my family I did have. He loves me with a dedication that I’ve never experienced, while at the same time he loves me with a certain degree of disgust and disappointment. It’s familiar, sad, but familiar. I have moments when I think “what am I doing?” But at the same time, I can’t seem to stick my head back in the sand and say “everything is okay.” I don’t want Tom to be the only experience of being romantically loved I have in my life. I want something different; I want to live what I feel when I write my poems or music.

I don’t know what that will entail ultimately. Tom has been the only one who has remained—where everyone else has looked at what I do and run for the hills, Tom has embraced it. He’s encouraged it even though there are moments when he’s jealous. He’s listened to every piece of music I’ve written; he’s sat while I read him every poem out of Into Quiet or other books (not Love Amongst the Fishes or Turning the Silver Wheel). He’s listened to research articles and my political rants. And in some ways I want to love him with as much fervor as he has shown, but I don’t. And I admit I feel like a failure at the whole relationship thing. Sometimes I really do believe the marriage has failed in a large part due to my absenteeism. I know that’s taking more responsibility than perhaps I should. But there has always been a part of me removed from the relationship—sitting over there and outside holding on to this belief that this is not where I should be and he is not who should be loving me.

I want what I write about. It’s a crazy kind of love I suppose. It’s something different then what most people look for, but that’s just me. I know I’d drop everything for you or for Jeff. I’d let go of everything I do and everything I have (except Charlotte and the other creatures). It is a kind of stripping bare that is even more than what I wrote in Love Amongst the Fishes. It is a kind of willingness to let go of the “stuff” collected in life and held up around oneself to show or more so hide from the world. It means so little to me. People dream of careers or children and I dream of a “love that time would lay down and be still for.” Maybe I read too many romance novels over the years. I’ve been told that what I want is impossible; but then I tend to follow the Alice in Wonderland view of life—life is far more interesting when impossibilities are what are sought. Why waste energy with normalcy?

But in the end I have no idea if I can love as I wish or even be in a relationship at this point in my life, if ever. There are moments when I think I am so damaged that I am ultimately beyond repair and can only tell others what not to do. I can tell friends with children what not to do so as to keep their child healthy—I can say what I didn’t have. I can tell them to give their children opportunities to socialize in their lives and encourage them to feel they are “good” as they are; that they are “good enough.” I never feel good enough—there is always something lacking in me and it leads me to feel like I am falling behind everyone else. While others have moved forward in their lives, I remain behind feeling entirely unfamiliar with the territories that define their lives. I fill up my world with my music. It pours out of me—my voice that spends so much time these days silent. Ever since I had my first stroke, I have slipped into silences. For years while I was having active symptoms, I never knew when I was having a problem simply because there was no one to talk to. When Tom did come home and ask me a question, my words would emerge slurred, garbled and incorrect. He’d ask why didn’t I know I was having a problem. I’d slur out that in my head I am fine. In my head I am fine.

It is where I talk to you. It is where I talk to some part of me that is still trying in this world. Still trying to find that moment where she can say “Yes, this is my life and where I fit.” It is the part of me that spills out these letters and sits writing music. It is where I spend most of my time. And when I do see people, I feel as if everything about me is so big, bumbling, and wrong. I babble incessantly at times—desperate to spill out as much content of my head as possible before I slink back to my isolation and the silence. When Tom leaves, there will be only silence in my house. I don’t know if I am prepared for the silence. At the same time, I often think I am safest in the silence. It is a place where I never feel rejected. I don’t feel anxious. I feel a wide, open space that opens up and I can finally breathe.

Yet even in my discouragement of my life; in its solitude and silence; and in my own retreat into my inner world where I rarely speak at all, I count myself fortunate that I have been in love. I suppose that is perhaps a nearly unimaginable feat for a girl who spends the bulk of her time alone. I doubt I did it the “right” way—and no doubt anyone looking at my life would probably question what I felt and also look at just how horribly things fell apart both times. But in all truth I fell in love with you and I loved Jeff. And if someone asked me why—it would be little things, simple things. It would be uncomplicated moments, silences, and soft-spoken voices and patience. It would be a sense of not having to “be” on stage and perform some kind of therapeutic magic act or have to fill up time and space with so many words that I lose track of myself. It would be the simplicity of Pachelbel’s Canon or the serenity of a seahorse. It would be the calm; the quiet. It would be a moment where the “weird” girl is “normal” for a change. And I would leave everything in my life for all of that. It may make no sense to others, but then I’ve rarely made sense to most people. I consider the fact that I have been able to actually fall in love with two human beings to be a miraculous occurrence in my life. It gives me a sense of hope that perhaps I have not retreated so deeply within myself that “I am gone, though I am here” (to quote Shakespeare).

I will never love like others. And I suppose most individuals want to love in such a way that it supports the dream of a normal life. I will never be that dream. I can’t even fathom someone actually wishing for a person like me; I don’t think anyone can imagine someone like me period. I simply can’t fathom being the person someone else dreams about and comes along and falls in love with. That Tom fell in love with me baffles me. He doesn’t know why. If you ask him, he can’t tell you why he loves me, he just does—a kind of generic “all the things you do.”

But all in all, I may never be loved by a person I fall in love with. Timing in life is everything. And while it is the one dream that I actually have; I will trudge forward in my life as I have always done without it. I will take my moments I have had with two men I have loved and they will be enough. And I will walk into my silence and make music.

Sorry I’m babbling tonight. I think I’m tired. I have to rework the song “Love Pouring Out”—I don’t like it yet. But I do love “Son of Arianrhod”—it is about you. It is what I see and love in you. Hopefully you are doing well.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 35: Son of Arianrhod

2011-08-12T23:10:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Welsh myth holds that the goddess Arianrhod spins the fates of all of us, turning her great spinning wheel in the sky. I don’t know if I believe in fate—there are moments when it seems like something other then me is moving my life about in some generic great round of spinning upwards and down. And halfway through the round are these nebulous states of half-way between good and bad. I suppose these moments are the comfortable ones where life takes on a shade of gray and everything is simply okay. And then there is this moment when the wheel, like spinning a game wheel at a summer fair, spins so fast upward that you are suddenly seeing the world in bright colors and it feels as if you are awake and seeing a full moon and a sky full of stars and endless possibilities. It is a moment of breathlessness and awe. You suddenly have a sense that you are alive. There’s no rhyme or reason as to what suddenly awakens you—it seems as if you had no role in it whatsoever. Just suddenly there you are. You feel a kind of liberation in the joyfulness of the rising of the silver spinning wheel and the stars that spill from it.

There is, I think, something of beauty to each of us. While life spins us around in our experiences of grayness, color, and absence; pain, joy, and acceptance—there is something beautiful in each of us that spills out like the stars. I don’t think we always see this. We are so deeply caught up in the physicality of appearance that we struggle to see what is within us—the substance of the star. I know for myself, I often dwell on what is wrong with me and fail to celebrate what is beautiful in me. As I’ve gone back to my music and writing I see this more clearly. As I walked this morning around town listening to premastered copies of the my newest compositions I hear two things. The first is my spinning of the wheel upward—there is sadness in the work, but the work itself is mine and me. It is my authenticity and myself stripped down into bareness. This is who I have always been—through all the traumas, losses, missteps, and downward spirals of the wheel—my starry nature has always been this. And I hear it and I can say that it is beautiful. And as I walked today I thought that perhaps my uniqueness is actually what ultimately makes me beautiful—my book of poetry I wrote for you and the albums they are me, absolutely stripped bare expressions, and they are beautiful. You may see that too late.

At the same time, it is not simply my spinning of the wheel that emerges in these projects it is also yours. For whatever the reasons were you and I collided in the universe. How you experienced me or what you have walked away with I cannot say. But you fell into the center of my star and I have been spinning you outward since. Today I wrote the piece “The Son of Arianrhod.” This is you—how I sense you; how I feel you; what I see. It is the you who 6 days a week quietly slips into the routine of cleaning fish tanks. I think what is starry-like about us emerges in so many different ways. For me it is my music—although I think many would say it is my smile and perhaps that is it as well. But for you it is you and the water. There is a perfect comingling between you and the sea. And as I wrote the piece and listened to it (and continue to listen to it), I see you pulling out one of the salt water fish who is sick and only you would notice this—you have a sixth sense about them. But you catch him and he flicks his tail throwing up a stream of water at you. You turn away just as you are splashed and quickly move him to a medical bucket. In my mind the moment is slow motion—there was within it an incredible linkage between you and fish, you and water. And it was beautiful. You may never see that. But that is your starry nature. There is a sadness to you—that downward fall of your wheel and whatever experiences it has brought you (no doubt I’ve tumbled you back down) and then I see you with the fish and there you are. Stripped bare of the edges you pull over yourself as you go about your day and as you engage with others. You are the man who saves a Rosie when it has fallen to the floor—a poor little fish who will become food for bigger fish or reptiles. But you saved it nonetheless to “give it one more day.” When you work the wheel turns for you, it slips slowly upward—never far, work is too intruded upon by others. But it is there—that beautiful starry self; who you were before everything wore you down. That is the song “Son of Arianrhod”—and perhaps if you hear it one day it might just remind you of what is beautiful about you.

Or you could just think I’m crazy. I suppose that’s okay too.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 34: My Inner Fish, Part II

2011-08-11T22:35:00.005-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

So it definitely appears the next album (playing if you have your speakers on) will be dominated by the cello; perhaps it is my voice on this album. Although my own voice will make a sneak peek—it isn’t perfect yet for a full-length vocal release; I’m still trying to rehabilitate my right vocal cord. It poops out after one song. It’s a bit discouraging but in all truth it could be worse unless all of this is a prelude to Parkinson’s. Then it can’t get much worse than that. But I try not to think about the looming diseases that may ultimately find their place on my emergency medical information sheet.

Anyway, I am in a much better mood today. I think working on “Gone & I Remain” until early this morning was good for me. In all honesty it’s my musical take on our April 22nd conversation. The musical piece begins with our dialogue (expressed in sound of course) followed by my own post-discussion reflection while I drove home that day. I was miserable you know. And if I were a different person rather than someone who seems to take personal responsibility for everything, I’d have kicked the shit out of Tom. Sometimes I wish I was that kind of person who could scream and kick the shit out of things. Instead I have cellos, clarinets, pianos and a recorder that is running around in my place somewhere. I want a violin and actually had one until I tuned it wrong and snapped it. I returned it. A good thing since I really can’t play it with my tremors these days. I want my flute back though—may have to break down and purchase one again if I ever have the money. I have instruments. I dream symphonies. And I used to think if only I could have some sweeping musical score under everything I did so that people would understand where I was coming from and what I feel since I am utterly pitiful at expressing this. But then I’d also like a printer attached to my head so that everyone would be able to have a print out of what the heck I’m thinking so that people could understand. It would be nice if communicating my feelings could be as easily scored as a melody. If I could designate a cello for my grief; an oboe for longing; a piano for love; a glockenspiel for whimsy; a rousing string section to augment the kind of grief that happens with love; and a snare drum for fury or the cello in a squeaky harsh accented structure.

My Inner Fish is an album of longing I think. Chasing Zebras was an expression of love—a kind of uninhibited abundance. When I listen to it I am struck by how textured it is and just how much love is expressed in it. There are moments when my rational self looks back over the months—the year in fact and thinks it was utterly impossible that I could have fallen in love with a man who barely says a word to anyone unless absolutely required. And then I hear it—in the simplicity of “Love & Trembling.” And I read it in Love Amongst the Fishes, which is meant to be read aloud (I’ve toyed with the idea of making an audio book, but I can’t get through the last five poems without breaking down). And now there is this album. It is something different—quieter, sadder. I think it is more about me than you; although you are the figure it revolves around—I the cello wrapping around the piano in most instances; transforming you into my “inner” fish rather than the man who dwelt outside of me.

I am so baffled by you. You are disruption to my life. I was trucking along just fine—well I had accepted my circumstances and like most elements of my life trudged forward thinking this was all I would ever have. And then suddenly you were in my life. I didn’t think much about you at all in the beginning. I have to be honest. You were really a footnote when I first met you. Someone who felt like he was slipping closer but was still on the outside of my life—I thought it was similarity; the familiarity of coming from my hometown; a kind of tribal recognition. But you became.

Some of the pieces on this album are about your becoming and my emotional experience of it and I think the sadness that came with it. It is and was not simply sad that you are gone, but my marriage also fell apart. It was always going to—really just a matter of time. But suddenly Tom lacked so much and the good times of our closeness seemed missing some kind of quality. But I am cute with him even now. There are moments when I am affectionate in my kind of changeling or fairy way and it still feels good and comfortable. But it is as if he is on a dock and I am on a boat sailing out to sea—to the middle of nowhere where there is no land in sight. You were not a bright and shiny person in my life—even though while around you I felt a peaceful happiness, a kind of calm sense of rightness. I would leave this space and return into the chaos of my home and suddenly find all the cracks, the peeling paint, the worn out rug metaphorically speaking. Things looked tired and old in my home and my ability to trudge forward and make the best of it seemed ineffective. I felt and still feel the weight of compromise—of settling. And I feel cruel in this.

And yet despite the discomfort, I could not convince myself to not love you. And I tried and I think I still do—although now I am more accepting that it is what I felt, even if others may think I’ve lost my mind (probably have). I don’t celebrate it. Perhaps I would if circumstances had gone differently then where they went. I thought that when (if) I fell in love in a kind of “big” way again I would feel good. But it doesn’t make you feel good because I don’t think I am really allowed to love under the circumstances. It is as if not only is/was it morally wrong somehow, but because I seem to have fallen in such a way that is so markedly different then what “culture” deems normal—that I feel uncomfortable, self-conscious, guilty, and well once more just plain weird.

But regardless of uncomfortable feelings it is there. And it is in the music—pouring out. And it was there when I saw you. And it was there when I left you. And it was there when I dedicated the work to you. And it was there when I rescinded this. And it was there when I gave you the seahorse. It is simply a fact of my life. You have become a fact of my life. If I live ten, twenty, or even 50 more years—you are the man who dwells in my creativity. You dwell within my deepest oceanic self—you have become truly my inner fish.

And while it makes me deeply uncomfortable and embarrassed, I feel what I feel, and you became what you did. I will likely never know how or why.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 33: And I Remain

2011-08-11T00:32:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

It’s late and I am still awake, which is never good. My head is a bit too busy, but I wrote two very awesome compositions today (both are up on my facebook fan page if you click on the music tab). Both are cello pieces: “Quiet Hero” is for cello and piano; and “Gone & I Remain” is for solo cello with a surprise at the end. Not sure if I want to keep the surprise yet. Anyway, their rough recordings and will undergo some changes prior to being finished; but I really like them. I’m finding the cello is speaking to me at the moment; like the piano did for the last album. Instruments become my voice most of the time and I think I am most honest through music than I am through everyday mutterings.

I talked with T a lot this evening when I was there. Somehow I seem to just over-share with her, but I suppose it seems to be what everyone does there. It’s like fish-therapy or something. Anyway, it gets depressing when my life tumbles out of my mouth and it puts me in a crappy mood. Sometimes I think my life is simply one tragic moment after another. No matter what I manage to accomplish my personal life just burns around me until I am burnt out, which I am feeling now. I talked for a while to Tom tonight as well and just said I was tired of constantly trying; I was tired of hurdles; I was tired of bad news; I was tired of mucking everything up; I was tired of my family and of him. And I didn’t even know if I really wanted to go back to clinical work. I’m tired of taking care of other people. I feel just emptied at the moment. I manage to keep up with my everyday “doing” things—grading, reading papers—but when I feel most content is when I live in my music. I put my headset on to block out the constant sound of the air conditioner and sit at the piano and start to chicken scratch my way through a piece or I start to hum it or I simply sit on the computer and click open my scoring software and just start putting notes on paper to match what I hear in my head. My music is the place I run to when everything else and everyone else seems impossible to cope with.

I’m overwhelmed. My divorce is dragging on. My tremors are getting worse—I now have them in my legs and holding things can be a challenge sometimes. You should see me with my new cell phone (yes, I finally broke down and got one)—I can’t even play games on it because my hands are so bad. I go to the store and I’ve stopped buying the live brine shrimp because they shake so badly I’m afraid I’m going to spill them. I know I could ask for help, but I find it embarrassing, but I’ve written a lot on that in the other blog—no need to dwell here. Anyway I’m annoyed with it and I assume it will improve once the divorce is settled and my life settles a bit. I’m just feeling a bit shell-like or perhaps shell-shocked is the better word. I am also in my Star Wars Jedi mode of “I have a bad feeling about this…” and I have no doubt that Darth Vader is just waiting at the dinner table making decisions for a while.

Sometimes I feel like I am standing on a playground and a storm is coming in and everyone has already gone home, but my mother is late—again. Other times I think I am a left over remainder—what’s left behind after everyone has taken pieces and run off with them (metaphorically speaking). I told Tom I was tired of “being” this or that role. I am tired of plastering smiles on my face and chirping some happy socially appropriate remark. I’m tired of thinking, doing, being, smiling, understanding, and always accepting. And I’m tired of feeling hatred for myself and who I am.

Well, it’s my complaining blog tonight. I’m in a foul mood. And no doubt this blog is littered with spelling and grammar mistakes—so to readers I apologize, hopefully they are not too too bad that your brain can’t compensate.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 32: Loving Beyond My Past

2011-08-09T23:00:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Okay so I admit that I am constantly thinking about how to be a better human being or more specifically how to understand the mysterious world that is me-dom of which I rule cluelessly (which appears to not even be a word according to WORD and Microsoft is always correct)… I don’t think I’m a bad person, but rather I think of myself as one of those old toys from childhood that one’s mother has kept in the event you someday have your own children only the darn thing is missing several essential parts, the paint is peeling (and likely lead-laden), and it doesn’t quite work as well as it should. That is how I feel—just a bit overused and underused at the same time. So what popped into my head as it has done a thousand times before is this separation between being loved and loving. I suppose most of us move about our lives wanting to be loved or some facsimile thereof or to be entirely left alone.

I think my desire to be loved is at once sad—coming from a childhood of indifference and cruelty—and at the same time utterly selfish. It is sad because it feels like a forlorn part of me. I was watching a nature program one evening and they had this lemur family living desperately at the edge of extinction in Madagascar. As the film crews watched, a mother lemur had to abandon her baby who could not cling well enough to her so that she could remain with her group; if she left the group—she would never survive. So putting a faith in the possibility of another child down the line, she dropped the baby with enormous reluctance and visible pain. And the crew filmed on as the infant attempted to crawl after his mother and cried ceaselessly. I wanted to claw my way through the television screen and pick up the baby and nurse it. I found myself both hysterical and livid with the film crew who knew this species of lemur are at-risk, why not pick up the baby and save rather than film it die? But this is I think the sad element of my need for love—an infant lemur left to die while everyone watched on and did nothing. In short, it is the sad tale of being the unloved girl. Yet as an adult it takes on a kind of narcissism, because there is this clawing, crawling desperation to be fed, held, and breathed life into it becomes a singular focus. I must be loved. I must be the one who takes priority and is cared for. I am the receptive one who sucks it all in like infants nurse. It is entirely passive. In short, I think it’s very unbecoming in an adult because it is precisely not adult at all. It is loving from a child’s point of view.

I’ve learned the hard way the consequences of trying to fill a void left from my childhood. I’ve rolled through relationship after relationship only to find that no one can ever really love me enough and of course, I’ve never really loved anyone enough. The sad consequence of the unloved girl is that not only does she crave the love never received, but she has absolutely no idea how to give it. And I didn’t. I think I was affectionate to those I dated or Tom, but I think if any of them ever described me there would always be some kind of intangible, unnamable something else that I was which left a person feeling I was not quite there: That broken piece of a toy that should have been thrown out.

I don’t buy into the psychological self-help bunk that you must “love yourself” before you can love another. We learn to love ourselves precisely because we experience love from another—our parents. Our parents are charged by Nature to love us and through them we gain a sense of our own self-worth. When our parents fundamentally fail at this through their own unresolved issues, through overt neglect, disappearing acts, abuse or indifference we grow as lopsided and out-of-whack children who struggle endlessly to feel they are worthy human beings. If I looked in the mirror and said “I love you Katie” I’d end up dropping to the floor in peels of giggles because it’s so ludicrous and empty. I don’t. I don’t love Katie—I’d like the best for Katie and I’d really like other people to say “Katie you are AWESOME”. But I don’t love “Katie”. Instead I move between suspiciousness about myself and wondering just where I will muck up next and downright frustration and anger at myself for when I do muck up. It’s not that I don’t think there are many things I “do” well—I just don’t feel you can define the worth of a person solely on what they “do”. We are always more than this. I just haven’t found out what makes the “more” of me valuable yet—I seem to be someone who is stuck being worthy based on what I do.

My family was indifferent to me. I think they love through indifference and I think, up until recently, I loved through indifference as well. Tom could readily attest to this. I love with a shrug of the shoulder never being overly invested but never being entirely dismissive. I feel my presence is simply enough, as if saying “I’m here aren’t I,” but outside of that something is missing. I don’t want to be like this and I think I am like this largely because any deeper investment means greater wounding. If I actually love with a passion than inevitably my “too much-muchness” comes into play and that is like getting walloped by a Mack truck. My mother and father used to avidly attempt to contain me. My mother bemoaned my difference: talk quieter, sit still, act like a lady… if you were only more like others, things would be fine…she used to say. My dad seemed to stay mute on the subject or entirely absent from my early life except for moments when he would tell me I cost too much or to participate once and a while in one of my artistic achievements. To be me and thus to love from whatever is the me that can’t really look at herself in the mirror is to be wrong. So I packed myself away and stuffed myself into a pretty picture. And along came Tom and Tom loved me and that was good enough for me. I liked him; we had a good time. He was sweet and he seemed to like the pieces of my muchness that crept into the marriage. And I loved him with indifference; not out of cruelty but more out of simply not knowing what else to do and because over time it was the only way to love without getting more deeply traumatized than I had already become.

It’s awful really to love this way and to be loved this way. To love this way feels cold, shallow, and non-invested. It feels like you are always looking at the surface of the person rather than diving into their depths and seeking intimacy with them. You make love with a kind of passivity that allows you to physically feel but to emotionally recede. It feels hollow and shadowlike. It feels like you barely reach for the person. It is always love from a perspective of anticipating their leaving or their cruelty. It is the “I love you enough but no more”. To be loved by indifference is to feel left wanting; to always feel insecure and that there is something missing. It is to feel like you have done something wrong and don’t know what. It is to crave some kind of emotional response that you’ll do anything to receive it. It is to feel forever dehumanized and unnecessary and unworthy. It is to feel insecure in who you are and how you are supposed to be as you attempt to obtain some kind of feedback from the numb person you love.

When I met you, you were another figure in the periphery of my life. But you became; unexpectedly, you became to me. I don’t quite understand it but I found myself unable to stay indifferent. When I tried I felt horribly guilty that I’d come in and apologize to you for being curt or ignoring you. I found myself desperately trying to push through my anxiety of intimacy and my unfamiliarity of needing another human being. And I found myself thinking not about receiving your love, but showing my own. You became someone I suddenly wanted to “be” with—to be emotionally and physically present; to be an active lover as much as to be a trusted and consistent friend. I wanted to be a woman of substance to you. I will likely never know why or how that switch was flipped in your presence—but in all truth, I would have risked utter heartbreak to love you I think.

So perhaps it is not self-love we really need, it is the love for another that pushes us past our own desires and toward potentialities of being loved. And then perhaps if all falls into place we wake up one morning and look into the mirror and say, “I am worthy, because I have been loved.” But all in all, for myself I think my singularly greatest challenge in my life is to love beyond my past.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 31: Love Pouring

2011-08-07T19:04:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I’m hoping that the summer ends on a far more positive note than it began. I have to admit I feel downright mismatched with my life at the present moment and nothing is feeling quite right. And my optimism is dwindling down. I just feel off. I’m waking up in shitty moods and I’m going to bed in shitty moods and I feel trapped.

Tom keeps telling me to go back to see you because I was happy when I was with you. This morning he said I should get a Halloween costume and just walk in so that you are so startled you have to respond. I told him he was nuts, which we all know he is, and that I was definitely not going to do that. Sheesh my book freaked you out enough—god knows what a Halloween fish costume would do. No, I told him, I’m staying away and sticking to Wednesdays like I promised. There’s no going back. I like to think sometimes there is, but there really isn’t.

I admit I’m a bit annoyed that the one person who seems to love me enough to stay no matter what is the one person I don’t really want. I really have this dreadful fear that the love from Tom is all I will experience in my life before my health craps out again. It’s not horrible I suppose. Tom is not an evil man—and we have had some really good times together. He’s at least made the last two months by and large okay with minimal upheavals—for now. It’s that little piece I always have to add that makes us unfixable. I can never just feel good when he’s good and we have a good time. We’ve had some good times over the past two months, but afterward I’m left with anxiety as I wait for the shoe to be flung at my head. We’ve had lots of good times but inevitably one of his moods kicks in and around we go again. So I’m still getting off the train.

There are times these days where I wish I could talk to the real you outside of work so that I could actually tell you how I think and who I am. There are moments when I think back to the craziness of the past four months that you would have felt better if you had known more about who I am and how I think about the world. I think you have a sense of me and my difference, but I think you’ve probably compared me a bit too much with how things are normally done and you’ve probably had a bit too much input from others who don’t know me at all about how “people” generally are.

There are times lately when I think I really should never have sent you the book or CD and that perhaps had I not done that then I may have been able to return to you in whatever capacity “we” were. I sent the material because of my own belief that people need to know when they are loved and that knowing this is a good thing. Knowing there is someone else in the universe who loves you is important and it allows us to feel better about who we are and to try our hand at new things in our lives because we have something secure at our base. I wanted you to know for those reasons. But this was probably just my projection of my own needs in the end. I desperately want to know I am loved and desperately want someone to tell me who isn’t going to slap me across the face (literally or metaphorically) the next instant. I’ve just never had this—neither with family or in romantic partners or, obviously, in my marriage. And so I think everyone must have the same need to know and feel this—and that we should be more willing to give of ourselves and our capacity to love to those we feel this for without all the crap that typically comes with it (“it’s too soon” “you’ll scare them off” “you can’t possible care that much” etc., etc.). I was wrong. Or at least I was wrong in projecting my own needs onto you. I hope though at the very least I wasn’t someone you felt obligated to talk with. I hope I wasn’t someone you pitied: the poor dying/sick girl with a shitty husband.

I feel incredibly inept at the whole feeling/relationship thing. It seems like no matter what I do I make the wrong decision or a huge mistake. Obviously I can’t entirely blame myself for outcomes I don’t want or that would just suggest I have some magical belief I can control the entire relationship and that it lives or dies based on me. A bit narcissistic… Rather, I just don’t feel I understand how normal people engage in a normal romantic relationship and what this is. I have to say I haven’t seen many “healthy” relationships—I’ve seen a lot of people who feel a sense of affection and ultimately get stuck in the trappings of traditional roles. So perhaps I simply am not comfortable in falling into a pattern of a “kind-of-love” that always has some undercurrent of anxiety that the relationship isn’t as firm as it should be or that the differences that are strikingly there between two people are tightly suppressed to keep the relationship afloat until too many stressors pile up. So I want something different and I really don’t know how to go about finding it.

With you, I felt happy. I felt peaceful and stilled. I sincerely loved being with you because there was something unnamable in the experience. I still can’t articulate it and I’ve been desperately trying to see if I can’t cultivate this outside of you so that I stop missing the real you. I admit to being nervous that it isn’t something that exists that I can problem-solve my way out of. I’m very afraid that the real crux of my positive experience was entirely just you. I don’t know how to translate that into other facets of my life or how to pick up the pieces that have fallen out of me that I didn’t even know I had.

I’ve been trying. I’ve been a mad creative monster lately. You think the Chasing Zebras CD and Love Amongst the Fishes was something; I wrote two other volumes of poetry since then and have written 4 more songs. All of which spiral out of and around my feelings about you and my inexplicable experience of you. I feel like calling this my “Fishboy Blue Period”. I used music when I was 19 to cope with the loss of Jeff, but this is something that trumps that. Two albums over 3 years and ample space between and a clear movement in the direction of resolution was normal I think. Something most songwriters would readily identify with. But this… it is like you pour out of my head in my attempt to find that unnamable quality that I felt with you. Sounds and words simply collect each detailing yet another shade of color. Nothing is the same yet.

In academic research when you are writing your dissertation or a quality academic paper, there is the litmus test standard advice: research until you come to the reference everyone else is using, then you know you are done. And so here I am researching through words and music for something that tells me what it is about you—what is the “definitive” paper that can describe you and who you are in relation to me and how I feel or what is missing in my life. And out flows papers after paper with nothing shared but you—it a nuanced variation of something felt or experienced. I never thought it was possible for one person to have so many sounds and words wrapped around them.

Now you can see just how wacky I am and how different: The girl who sits at a computer and piano composing and writing fiendishly in her attempt to find how she feels about you. And all I keep coming down to is you felt like “my ocean whom I have loved from youth” and I keep diving in and coming back up with newly discovered species. You are a starting place rather than a fixed moment or a fixed event. It is as if my experience of you is never done because there is an infinite capacity to discover more and that is only me locating you in your absence.

So when I sent you my book and CD, I was sending you what I had discovered of you within me. There was nothing for you to “handle.” I am unlike other people—what I wanted you to know was just a glimpse of the you who poured out of me. And in all honesty, I really do love you. I don’t understand it if I try to filter it through the ways people love in our society. But if I understand it through my own way of experiencing the world, it is very simple and has been for more than a year—the length of time it took me to complete Love Amongst the Fishes: I am happy just standing next to you.

I will continue to pour you out over pages in words and in musical compositions until perhaps I have created a whole “other” you who dwells with me now that you are gone. And perhaps should someone else come into my life, as my friend Hema has said another or several “fishboys” I will be better able to recognize who I have before I make another mistake. I should have walked out on Tom in December regardless of my parents and regardless of whatever risk it would have caused me. I was scared. And I fumbled. And I thought perhaps you would just wait a little longer. Had I known that this decision would have led to the endpoint it did—I would have walked out the door and to you in Winter.

So you are gone now and I readily understand all the possible reasons why. And it’s okay. But perhaps one day you will understand my reasons more fully and why it was to you I gave my seahorse. You were the one I chose—it was always you.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 30: Letting Me Go

2011-08-06T19:48:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I have felt so tightly squeezed by Tom over the years of marriage—even during the good times, which could last a year or more, followed by months of him screaming at me, throwing temper tantrums, quitting jobs, etc. It has felt claustrophobic and painful. It has been horrifyingly disappointing because the friend I thought I was marrying turned into such an incredibly difficult human being to negotiate. And as we all know he just devolved into crazy land this past spring—to which he continues to profusely apologize for now. He’s been saying for the past three months (prior to my asking for a divorce) that he doesn’t dislike you at all, but simply felt you were taking me away. What was striking about his discussion today (and a general surprising theme over the past several days) was out of the blue he said to me this afternoon that it really never was you who was the issue at all, but rather himself. He stated it was his own behavior that caused the problems. You were not the pied piper leading me away under some kind of spell. In short, Tom finally verbalized that it was his own fault. He has never done that before. He usually externalizes blame onto me and my responses to him; my reactions or lack thereof; he’d say you were out to get him or my parents are out to sabotage me; or my friends…and on and on from there. For the first time in 11 years, he actually took responsibility.

And with that, he said that he would let me go—no tears, no screaming, no demands. As soon as the papers are ready for divorce, he will sign them. And he will leave. He stated that he would be there if I needed him and he would work toward being the friend he was and not the husband he became. He stated that he would be there in the event my health took a turn for the worse, but that he would leave so that I could be happy and live without feeling anxious all the time. He has finally come to a point where he will let go.

In the 11 years of our marriage it was the first time he actually took responsibility for his behavior and showed insight and a concern for me outside of his own obsessive need for attachment. He said to me that he doesn’t want what I tell others about him and our marriage to be all about how awful he has treated me. He said that he would like to be a person I could actually say tried and worked finally to change how he was. He said he would like to leave the marriage not as he had been, but as someone I could hold positive memories of. In short, I think Tom has actually grown up. I say this with an aside of “knock wood”, which he said to me today that he knows I am always living waiting for the shoe to drop with him and that I really shouldn’t be living like this at all and that he was sorry it took him so long to see it and that he had no doubt that part of my health collapsing has been because of his behavior.

Do people really have epiphanies or am I just being scammed? I like to think that he has come to some kind of sincere revelation that will continue to support positive behavior and that when I get the paperwork to serve him he will stick to what he has said. But I won’t believe it until I see it in the end. He has been consistent about you though for the past 3 months now. You are once more the decent human being you had been when he met you and that you are a good man who treated me with respect and he thinks love and that he can’t fault you for that. He says to me that he should have been the one who gave me the support, but recognizes that you were the one there and you showed up and you listened and he was not. He said to me today that I should go back to you. He said that when the divorce is settled I need to go back to you to tell you how I feel, because, he says, he has never seen me as happy as when I came home from seeing you. He doesn’t know about the blogs or the poetry or the music so he doesn’t know you already know (or you should) and are gone, but he doesn’t need to know that. I just shrug and tell him there’s no going back and that you are gone as I stare at my tanks and my seahorses. He, though, keeps telling me that some people are worth risking for. He said that you are worth risking for. I tell him that I promised you I would not put you in any more difficult positions no matter how I may feel about you. And I’m not sure I am worth risking for, but I don’t add that. He’d launch into some self-help pep talk that usually just irritates me probably because our marriage has been spent with him one minute telling me how great I am and the next knocking me off a pedestal and stepping on me.

Suffice it to say, Tom has returned to his capacity for decency that he brings to the table wherever he works. It is a shame he couldn’t have arrived here sooner. He’s a good man, but this has been impossible to find. And it’s too little, too late. But perhaps he will show me that he truly does love me by sticking to his promise to let me go. Perhaps.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 29: As If Okay

2011-08-04T21:39:00.005-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I completely broke down last night. I don’t do it often but once and a while I reach an end point in my ability to laugh and smile and act “as if” things are fine and ducky. I have always operated that if I act as if things are okay than I will feel okay. Most of the time it works—sort of. For example, today I met with a social security representative and had a great conversation as I regaled him in my courage with my illness and the array of things learned about what it means to be disabled, what discrimination feels like, what poverty is like, etc., and he was fascinated at hearing about the other side of the spectrum as it appears most individuals are not able to share this experience (I would hazard a guess most are simply anxious). But the reality is when I was so ill, I really just clung to life attempting to act as if it was normal and okay to be as sick as I was and to find a way to make the best of it so that I could still look useful or somehow justify some modicum of value. And it was okay that I lost functioning in my right side; it was okay that I called my arm a “potato.” It was okay that blood poured out from my kidney and that the muscles to my lungs were failing. It was just okay that I could barely stand more than 5 minutes. In truth, you saw me so little (although I suppose you know this) in 2009 simply because I could barely stand long enough to actually leave my home and half the time I had no idea what the heck would pop out of my mouth with the way my language had become so mixed up following the last infarction in 2009. But I was okay with everything. I still am “okay”.

It is okay that they have had to increase my seizure medication; it is okay that I’m intermittently losing feeling in both my feet; it is okay that by 9 pm at night I start to struggle to type as I start to lose coordination in my fingers; it is okay that my tremors can be so bad that I can’t really hold a cup all that well and I start to spill water; and it’s okay that I admit I have no real idea if I can actual handle working full-time. I don’t really know if I am as well as I want to believe I am. But I will act “as if” I am.

It is always okay that I have to always be nice and understanding and smile and nod with Tom so that he doesn’t flip out on me. It’s okay to let my family act “as if” nothing bad has ever happened. It is okay to be reduced to a dollar sign. And it is okay to be shown wonderful happy photo albums of my brother’s perfect life and the perfect family that I am not a part of. It is okay that I have to act as if my brother was some saint. And I plaster a smile; I laugh; I make a joke and it is always okay because around me everyone seems to have forgotten everything and me.

I am often reminded of a poem entitled “Aftermath” by my favorite poet Siegfried Sassoon who wrote about his experiences as a combat survivor in World War I (a traumatized survivor):

Have you forgotten yet? ...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same - and War's a bloody game ...
Have you forgotten yet? ...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz -
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench -
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

Do you remember the hour of din before the attack -
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads - those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet? ...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.

It really doesn’t matter if you’ve suffered in war or in the domestic landscape—if you’ve been relegated to the status of a non-person that may be psychologically and/or physically dismissed or outright harmed—it’s all the same. And the one who survives it has to try to find a way to act in a world that truly lives in fantasy land having forgotten that you’re literally or metaphorically missing some essential limb that they were responsible for your losing through ideology or direct violence (psychological abuse is registered in the human brain as identical to physical assault on the body we now know from neuroscience research).

So last night, things were not okay and being forgotten was not okay. There are moments when somehow I crack. And so last night I found myself launching into this horrific grief process that pulled out of me everything from the time I was 5 to the present and my sheer resentment that I have been different from the rest and that I have had to accommodate my family, Tom, and all sorts of other horrific events and losses and smile and accept everything with an “it’s okay” because if I don’t I will offend and I will be left with nothing due to my utter dependency. While those I’ve known have moved forward in their lives and have become independent—I remain as dependent as I had been as a child. And it isn’t okay. And Tom says to me that he loves me and he supports all my weirdness and it isn’t a “bad” thing and I say to him “but you still constantly have yelled at me and told me I am not good enough.” And it really isn’t okay.

But I will smile and nod. I will plug forward even if my feet are numb. And I will act “as if” it is okay until it is. I will remain different no matter how desperately I would like to be, as I said to Tom, for once “that blade of green grass blending in with all the others” rather than some weedy thing popping up only to be herbicided because it breaks the flow of color and the sameness. And I’m okay even as my very history is forgotten by those who lived it with me. I am okay even if I am forgotten.

But last night I wasn’t. Today I smiled and joked and nodded and ate an Oreo cookie. And I am okay.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 28: Just Me

2011-08-03T13:54:00.001-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I think my docket number on my divorce paperwork may become my favorite number and I might even play it in the lottery—but I’m not sure yet. It all depends on how it goes when I serve Tom. I’m not sure if he really understands why I’m asking for a divorce. Sometimes I think he just doesn’t know what he’s done. After he flipped out on me the other day, he apologized and said that “I try so hard and I keep fucking up.” I asked him why did he think he did. He says it’s because he doesn’t “understand” me. He’s always externalizing the cause of his own behaviors. He’ll apologize for them, but the apologies seem blanket statements that he’s supposed to make—it’s not that I don’t think there is a sincerity in it, I think there is. I think there is also a great deal of self-interest as well. But in the end, they mean little because he simply doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong. He just knows that I end up feeling anxious and miserable. It’s sad. It really is sad how this has all unfolded. I think Tom, in his odd way, loves me. And he may be the only person who ever does, which is really a sad testament to me. At the same time, I really want to start over.

I was up most of last night with what is known as a carotid spasm coupled with a neck spasm. It’s rather painful and just part of my overall neurological problems. So I was awake waiting for my muscle relaxer to kick in and I was thinking. Do I ever not think? I’ve been toying with the idea of actually writing my memoirs, a kind of part 1 biography but it really would be depressing.

I don’t really have a foundation to build from. My relationship with my parents is okay, but I suppose more telling is my mother showing me a photo book of my brother’s son with everyone in the family pictured in it, but me and her own failing to recognize that it might just be offensive. I’m kind of the absent girl who is expected to take what little care she gets and not expect more. There are times when I think I am this way because my family feels I want this and other times I think it is just how life has unfolded. My relationship with my brother was violent, disruptive, and continuously put my parents into position they were uncomfortable handling and in the end were not able to handle at all. I still grew up in my own inimitable way. But I grew up alone. I spent most of my time alone in my room (I still do that; Tom drives me nuts because he has to be with me all the time). Growing up it wasn’t all that bad to be alone. I entertained myself with singing, reading, writing, or simply watching movies. I socialized in isolated, discrete ways and usually couldn’t wait until I was home. Once my brother went to college, I suddenly had lots of space and I could play the piano and otherwise move through my parent’s house disconnected from everyone. My dad would come home late; mom would arrive home late and it was just me floating about. There were no phone calls to friends. There were few visitors. There was no going out. There were no boyfriends. It was just me. This was normal to me.

It never occurred to me until adulthood just how abnormal all of this was. My friends had parents who sat with them and their friends. They had barbecues and birthday parties and holiday parties. Friends called each other and went out to movies or to the mall or to the boardwalk. They went to concerts and Great Adventure and they dated. And I sat in my upstairs bedroom and sketched with pastels and charcoals or listened obsessively to The Secret Garden or read War and Peace or watched documentaries on PBS. I came down for dinner at 6 or 7 o’clock when my dad arrived. We all had a customary family dinner. I usually said little and intermittently chimed in with a controversial point I learned from watching a documentary on PBS. I might get snapped at or patronized depending on the mood at the table. I’d eat a bit, leave the rest, grab something sweet and head back upstairs to my room. My dad would follow suit and my mother would sit in the family room reading a book. And so it went—year after year. Intermittently I’d visit a friend, feel awkward and find a reason not to go back for a while.

I managed to form healthier habits in college and was fortunate to also be able to actually have romantic relationships—which really given my history is a remarkable feat that I have no idea how I accomplished. I have approached my life as learning-in-the-moment. I never feel like I have a foundation to work from. I spend a good deal of time when my life derails wishing I could simply excise the first 12 years of my life entirely. I feel like I am constantly encountering situations I am unprepared for and have nothing to rely upon to find a way through them. I feel like I respond in this kind of stuttering way—either no response/very contained response or something dramatic and huge, simply because I don’t know how to handle my emotional life with regards to other people—or at least positive emotions. I’m very good at negotiating negative experiences—and I admit to wondering if I don’t simply seek them out unconsciously or transform positive experiences into negative ones because I at least know how to handle these. I know what to do with anxiety and depression and I know what to do with horror. But positive emotions feel foreign to me—and I don’t know what to do with feeling good.

I think this was why you got the book and CD (aside from the fact I’m very proud of the work and wanted you to be the first to see it), but there was this double-edge cause. On one hand, I probably knew it would flip you out and that what had been an important relationship for me would descend into absence and thus a negative and all-too familiar experience. On the other hand, I think I really did want to share my enthusiasm with you; I wanted you to know how I felt because I think naively I assumed that it would be good—as if this part of me never got the message that “normal people just don’t do these things.” And I fucked up. It’s okay that I did because I won’t do it again—I am someone who does actually learn. But as I thought on this last night I realize just how pitiful I am with regards to relationships. I’m almost Asperger’s-like in my capacity to relate to others. If I didn’t have a kind of forced extroversion that acts more to deflect people than embrace them, I’d say I had Asperger’s. I am most comfortable alone because I become the only one responsible for the quality of my time and I don't risk anything.

When I married Tom I did so because I wanted to be wanted. And I don’t mean that sexually. I mean this more in a family way. I was tired of being cast off largely because of my weirdness I think. And I am weird. It’s worked for me creatively and intellectually, but it’s been death to my romantic and social life in most respects. And Tom was there accepting (and most of the time he does) my quirks and it was nice to have someone embrace my abnormalities where they hadn’t been an accepted part of a family before. But it didn’t work because in the end I don’t think I ever really loved him and perhaps that is what he has been responding to all these years: the absent Katie. And I do absent myself. I will disappear from anyone’s life in a heartbeat if given the right circumstances. If someone stops calling, I usually never call back. If someone stops emailing most of the time I never email back. Not because I don’t want them or don’ like them—simply because I feel they’ve made a decision to leave and it’s okay. I float away like a balloon over the ocean—it’s what I do. Sometimes it’s painful, but most of the time, I get by. I work more or I write more and simply go with the flow of my life. (I’ve been actively trying not to do this so that others don’t get the wrong message that I am leaving them, so I do send emails and make calls now to check in with friends).

You were different. I actually felt happy with you. I don’t know when I last felt happy. I’ve had moments with Tom when we’ve laughed and had fun. But you, I felt just contentedly happy every time I saw you. It felt good. So I thank you for that. I have learned something else about relationships I had not known before. I learned what it was like to feel happy in the company of another human being. And now I will return to just me as I figure out whereto from. And the first line of last poem in my Fishes book will likely hold forever true: "You are gone. But I am never without." Thank you again and again and again...

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 27: Seagulls & Domestic Abuse

2011-08-01T13:15:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

One in 4 women living in a domestic abuse situation attempt suicide (no I am not going to off myself); while a significantly higher portion become substance abusers; I can see why now on both accounts.

Last night Tom had an episode where maintaining his congenial demeanor in hopes of forestalling the divorce could no longer be sustained. Once more he was spending an hour lecturing me on what I was thinking about what I needed because he clearly knows more about me and my internal world than I do. And he says all of this with such grand declarations and firmness that for just a moment I think “maybe he’s right, maybe I really don’t know what’s best for me.” And then changes course and begins telling me to just kick him out because I suddenly have a “look of disgust” on my face (which was true) and after yelling at me on this front (which in the end only ended up accomplishing my own sinking back down into the covers). He began to yell at me that I could never survive without him. He’d take all the money left by my parents and his own and I’d be left with nothing and that he’d like to see me try to survive then. And then to drive home the point of my own precarious financial situation as the only income I have is presently contingent on whether the stupid federal government decides to actually pass a budget resolution, he adds that my parents are just waiting for me to fail so that I have to go crawling back to them. And how much they’d love to see my life fall apart—after all they hate me and he’s the only person who has ever loved me. And after I say that it’s unlikely my parents would really want me living with them, he changes tactics once more.

This time he decides to go where he knows I am most fragile, my relationships. Because I was horrifically abused as a child (I suppose horrific really isn’t enough of a word to describe it), my confidence in all relationships outside of Charlotte [for those who do not know, my dog] is generally fragile at best and usually requires me to play a role I feel confident in to have any relationship at all. Clearly why Tom ended up choosing to marry me—he assumed I was so vulnerable that I’d lay down and let him walk all over me and become so twisted up into his life and desires that I’d simply be whomever he wanted, whenever. Which sadly, it appears I've done. So for the concluding 15 or so minutes of this hour-long tirade, designed to erode all sense of myself, he launches into the fact that all your coworkers want nothing more than to see my life fall apart and that deep down they are only nice to me because I’m a customer and they have to be. He knows I have significant social anxiety and have since I was little, so all he really ever has had to do was plant a seed of doubt that is moderately realistic—in this case it’s quite possible that I’m spoken too simply because I am a customer. And that is enough to make me profoundly uncomfortable, if not disappear all together from a person’s life. When it’s someone actually close to me, he spends days driving home his seeming logical points about how the person doesn’t care and that I’d make a positive statement about who I am if I let the relationship go.

He’s been doing this behavior for about a month with my other relationships, subtly questioning whether various friends care and are really interested in being in my life. It’s not much different than what he did when we were first married and I ended up losing all my relationships (see my blog post ”Why I Stayed 11 Years”). And so after saying I’m of little worth to anyone around me, he then once more returned to the subject of my parents. He states they clearly are indifferent to me (and to most people on the outside looking in on the current situation and their behavior, I suppose they are). He adds they clearly desire to see me fail and fall apart. In short, by the time his tirade was complete, every single relationship I have was allocated to the land of no one really liked me (but him of course; oh and you—you’ve become one of three people now that he no longer attempts to undermine. But I think you are no longer too much of a worry for him—he accomplished what he had originally set out to do in April: excise you from my life or at least he hopes so and I think he has some fantasy that I’ll turn to him to pick up the pieces, a kind of “see he wasn’t there for you like you thought, but I am” (which won’t happen). And I sat there in silence as I always do until he gets so angry he walks away to his room where he either remains for the night or comes back out apologizing. And I sat there already having bad tremors throughout the day that have been spreading to my legs and all I did was reach for my Xanax and take one and hope that I go to sleep quickly—knowing at least this will be all over soon. I may be destitute, carless, jobless, and my health may crap out on me, but at least I will be free.

And as I sat there swallowing my medication I thought I now understand why women become substance abusers in these circumstances. There’s nothing you can say; there’s no way to express anger or you’ll just exacerbate the situation knowing full well there is always a risk for violence. You can’t even show an emotion. In short, you can’t respond and instead you have to listen as you are dragged again and again and again through the coals. Over and over you are stripped of any shred of positive self-perception. The world around you becomes so profoundly bleak and empty. You really are living in a prison as the person you are married to who had promised to love you consistently takes your greatest fears and your newborn fears and just terrorizes you with them until you are quiet and submissive. If I didn’t value the small glimmer of health that I’ve gotten back, I could readily see myself popping xanax pills or drinking—simply to shut him out and shut everything out, becoming entirely numb.

Which brings me to the next point… after one particularly awful tirade of Tom’s this past February where he launched into how ungrateful I was; how useless I was; and how much he has sacrificed for me—playing on my sense of guilt for becoming sick and my overarching sense that I seem to ruin the lives I care for most (I tend to take over-responsibility for things, another product of my childhood and other events), I sat in bed while he stomped off to his room and slammed the door and I stared at my seizure medication and flitting through my head was the possibility of being able to finally escape from all of it by the very simple act of taking enough seizure medication until there was nothing but silence left (obviously I didn’t do that). And I sat there last night listening to him go on and on and on feeling myself sink into this space of “I’m never going to get out of this.” And you feel it too—there is this feeling in your chest that is as if someone is sitting there so that you can’t breathe. My brother used to do this to me when I was a kid; he’d throw me onto the ground and sit there on my chest so that I couldn’t breathe always to the edge of nearly killing me; other times he’d just simply attempt to suffocate me with a pillow. And as I sat there feeling entirely pinned to the bed, not by Tom sitting on my chest but by the very fact that he continues to control the whole of my house even as he blames me for my own abuse. And I finally understood why 1 in 4 women commit suicide to escape. It feels as if there literally is no way out. Even as the rational mind says do XYZ and it will work out okay—in the end, the reality of where you are in the immediacy defies all logical problem solving. It is still just me and him in a 4-room house and there is no one else there. There is no one to call, because you can’t involve other people or this could simply escalate a non-violent situation into a violent one once they leave or Tom will do what he did to you. Even the police don’t want to be involved stating that unless there has been a direct threat or physical harm their involvement will just escalate the situation. And so last night I sat in bed wondering if I’d really ever make it out of here.

There is something so utterly dehumanizing about where I am and I feel ashamed about where I am. Somehow I should have made a different choice; I somehow should have found my way to leave earlier. I should have, should have, should have… And right now it is just me and Tom alone in a 4-room house and me trying to keep him as happy as possible until I can simply serve him the papers so that he’ll sign them and leave. And I suppose at least he knows I want a divorce and that the real you is a non-issue are accomplishments in this whole process. And in all honesty I’ve reached the point where I’m willing to have absolutely nothing left to get him out of my house. I don’t care if I live on Raman noodles for the next 6 months, can’t get around outside of my own two feet down to the small supermarket in my town, and reallocate what meager funds I have to paying basic bills and ensuring the creatures I take care of are okay. Hell I may not even have money for medication or doctors at the end of all of this. But I will at least be free.

This morning I was taking Charlotte for her morning walk and there was a seagull gliding incredibly high on the wind currents. I’ve watched seagulls for years—love them. I envy them deeply. They are birds who love to fly—it is not simply functional for them to move to food sources or nesting grounds or mating rituals. They simply love to fly. They are fully liberated birds and I think it’s one of the reasons why humans hate them so much—they are unperturbed by us. They have a sense of their own dignity and rights and will not bow down to our own abusive tendencies. They rise up.

Maya Angelou wrote in her stunning poem “Still I Rise”:

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

I dream of being able to soar in my life. I dream of being stripped bare of everyone who clings to me through abuse so that I can lift myself up and find out if I am truly loveable. And if not, then at least so that I may be free to live in the silence of my own home without hearing how awful I am day in and day out.

Well, it’s a more depressing note today. I had a nicer one planned yesterday, but life is a wheel moving around and around.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: Oh and for those reading: no, I am not suicidal, please don’t worry about that nor am I taking my xanax in an addictive way (I have a 30-day supply for twice-daily use since 7/12; I’ve taken 5—so don’t panic or I’ll have to send you some :0) ).

Letter 26: As You Are

2011-07-28T21:11:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Well by now I should hazard a guess the real you has read the real letter. If you find your way here, I hope you recognize that I sincerely meant what I said in the letter. You are welcome to walk with me as I experiment with going off onto a road less travelled or know that it is with my deepest thanks I wish you only the very best on the road you find yourself on. I’ve toyed with the idea of squirreling away this blog and other projects that allude to you for fear of what you might think in case you’re on the fence about me, but in the end they are my reality and my truth. They are expressions of who I am and they emerge from a fundamental amazement at how you have altered my life only by being yourself. Hence my letter in May—I wanted you to see yourself as I had come to see you, because that is the only gift I can give to repay you for what you have done for me. How often in life are we told that who we are is perfect enough? This was what I was thinking about as I was walking this evening and sniffing the ocean—I do that all the time (I sniffed you a lot as well because you smell like the ocean).

It occurred to me that on one hand someone reading about what I am grateful to you for would initially (and perhaps you would too) think I was placing you on some heroic superhuman pedestal. Which is an inevitably terrifying place to be stuck on—both lonely and anxiety provoking as the drop down becomes the primary focus. Having been on far too many pedestals over the years, as you’re psychologically standing up there you find yourself making all kinds of compromises in who you are just so that you don’t get pushed off. You do what you can to ensure that the other person remains in love or in like with you and in the end they’ve ultimately got you wrapped around all their fingers just through their kind of “love”. You are not loved for being you, who you are without bells or whistles or successes. You are loved because of what you can “do" or what need you can fulfill for the other person. You are not loved for who you are and how you are—your fundamental nature. I think the other response to the pedestal is simply outright rejection—a complete disengagement from the relationship; a willingness to fall off it and smack to the ground and hopefully walk away with as few broken bones as possible. To me the pedestal is a dishonest form of love and also of gratitude.

You did “big” things for me without intending to and as I walked tonight I thought how they occurred just because of who you were (are). There was no grand gesture, no impossible standard or expectation to fulfill. There were no great declarations and promises. There were no superhuman rescues. There was just you with your quiet self listening away or happily reenacting your enthusiasm for the latest movie that you watched. It was the honesty of your own irascibility and frustration as it was your honesty of your concern. In short, you transformed my life because of your very nature.

I started to walk because of you. It’s hard to explain what went through my head other then I liked spending time with you and thought that if I could walk better, I’d have the ability to spend more time with you. I could trail after you with greater ease or stand next to you for longer periods of time without my muscles starting to burn and weaken. Or simply be able to bring more of myself to the table if I could walk. I wanted also to find myself in my body so that you could see the whole Katie, not just pieces of who she had become as illness and my marriage ravaged away swaths of landscape. Against all odds, I got up one morning and started to walk. It was a simple act that started the process of remission for my illness and still baffles my neurologist. Now I walk for myself because I love it and because I missed it and because I can. You did nothing other than tell me about bug museums and horror films—that was all and it was enough for me to say, “Get up Katie and move.”

My marriage was another element that became transformed. Now before you think I left my marriage because of you, you can put that thought away. I left my marriage because I had to, because it was unhealthy and had been for years. I left because I could, because my health had changed and because you listened to me. You stood there at the water station that one summer day filling my water containers as I babbled out the struggles that had defined my marriage. You listened, chimed in a surprised statement, a sympathetic nod, and listened some more. There was no judgment, there were no emphatic statements I must leave now; there was no bullying like a therapist I saw did, there was simply attention. You were the first person I told about the abuse in my home. And all you did was ask about what was happening. You did not rush off as Lancelot or some fairytale prince who’d avenge the princess. You simply heard what I was saying and spent the next several months hearing more of the story and listening. You empathized and you checked up on whether there was any progress being made with therapy or doctors. And as the marriage further deteriorarted you suggested that perhaps I deserved more than this, perhaps I deserved a life of my own. And I started to think what could new possibilities look like—could I just perhaps deserve more than what I had been living with all these years. You did nothing more than care about my wellbeing in your nonintrusive, quiet way.

I don’t know if anyone ever tells us that who we are is loveable; that our very character is worthy of love. But who you are is loveable, Fishboy. You are fundamentally loveable. There is no need for you to change, even if you feel your irascible qualities are a struggle for you--change what you feel needs to be changed, but let others accept you as you are not what they think you could become. You do step outside yourself and your reticence when you feel moved to and when you care. And you are present with those you seem to care for. You work hard at what you do and you are reliable where others may disengage or become distracted. You don’t, I think, give yourself credit where it is due and perhaps you, too, may not see possibilities because you don't see that who you are is good. But you did save my life through the very simple act of being exactly who you are. So before you think I have given you too much credit, trust me I haven’t. As I said in my note to you last November, I do not lie and what I have said about you and why I have been grateful to you is the truth. You need to see that.

So if there is something I can give in return, it is this: you are fundamentally loveable as you are. And may the path you walk on be filled with those who recognize this (if they don't I'll kick them for you). And may you always know that wherever you do go in the journey of your life, I am here and I feel so deeply privileged to have met you.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 25: Being Mythic & Leaping

2011-07-27T17:11:00.006-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Well, I dropped off a “real” letter for you with P. It’s not a “scary” letter; I told her to emphasize this. It’s really just a simple letter that I promised and which I owed to you. I wish there was a magical way to write the perfect letter; I am always concerned that I will write in my academic-voice and come off sounding stuffy or otherwise disinterested. Nothing is further from the truth or the nature of my character—I’m more of a creature out of a magical surrealist novel than I am the academic. I actually was thinking about that as I drove away from the store today. I think I am a kind of fairytale character. There is something “other” about me. I think you encountered that perhaps more than most. In general, I keep most people in particular social plays that I step into costume for. There is my professorial role; my clinical role; my rational realist role…etc. I slip in and out without much thought these days, but then there is Seahorse Lady. I really should embrace this mythical creature, but I struggle with it. It is all gooey with emotions that I’m not quite sure what to do with. I think this is in part why I always had one foot out the door the minute I started talking to you. You’d edge closer and I’d slip back antsy to get back into my “Katheriny” self—that stuffy, statistic spewing, analyzing being I rolled into under duress of being labeled “too” different and my fear of fully becoming different. It's much easier to accept being left behind when one is simply acting a part than when it is one's very nature being left.

But it’s never good to go stuffing oneself up into clothing that is ill-fitting. It’s like buying a pair of pants that are too small and shoving your body into them so you can’t breathe. But you do so because it looks good. I don’t know if you experience this. I’m fairly certain you must have some kind of resistance to being yourself—there has always been something tightly wound about you; caged, reticent. As if stepping out of yourself would be like encountering some storm of emotions and experiences—being overwhelmed by painful color, sounds, and lights the way a migraine sufferer feels. I seem to pitch myself outside of myself after I spend too long in tight clothing. I can’t seem to slowly edge outward at a nice pace. I seem to operate from this stuttering quality—a dance of you stepping close and me stepping back—until I can’t do it anymore and I have to jump. I suddenly have to leap off a ledge. That was my book and music, you know. I reached a point where suddenly I just pitched forward and out of every shred of recognizable “Katherineness” there was. For that moment when you opened the package, loud and noisy Katie who could never shut up when she was a child and who seemed to come from some whimsical underwater world where pink and purple turtles fell in love surrounded by swimming hearts and fat fish appeared. It’s an overwhelming moment and one that you recoiled from the way a migraine sufferer slips off into a darkened bedroom. I think that was the Seahorse Lady who’s been living too long arguing against her beingness. I hear echoes in my mind of all the “you can’ts” from my parents, teachers, and peers. You can’t be XYZ; you must be ABC. But in the end that Seahorse Child still grew up and became an adult underneath all the costumes still being XYZ when no one was really looking and she could come off the stage and descend back into the watery depths of her own oddity.

I still spend hours trying to figure out why you. Perhaps there is a bit of the seahorse in you—although I often think of you more like a Selki. But there is the ocean about you—it’s forceful and I think deep. You are big even though you prefer to remain a small distant lighthouse away from those around you outside of a few closest. There is also a vulnerability to you—I’ve seen that on several occasions—there is the boy, not just the man. I suppose that is where the girl in me emerged the most, but the woman just flung the door wide open with my music and poetry toward the whole of you and I dove--recklessly. The girl in me is a bit of a talker—a babbler about whatever captures her attention at the time; and you appear to be the boy who listens. You squirreled away whatever I babbled about and intermittently you’d find a voice and surprise me. There was something innocent about us at times. As if for just short moments the more naked selves that hide beneath all of our “must selves” emerged. And then there were times when it felt like the more secreted adult selves, who have even fewer opportunities to emerge freely, slipped in and I think wanted each other in a way that made my marriage seem some incompatible fact of my life under the sea where we lived.

Intermittently I catch sight of myself—like looking at a mirror out of the corner of my eye or catching a reflection in my tanks. It is as if in just a split second I have winged fins fluttering about the sides of my head steering me about. Just a moment there is a bit of the magical and mythical about myself. Once and a while the echoes of that self steeped in childhood behaviors emerges in silly games, funny voices, shadow puppets, and other assortment of unrestrained fun behavior I am still prone to. And other times, there is the woman who emerges who seeks the one she belongs to, swimming about for the receptive other. It is a sensual magical self, who wants to shed all the restraints set up that divide us from those we love the most. It is the self that still thinks one can actually find love and be in love and where this is worth all possible risks. It is the self that has pulled me away from my marriage and wants to drown back in the depths of the oceans because I can suddenly breathe again underwater.

Of course all of this is fancy-shmancy writing, the real truth here is that I am just a “different” person and at some point in my life I should embrace it rather than run from it. And I also have to recognize that this is where I ultimately have to love from. Anything else is simply a part played—not a life lived. So hopefully the real letter does not upset you and hopefully you can forgive my leap off a cliff towards you. It reminds me of this time I was working as a camp counselor at the age of 16 and one of the 1 year olds, whom another counselor decided not to supervise as they were instructed, decided with pure excitement and bubbly laughter to leap off the top of a 20-step staircase. To this day, I have no idea how I saw her do this or how I managed to catch her in my arms while I raced up the stairs. But there she clung to my arms giggling widely in the pure thrill of leaping. Meanwhile, my heart was racing and I felt sheer panic that only subsided when I had her down the stairs and firmly planted on the floor. I think I understand what she felt that moment on the top of the stairs when I sent off the book and CD to you; and I also now understand how you felt having to attempt to catch it with no firm footing to stand on.

So there you have it. Perhaps I am learning about my life after all.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 24: Belongingness

2011-07-26T21:26:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I suspect this might be one of the last letters I write on this blog, but one never knows. I am in the process of trying to figure out what to say to the real you. I promised the real you I would let you know when things on my end were basically finalized, but I can’t seem to do it. I’ve got three draft letters that I want to rip up. I am utterly terrified of writing to you. I’m afraid I’ll freak you out and send you in some kind of anxious tailspin; I’m afraid you’ll want to see me; I’m afraid you won’t. I’m afraid I’ll be too distant or too emotional. In short, I don’t think I can win if I write and drop it off. I’m terrified of every possible outcome. Then I think I should just tell T nonchalantly that everything is fine and to ask you if you’d be comfortable if I can came back, while letting you know you really don’t need to talk with me. And then I think I could just pop in and tell you myself and act as if everything is normal—which it hasn’t been obviously. And I can’t help but think when the heck did this so mucked up? It used to be normal for me to come in and see you just about every day. Why the heck am I so anxious now?

I think my problem really comes down to not knowing what the heck this all is that I feel. Why hasn’t it lessened since I left; why is it I miss you. Everything feels off somehow. It’s like something bizarre happened in April that through things into a direction it shouldn’t have gone. At the same time, it was a direction that I think needed to happen because I can’t spend my life wandering into a store every day because I’m in love with the man who works there and have absolutely no capacity to say anything or do anything about it. In this, I suppose it was important there was a rupture—no matter how awful that rupture became. I don’t, however, know how to repair the damage to allow something new and positive to emerge. I think perhaps I need to just stay where I am and figure out my life on my own. I need to hope that there is someone else down the line who evokes the same feelings as you, but with whom timing actually works. At the same time, I still want that person to be you. And then I think, well, of course you feel this way, that’s only because you haven’t met another person; you can’t see who’s coming so you’re focusing on who’s left.

And then as I was driving back from express mailing last minute paperwork issues for my divorce, it occurred to me I feel strangely like I belong to you. It’s a strange feeling and it isn’t the other way around. I feel somehow this strange sense of belongingness. One of my students wrote in her “Ecology & the Sacred” course homework this process of finding a sense of belongingness to the landscape—it was a brilliant essay—and of course it strikes me our landscapes are not simply the world in our immediate vicinity, but it is the process of finding those we fit with. Those who make up the totality of our personness. Of course, I can’t say this to the real you; but it is what I feel when I go to bed at night and you zip through my mind or when I dream and you are there. Last night I dreamed after a horrible night of seizures (my neurologist had to increase one of my medications today—likely due to the stress of my home situation) that I was sitting in the backseat of a car outside the store, terrified to go in. So terrified I sent a friend in for me instead. And then you were walking out of the store and opening the car and sliding in. You looked at me and said something to the effect of I didn’t need to be so scared. You had a nifty necklace on full of brightly colored wood-carved animals a la Noah’s Ark. Perhaps you are my ark that I am being called to—perhaps you represent something I am being called to but have yet to decipher. But in any case, I seem to be hitched to you—tethered at the end of a fishing line. It wouldn’t be such a bad feeling if there was some kind of reality or more rationality to it. If you were really there, I think it would be good.

In between writing this blog, my good friend Sharon called. I’ve written of her in other blogs—she’s like my older sister and has been with me through thick and thin over the past 10 years. Anyway, she is the only one who has a copy of the poetry book that was written for you. She just finished it and on the phone asked if I had gone back yet to see you. Of course I hadn’t. She said the book was simply beautiful and it was clear to her that I simply loved you. She hoped you would read it one day. I had counted on her to be my rational voice in my feelings—she’s not keen on any kind of relationship and has been my cautionary friend, but now she too has been swept up on my feelings for you.

How is it possible that I have come to this place? Without you, I feel cracked—like a china doll that fell over and lost a piece of itself that needs to be glued back on. Only I don’t have the glue and at times I don’t even know where the heck the piece went. But then I go to sleep at night and you slip through my mind and my dreamscape and I sigh and my chest feels just a bit fuller. But you are still not here and I have no idea if I can go back to you. And yet, somehow I feel like I am already yours. Even if you do not want me.

Well Tom continues to be fine and he is fine with you. He’s been nice for the first time in years and is even likable. And he’s okay with you. I could come back to you now with no issues. I could if I had any guts at all.

Hopefully your day was good and that your day off tomorrow is at least partially relaxing or fun.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 23: Incompleteness

2011-07-23T19:56:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Well, I’ve added excerpts from the Chasing Zebras album—these are the pieces I wanted you to hear. It seems fitting that the music streams while one reads. Of course after a while, I suppose one could get bored, but then you can just stop it. I uploaded a few of my favorite pieces—although I admit I love the whole album. It really is my best work. Anyway, hope you are doing okay in the heat. We topped off at 104 degrees today. My kitchen is 94 and we’ve blocked it off with plastic to ensure the tanks don’t turn into steam baths and cook my friends. I’m a bit sick of the heat wave since I can’t go out and I feel like I’m living in a cave with everything closed up to keep the temperature in the house down. I hate not being able to walk. Tom is still being nice, but moving back towards the “we’re really not getting a divorce” mode of thinking. I’m making him an appointment for next week to look at a few places. I’ll deal with his mood. I really can’t live like this anymore.

Today is a missing-you day. I don’t know why I have these. Suddenly I get so antsy and I can’t seem to sit still and focus on anything. It always seems to happen on Saturdays beginning around 11 am and up through about 6 pm. If things had not gone the way they had, I’d be seeing you. Tom said to me this morning that I seemed sad—or to quote him, “there is sadness around you.” I didn’t feel sad early this morning, I was busy writing a review for the movie The Ledge at the request of the film producers. I was otherwise busy. But once I was done with writing, I suddenly seemed to feel deflated and to feel a bit hollowed out. It’s this thin feeling, like the oxygen in the air has suddenly dropped and I really can’t quite breathe deep breaths. I feel somehow incomplete.

My mother and I were talking at lunch the other day. I was updating her on a recent marriage of someone I used to date and how his family must be thrilled with his choice as she likely shares a similar cultural background and value system as them. I did not. I was just weird to them and I think they were a bit suspicious I would somehow convert their son into some socialist, liberal, vegan, Peta person. Anyway, I started babbling about you and how you got a kick out of my finch story and started telling me about your mother’s. I looked at my mom and said to her in surprise—I seem to surprise myself way too much lately—“he always seemed to just accept who I was as normal; it was just Katie.” Tom makes me uncomfortable with my weirdness because he is way too vested in praising me. I don’t really like praise—a compliment is fine, but too many sentences that require exclamation points if they were written make me uncomfortable. I often feel like I am too far up a pedestal and have become even weirder than I already know I am and even more disconnected from a world that I already know I live in at a periphery. Tom throws me up there and it’s a long way to fall. I don’t know exactly what you thought of the whole of me, but you seemed to take the whole of me in stride. You encouraged me to talk about what I liked, threw in a few quiet compliments, but never overwhelmed me nor did you denigrate anything I did. You normalized parts of my life that made me feel more excluded, just as you seemed to enjoy the bits of me that were out-of-the-box. So I sat there across from my mother eating my chicken tarragon salad at our local cute restaurant in my town and said to her, “this was why I think I fell in love with him, Mom—he never treated me as if I was different. To him I was strangely normal.” Well at least that’s what came across to me. I could just be delusional :0)

I think this is why I felt somehow complete around you. I was able to accept myself just a bit better than I had been. Anyway, it isn’t a la Jerry McGuire “you complete me” but rather you allowed me to complete myself. So thank you again. I have no idea where we are in the thank you process, I think I’ve lost track. Maybe when we love someone this is what happens? Do we suddenly find ourselves opened up to be transformed by the experience—to allow ourselves to suddenly fill in new spaces of being? Funny when I first met you I thought I would do something positive for you and that you needed something from me; in the end, it appears it was the exact opposite. I didn’t even know I needed something until bit by bit I was suddenly feeling different, filled up by an innumerable array of feelings, thoughts, ideas that slid from you into me. You know though I think all of this has and continues to make me a better human being.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 22: Who Could Love Me?

2011-07-22T23:51:00.002-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

So my most recent labwork came back yucky. Not horribly yucky, just yucky enough I have to call my doctor to see if I need to worry about it or go on antibiotics or have a repeat test. My kidney functioning has been showing a consistent problem over the past several months—but it could all be simply related to the infarction I had in 2009. It’s weird though—a kind of bizarre mixture of issues. My urinalysis says I’ve got enough ketones for kentonuria (what makes this bizarre is I’m not a diabetic nor am I anorexic or pregnant), small amount of protein, an elevated specific gravity, WBCs and slightly acidic urine—not of which is good. None is so horrible it’s that bad, but it says there’s some kind of problem going on. My blood work shows I’ve got an elevated BUN (urea nitrogen) and an elevated Bun/Creatinine ratio, which is suggestive of something called prerenal azotemia—I’ve had this for months and months now; they have been consistently elevated. Thankfully my creatinine is normal. My metabolic panel isn’t great either as all my minerals are on the very low-end of normal, I mean low-end, 1 point or half-a-point from bad. On top of this my stupid B-12 levels have dropped 500 points since April and I’m going to have to restart my shots again as my neurologist wants my levels above 400.

On the good end my Iron and my Vitamin D are PERFECT, so that’s a relief. It’s taken two years of 50,000 IU supplementation with Vitamin D to bring it up from <7 (it was so low that LabCorp didn’t even bother to get a specific number) to 62.4 ng/mL (normal is between 32 and 100); I have to take 2000 IU of it per day. My Iron is a lovely 106 (normal is 35-155 ug/dL), which just illustrates that my iron levels are really normal 99% of the time and it only became abnormal when I dropped to about 9 bleeding out from my kidneys. All other markers for anemia are good—so no bleeding from any unknown area. Good stuff on that end. My kidneys have always been this mystery of come-and-go problems. It’s like my brain—where one minute it’s functioning just fine and the next I’m lucky I can string two coherent sentences together. I suppose in many ways it’s part and parcel of being a Lupine. But it seems to also fall outside of this—my mysterious zebraness. I hate it though. I hate getting labwork back with issues. Low-level issues to me are more annoying because nothing is done with them—it’s always wait until it gets more abnormal. Your numbers have to be so far off the chart that the lab requires another word “critical”. I had that once—my blood glucose levels dropped to 35. I felt a bit dippy when getting my blood drawn and not quite with it, got sweaty, slurry speech, and muscles started to burn—but I knew the glucose was low (I was doing the awful glucose tolerance test to see just how hypoglycemic I actually was), but I didn’t worry as I figured I’d go eat. Anyway, the lab got the blood work and called my doctor; she called me on every phone number she had, even my mother, to find out where I was and I assume if I was still alive and not in some coma. I was fine and had no idea what the heck she was calling about and really it was too late anyway. By the time the lab processed my blood, if I was going to have a problem I’d have been suffering seizures just after walking out the door. So I suppose that doctors wait until the lab calls them with “critical” values.

I don’t know if I like that. Clearly researchers determined that normal was within a certain range. If you fall out of that range than something isn’t quite right—the degree of dangerousness and damage of the not-quite-rightness of it depends on the leap of the value away from the standard deviation. So my kidney function is not-quite-right, not-quite-bad-enough yet. But you really don’t need to hear all of this. Sometimes I’m embarrassed at how tinker-toyish I am—that’s what Tom and I call my body. I really want you to see me as this vibrant, vital woman—but I’m not. Vibrant maybe, wacky definitely, but in perfect health, no. I think it’s my downfall. I wrote in a blog last year that I was a “lemon”. How does someone fall in love with a broken person? I’ve got all my parts save for my tonsils, but who has them anymore anyway. I managed to keep my thymus gland for at least another year. I also managed to keep my gallbladder from emergency surgery because doctors are so scared of operating on me and agreed instead to send me for a CT scan (thank god they did, it wasn’t the gallbladder at all—it was just a smooth-muscle spasm in my abdomen—courtesy of my wonderful brain…). So I have all my parts—they’re just creaky and well, used. I’m like that fixer-upper-house you buy thinking you’ll do all kinds of lovely renovations and you have a wonderful budget and suddenly you get in there and find that the whole place has to be gutted—everything is broken in some way. In me, every system in my body is dysfunctional in some way—hence I see a specialist from just about every discipline of medicine. So how does one fall in love with me?

Tom got me when I was healthy and a new model. I was a bright and shiny young thing. I was in some ways a kind of sporty car, expensive. And of course we all know the downside of them—once they go fixing them is a pain in the ass and liable to bankrupt you. And that’s me—a 1970 broken sports car that is so bad it can’t even be considered a classic. And to compensate, I’ve had a lot of bodywork done—I look like a “new” sleek model. If you saw me now, you’d think I was that 24 year old and you’d think I was this perfectly healthy woman who was just out of the showroom. I look good. Actually I look great according to everyone who’s seen me. I think people forgot what I looked like before I got sick. My neighbors whom I’ve known for the past 13 or so years have all been startled at my transformation. It’s like suddenly you become someone else—I don’t know what it is, but I suddenly hit about 115 pounds and everyone has been just speechless. I look like a fancy new car. Labwork frustrates me because it tells me what’s on the inside and highlights those creaky, broken parts.

You know one of the things that struck me about you—and maybe you didn’t realize it or thought much about it—was that you seemed to like me sick, well, fat, thin. You just always seemed to like to talk to me no matter what I was. I appreciated that a great deal. I don’t understand why you did this—perhaps because I am too harsh on myself and too judgmental about myself. But I loved coming to see you during that first year because it just felt good to chat with someone who seemed to see me and enjoy me somehow. Of course I have no idea how you exactly experienced me, but what emerged from you seemed sincere and you seemed to be vested in my well-being. Why? I think this question all the time. Tom keeps shaking his head and saying over and over and over that it is because you fell in love with me. I keep shaking my head back and saying first that he’s just nuts and second “why?” Why would anyone choose to love me the way that I am? Tom got stuck with me—he denies this now and I think he does sincerely love me in his way. But when I first became sick, he lashed out at me on one of my very bad days where getting out of bed was virtually impossible (this was before they discovered I had a constellation of autoimmune diseases that impacted my joints and muscles and put me on the right medication so that I could get out of bed) saying to me “you were supposed to help me with my music, now look at what I got stuck with.” Not only did he express hatred for me and my brokenness, because I somehow failed to do for him or interfered with his dream of our marriage, but I became a “what” not a “who.” I can’t really face that again.

Thank you for respecting me and choosing to talk with me when I was so sick. And thank you for worrying about me for whatever your reasons were. And thank you for being fully present with me when it looked like my health had deteriorated into cancer. Thank you. You know these are just a few of the reasons you received the gifts I gave. I really couldn’t think of anything else to do to repay you other than to show you how I had come to think of you—to show you who you are.

Well I think that’s all for now. It’s nearing midnight and I’m getting pooped and I have to take my asthma medication which I’ve been getting lazy with. It’s depressing talking about my labwork. Hopefully you had a good day. You like the heat—do you like it this hot? It was over 100 degrees and I can’t imagine how hot it was where you work. You’re always in the mid to upper 80s there, if not in the 90s.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 21: The Stuffing of Courage

2011-07-21T20:06:00.003-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Sometimes I think of Tom as a kind of invasive species that has been transplanted in my home and has started to thrive at the expense of the native species (me). He has rooted in and has simply strangled me and blocked me from the sunlight and no matter how hard I try to weed him out, he simply grows back. He’s stubborn in this indirect way. He’s made no effort in looking for a place and I think he assumes if he ignores this he’ll be able to stay indefinitely, because he knows I am too anxious a person to kick him out onto the streets. And I am. I wish I wasn’t. There are times like these I wish I was much more like a friend of mine who seems to be able to take a firm stand and tell people like it is without a moment’s hesitation. I admit that I feel somehow just weak—it’s like I am constantly struggling against this learned helplessness. I sustain a sense of willpower for only a short period of time; I steel myself for a short period of time and then it peters out. It feels like I am holding my breath and tensing my muscles and then suddenly I am turning blue and my muscles in my abdomen and lungs start to burn and I have to exhale and breathe. And in that moment I falter. Suddenly I become fearful of raising the subject of “get out.” I feel ashamed of who I have become in this marriage.

But I take small steps. Each day I set out a plan for myself to help me achieve the bigger steps (filing, telling Tom, etc.). Today my goal was to email one of the places I looked at for him and get the information and availability. It’s not a big step, but it’s achievable. In psychology, we’re taught to develop goals for clients that are a bit challenging to force them to expand and come to recognize they have skills they didn’t realize, while also make the goal achievable. If they fail at the big goal, it just reinforces their sense of helplessness. I’m treating myself as my own client. So this is my small step. I know I have to do this—I have to unwind myself from the kinds of psychological entanglement I ended up in with him over the years and my own sense of agency or the ability to meet the challenges in my life successfully on my own. In particularly, I know I need to know that I can say “no” and be better at protecting myself in relationships.

I admit I am scared at every step of this because I am waiting for Tom to start to become difficult. It’s okay that he is sad—I accept that and recognize that it’s normal. Although I wish he’d be sad elsewhere. I’m mostly scared of both his anger and where his sadness starts to escalate into manipulative behavior so that getting him out of the house becomes that much more of a challenge. It’s unnerving to be here. All I really want to do is break away from him. I want to be able to get in the car and go somewhere. And I have been thinking of coming back to see you—I’ll wait until Tom is officially gone though. I don’t want to sneak in to see you, nor do I want you to feel uncomfortable. Of course, I say all of this now, chances are tomorrow I will be digging my feet back in to avoiding you.

I get scared though. I thought I was brave and I think I am brave under certain circumstances, but I seem to be seriously lacking a chip in my capacity to advocate for myself. I know intellectually chronic experiences of abuse tend to erode this ability—I think much of this erosion has to do with the erosion of one’s ego, one’s inborn narcissism that allows one to say “I count” and “look at me”. Some selfishness is good selfishness. I seem to have been winnowed down to this toothpick of a person—lacking substance. And it’s painful and you really do start to feel like a failure.

Anyway that is where things are at. I know things are almost over, but it just doesn’t seem to be ending soon enough. I really want it to end now—so I can start to live as me again or at least start the process of gathering the pieces of me that have fallen out and putting them back where they belong—like Scarecrow’s stuffing in The Wizard of Oz. Crazy how I use this film in blogs lately, I actually hate it! But it’s appropriate—you feel like you have all the stuff pulled out of you and it’s just covering the floor.

If you read this and if you care for me, please wait for me. And if I freak out and cannot come back, find me. Because there is a good possibility my embarrassment will sabotage me and root me in my home when I’d really rather be seeing a movie with you.

Hopefully your day has ended peacefully and you were able to get everyone in their proper spots for the evening. I’m assuming it is much easier with A there working with you. God I miss you. Sometimes I think I’m pathetic.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

PS: I almost forgot. Chasing Zebras the album will be out next week--the physical CD that is. Amazon will be carrying it. It will be out digitally on iTunes, Napster, Amazon etc. in August. It sounds incredible and the cover art is awesome. I'm very excited about the release. I think it marks my best compositional work. I really would like you to hear it some time. I will forgo requiring you to read Love Amongst the Fishes--my courage on that ship has long-since sailed; at least for now. Perhaps one day I will read it aloud to you. But the album... you should read the liner notes for it on my facebook music page and at least listen to the rough cut of "Love and Trembling" located on that page. I'd like you to do that. Okay now I'm done writing.

Letter 20: Returns

2011-07-19T11:14:00.004-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Well this is officially it. Tom is leaving and the divorce is legally in process. He’s doing so amicably so that is a relief and he holds no malice or jealousy towards you anymore. As I suspected his bizarre behavior was largely because he did and still does feel you love me. I don’t know why he thinks this, but he feels that you do and as I wrote in an earlier blog—you are the “only other in the universe” and I suppose Tom has felt that because you do love me you were always the better match for me. He sees us as growing from the same plant, while he and I are entirely different trees. He’s always noticed the way we talked and how many aspects of myself he never knew existed would suddenly emerge while we talked. He said to me the other night, out of the blue, while we were walking on the beach, that he felt your chapter was not complete in my life and that you would return and he felt this was meant to be. He just was hoping to forestall it. I don’t know how much of his instincts are actually accurate. But that is where he is at; he's back to liking you as he did when he met you and he said that he couldn't be angry at you because you (in his eyes) cared for me. He stated he realizes how few people in my life have and how most of my family have been, at their best, indifferent. He said that I should go back to you and that I should never have left (I think he actually forgot what he did in April).

He is sad, though, that he could not be a better person to me, but has promised that he will be a better person in his leaving. And so far he has risen above himself and has returned to being the friend he was before we married. And I do love him—but he is not meant to be my lifelong romantic partner. He is not meant to be in my heart and he does not fill my heart—even as I think I do his. And so again this is simply a sad, but necessary ending.

However, all of this raises the issue now of you. I’ve been back and forth for days now of how to cope with you. I have no idea if I really do have the courage to see you. I have no expectations outside of a distant you, which under the circumstances of our parting would be perfectly normal. Then I think perhaps on Wednesday I will leave a note with P for you, but then I think you might see this and have an anxiety attack thinking I’m going to declare some epic love for you or some other such nonsense. Then I think I will just tell P to tell you, but then I think you might really like me and think that I don’t want to see you again. So you see my dilemma. I know I should just bite the bullet and come in.

I don’t know if I can return though. I wrote this in the last pages of my book Dear Fishboy. I don’t know if there is a real space for me to do this. I don’t know how much you’ve returned to your comfortable routine and have felt better without me. At the same time, Tom has never actually been wrong about his instincts with people—strikingly so. And if he is right and that you really do love me, as he said last night, “in your way,” then I stand to miss out on the one person I have felt heart-love for. And that thought is as unbearable as the idea of intruding upon your space and making you anxious.

I really am clueless on what to do and wish someone would again do all of this for me. I know I can say that I was brave and asked Tom for a divorce and have managed to keep to this, even as I face an uncertain future. But I still did it. My primary care doctor reminded me of all of the acts of courage and resiliency I have accomplished over the years, and I know that I have the capability of facing the scariest of events without becoming distressed. As my mother stated to me today, I am "unflappable." But you are something different. You are both my mythic fairytale friend and you are a man I simply just love—and I don’t know if I want to face the possibility of losing this OR to face the possibility of hurting you. I have no idea how to find the courage to return. This is something that completely baffles me.

Well that is my letter today. Hoping you are well and either happy warm or finding a way to stay cool. Oh and I saw a fantastic picture of a parrot fish in National Geographic the other day (I retweeted it). I love the beak-teeth on them! They're incredible! If I recall, didn't you say they were kind of stupid fish? Also, there was an article on their website about this particular water bug with a special skill with its appendage. I shall write no more, but I tweeted that as well. It's fascinating! And I wish you could see my youngest seahorse--she's gorgeous. If you return in my life I'm going to have to get my ass out of bed a 4 am just to rescue another baby so you can see it as it grows.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 19: Pouring from the Heart

2011-07-17T14:59:00.006-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

I feel like I have become this fragile, glass-blown woman and all of my blood has poured out of me. I feel utterly exhausted and I can’t figure out what to do with myself. I’ve been filling up the time remaining with Tom with a marathon of Ugly Betty. I feel like I am dragging myself around with little left to me. I spent the bulk of the morning crying so hard that Tom almost broke down and gave me one of my xanax so that I wouldn’t start hyperventilating. Tom has agreed to amicably leave. No questions or demands anymore. He’s going to review the places I located for him tomorrow and if they are available he’ll be out by the end of the week. I told him he needed to “let me go” and he said that he promised if this was what I needed he would. And so he has. I guess my grueling sobs finally hit home.

I want to be excited. But I really feel like I’m spilling over the edges of my heart—that I’m just pouring out of me in some kind of hemorrhage. I keep patting and rubbing my sternum as if to somehow keep myself inside; I am so emotionally exhausted and feel such a profound sense of shock that my life has moved in the direction it has. A friend of mine posted to my facebook page this morning that it's okay that I feel such sadness; she stated that it simply means that there was love. I find this comforting--I don't want to think of this ending as something that had deteriorated into hate.

So it is over. And I suppose I will find out who I am once I manage to pull myself back inside my heart. I know the next several days will be awful and in all truth, I wish I wasn’t here for the long goodbye. I wish this could be like a band-aid where you rip it off as fast as possible to avoid the pain. I hurt. I’ve hurt for a long time in this marriage. I’ve hurt a lot over the past few months in particularly. It shouldn’t have been like this. The person who loves you should simply love you.

I hope your Sunday was okay and that you do something fun for the little time you have for the evening. I am going to attempt to run if I can drag sorry ass off the couch and see if I can’t get this feeling of a rock in my chest out of me. Maybe you’ll see me in a dress after this… I don’t know. I haven’t worked out just how much courage I really have left in me. At the same time, if there is a possibility of you I also don’t want to lose that. I wish this had all be easier. Love should really be simple.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 18: A Place of My Own

2011-07-16T14:01:00.001-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

So it’s done. I told Tom last night that I wanted a divorce. I explained I had called my parents to come up because this was it for me. He started to get weepy, then threatened suicide again. To which I told him he promised me he wouldn’t do this and that I’ll call the police if he continues down that track. He then changed his tactics to anger—getting upset that I was asking him to leave immediately and hadn’t given him any notice (although as I recall I told him in December I wanted a divorce….). So then he launches into this biting, lengthy discussion of how I should let him stay so that he can get more comfortable without me and work on his music. I admit at that point to feeling utterly defeated and had I owned a car, I would have packed a bag and taken Charlotte and just left. I have no idea where I’d have gone, but I think I would have just left and never looked back on him or my family; for a while there it felt like I was trapped in a prison or some unending nightmare that no matter how many times I try to get what is healthy for me it backfires. So he continues to babble on about this and I say nothing—once more. I really think speaking is overrated at this point in most facets of my life. And I admit that if I never have to hear myself talk or even hear myself talk about this it will be too soon.

Anyway, I then get up to go take my medications and I move to sit in the living room rather than his room. He keeps talking. He even tried to tell me he should be able to stay here even though we’d be divorced. I told him that would never work because he’d always see me as a wife—and sheesh what kind of life do I get to have with my ex-husband living with me? When do I get to recover from him? Anyway we’re sitting in the living room and then he decides he’ll get angry. So he starts saying that my parents had better not be there when he comes home from work and my father had better not start something because he couldn’t be responsible for his actions. At this point I stop the conversation dead and ask him what he means. He just restates this. I said to him are you making a threat? He says no. I said to him if you’re making a threat against my father I will call the police. He says no. Then he just stops all the bullshit and just sits there.

He says he’ll leave whenever he is asked. He knows that he could be kicked out at anytime and that he’d have to leave. He then begins a lengthy talk sitting there stating he knows he ruined the marriage. He knows he has treated me poorly throughout and that despite his effort to change and never wanting to hurt me, he knows he has. He says he has never told me but he’s known for a long time that he takes out his frustration with his music on me. Nice of him to have known all along why he was an ass—nice that he never really bothered to fix it.

By the time he was done rehashing his life story and his lifelong struggle with his music, I was falling asleep in my chair. We went and walked Charlotte and I came back and took half a xanax and went to sleep. He was fine this morning. Nice and recognizing that these are the last days he’ll see me. Maybe he’s appreciating me a bit—or just simply trying to be nice enough to wash away all the years of screaming at me, blaming me, threatening me and so forth. I feel really exhausted.

It’s hard to imagine that in the span of a 3-hour conversation I ended a 12-year relationship (for the second time it seems), but I still feel suspended. I know my paperwork is filed; I know my folks are here and this time willing to pay him to leave; but I can’t believe that I’ll be lucky enough that it’s over. I feel like my luck just won’t hold out. I so desperately want to just pack a bag and go now. When you asked me in April why couldn’t I just run away and I said I really had nowhere to go—I don’t. I have friends to stay with but I have no place of my own. Even here it used to be mine in a way; it still looks like mine, but it’s become Tom’s. He is everywhere here—like a dog who’s marked his territory. He has worked for 12 years making sure that I feel I have contributed to so little (it’s not true though, more than $80,000 of my own money was spent on propping him up and ultimately leaving me with nothing), but the place feels like it’s his. He has dug in like a squatter and refuses to budge. Meanwhile on the opposite side of the fence are my parents, who actually own the place. And I feel as if I belong nowhere. I feel homeless in some strange way. And I think this is what had me in tears last night and utterly exhausts me. I’m trying to somehow argue for my own place in the world and I simply have nothing to argue with. Any argument I come up with that says I deserve to be independent or find my footing or simply seek out my passion in life seems shallow and easily upended. I hear “your too sick,” “you could have symptoms,” “what if you can’t handle it,” “your father and I were talking…”… At 35, I feel like I never managed to get past 12 and it feels like my life is everyone else’s.

All I really want to do at this point is pack a bag and leave. And I simply have nowhere to go to. Everyone I know is independent. They have homes or apartments, families, marriages, careers… I have a dog and two turtles and some fish and a disability. I have no tangible anything. And I really want a home—that place where you are secure; that is your foundation that all other things emerge from. That place that is familiar and peaceful. All I have is a voice in a virtual universe that emerges from a changing IP address pinging about whatever route my Internet service provider decides. I have a webpage that roots me in this maze of zeros and ones, but that’s all. The flesh and blood me has nothing but a husband who simply won’t let me go until he has wrung everything that is left out of me. And my parents whom everyone keeps asking me what the hell is wrong with them that it took them 9 months before they came up to help you out of your marriage and who never bothered to actually see you in the hospital when you were catastrophically ill.

What is it like to have a place of your own? I desperately want to come home.

Well that’s all for today. I hope Saturday craziness isn’t too bad for you. It’s a good beach day and Harry Potter is out—so maybe you’ll have a relatively quiet day. And you do not need to worry about Tom. My turtles are quiet. Tom has decided you are officially gone. He always felt my turtles went on feeding rampages because you wanted to see me and knew I’d be in to get feeders. I know, he’s nuts. But the calm turtles have reinforced what I’ve told him—you are gone. I told him we had a huge fight and that you hated me and I told him that I hurt you and it was unforgivable. I’ve been telling him this since May—and now with the calm turtles, he feels certain now you are gone. Oddly, you are.

I’m grateful I fell in love with you. Falling in love is a good thing; it’s something that fills you up when there is nothing else. It is something that cannot be taken away--not by my parents or by Tom or anyone--it is something within me that is mine alone in a life that right now feels really empty. See just one more thing to thank you for… ;) Thank you.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady

Letter 17: A Simple Fact of Home

2011-07-15T13:37:00.006-04:00

Dear Fishboy,

Today is the day. I didn’t think it would get here, again. I think I preferred December when I just blurted it out without much thought. Right now I am compulsively eating chips and salsa and my tremors are awful. I have a funny feeling I’ll end up having to take a xanax; although I don’t know when Tom flips out I usually become the calm clinician—so maybe I’ll get through this. My friend Sharon said she’ll be around tonight and to call her if I need her. I think Tom will take it as well as he can since he knows my parents are in the state and will come up immediately if necessary. Funny thing I was awake this morning around 6 am; Tom had just come back from running. He lifts weights after he runs. Anyway I hear this crash and I get up and knock on his door to find out if he’s okay—and he nearly got clocked in the head with this giant piece of iron artwork he bought—it literally flew off a dresser and landed 3 feet away right where he normally rests after exercising, but today he sat up instead. All I could think of was how symbolic, his world is going to crash down on his head. But in Tom’s characteristic low-level paranoia he says it was due to energy and someone not liking him. It’s a long list of people not liking him at this point. I told him I never had anything flying out of cabinets, off the walls, jumping off dressers, lights turning on and off, or our crazy SpongeBob cookie jar that randomly talks in the middle of the night until he moved into my house. I had a nice, calm, quiet house with a few furry creatures and myself. Maybe I’ll adopt another rabbit after all of this; I miss my Boobear. I can hear my mother groaning about getting another pet—she still wants to get rid of my turtles (thankfully Charlotte is more people/grandchild to her).

I think I’m a combination of sad, relieved and scared at the moment. I’m sad that I will hurt Tom and that it all fell apart in this fashion. I will do my best to present this in a positive light to try to encourage him to see the possibilities of having time only for himself and his music, but he really does love me in this strange overly enmeshed way. So I don’t think I can spin this in any way that will limit his distress.

I’m also feeling a growing sense of relief that it’s almost done. This whole grueling process of almost 7 months to the date from when I first asked for a divorce; and a year to the date since he decompensated so dramatically on me. It’s hard to believe that when we were talking about this in December that it would have taken this long to accomplish. But it is happening this time and it may not be a smooth process, but as I told you in early April, I was leaving regardless of whether I would be okay or not. It’s hard to believe I’m leaving—they say so many women stay and stay and stay. Thank you for being the first person I told about my marriage—I think it made all the difference in the world in my ability to leave. You didn’t tell me to leave, you simply looked sadly at me and said it must be a difficult circumstance to be in and painful and regularly asked me how Tom was doing in therapy and how we were doing and how I was doing. And not being pushed into the corner with “he’s abusing you, you need to leave” allowed me to admit that he was. And you stayed right there through the whole process reinforcing each step I took towards advocating for myself. It allowed me to talk with others and professionals and allowed me to start to consider that I could in fact leave and that I wasn’t the bad person. I owe you everything—I don’t know why you did what you did; maybe you don’t either—or maybe you simply couldn’t do anything different than be sincerely nice when faced with a woman with such tragedy wrapped around her. But regardless of your motivation—I owe you everything. I admit it frustrates me that I can’t thank you in any way, shape or form. I really meant what I said that one day when I was talking to you—if I had money, I’d give it to you and you could retire someplace warm and have your own sense of freedom.

Anyway, thankfully he hasn’t made any crazy threats or statements or screamed at me in the past 3 weeks or so—so perhaps he won’t start now. Hopefully he’ll also recognize that I’ve tried—I’ve tried for years to cope with this and support him and I can’t anymore. Maybe it makes me a bad person given how much he coped with when I was ill—I don’t know, but I’ve reached my limit in being able to handle being yelled at. I hope he also understands that I finally have me health back and I’m about 3 pounds shy of my pre-illness weight; I haven’t had any active symptoms now and the only evidence of my illness is my tremors (which are permanent), weak hands and arms, and the intermittent language issues that happen late at night (which can be quite funny and highlight just how bizarre the human brain is). Outside of that and the traumatic memories of being rushed to the hospital more times than I can count, it is as if I had never been ill at all. The picture you saw of me of Charlotte when she was a tiny puppy, well I look like that now with longer hair—you obviously haven’t seen me in almost 3 months and I’ve shrunk exponentially in that time. So I think I am relieved that I might begin another chapter of my life with a bit more wisdom, a decent body (my primary care doctor said I looked 15 and I keep getting carded in the movies now) and definitely an inborn recognition that life is short and to seize the day. I’m not sure if I’ve changed enough to seize the day—I don’t think I’ve ever quite done this. I’ve made attempts to grasp at the day and once and a while take an impulsive chance. I’m seriously thinking I might like to try skydiving…but I don’t think they’d let me with my health issues…. sigh. I was surprised the other day when I saw one of the advertizing planes that fill the skies at the beach in summer carrying a sign for this and I actually thought I’d like to do that. Just launch myself out of a plane to see what it’d be like for just a moment to be a bird or perhaps completely free.

I am scared that Tom will not take this well, but not as much as I’m scared that I will both muck up my life again or that Tom is all I get in my life. I don’t want my relational life to culminate in an abusive relationship where the only person who ultimately loves me is someone who can only love by vacillating between abuse and kindness. If that’s what I get, all I can say then is I’ve lived a downright shitty life. But we shall see. I admit though I think I am sad that I will not have children in this lifetime (although I am relieved I did not have children with Tom). I think it’s a good thing—god knows I’d never want to pass on my health problems, but I’d have been a good mother. I never thought I’d say that. So I am hoping that this is the singular regret of my life.

So what all of this means in the end is that you no longer need to worry about Tom; you really never did the minute I told you I’d never let anything happen to you. But you don’t know me well enough to know that I protect those I love fiercely; so I understand why you have been anxious. I so deeply apologize for this and there are moments when I wish I had just let you go in the beginning—but I admit I’m glad I was selfish. You felt like home to me. I know that probably doesn’t make since but that was what I felt when I saw you. It felt like home.

I don’t know if you’ll see me again once this is done. I have no idea what the best choice is for you. And it really is you that matters here. I don’t want to intrude on you or your environment more than I already have if you’ve made a decision that you’d rather not think of me at all. I respect and understand that. So I’m not sure what to do. Although, I wouldn’t mind you seeing me in one of my new dresses—they’re awesome and I kind of want you to see me one more time without Tom looming in the background. But again, I may simply stay here on my couch and write a few more notes until I have finished and left home.

You know I wonder if one of your coworkers reads this and what they must think. I wonder if they are startled to see you through the eyes of someone who loves you. I think I will always love you—it seems just a very simple fact of my life as if it has always been. And I suppose baffling to most, it doesn’t seem to have to be embedded or tied to a relationship—it just seems to be.

Love,
The Seahorse Lady