Awkwardly Social

Now the hard work begins. I’m back, I have a month to find a sweet apartment that I can afford. I have to get some resolutions down, and I’m considering giving myself a year to get my act in gear and decide whether or not I’m going to stay in LA, and if I don’t stay in LA where in the hell I’d go. I don’t see myself handling the East Coast with much grace, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be moving back to the Midwest ever, unless I get into a good law school there, which is on the table at the moment, the south doesn’t seem so ‘me’ and I’ve burned out on the West Coast, so I guess the only place I can move is Nevada. yay. No, wait! Mexico! That’s where I’ll move.

I’m going to try to get my resolutions written down. I know one for sure is to make sure Lula gets some form of exercise every day. She just does so much better when she’s been out of the house for a bit, and I do too, so it’s a good goal.

Last night, Tara picked me up from the airport and she wanted to take me out. Like to a bar. I seriously considered it, but as soon as I got home to my trashed apartment (the wind had wreaked some havoc on my neatly stacked piles of ‘very important’ papers) I decided that there was no way in hell I was going to try to drink a bottle of piss at her favorite dive bar. I have plenty of time to pick up smelly hipsters and take them back to my place, right now all I want to do is sit in my pajamas and figure out what I’m going to do with my life. Tara is awesome for wanting to make sure “Lonely Young Woman and her Dog found dead under a pile of trash in her studio apartment” headlines don’t come to fruition. It’s a tough job getting me out, but she seems up for the task. Thank the lord.

More later, including getting back into the x365 saddle. Which sounds kind of dirty when I put it that way.

I’m feeling a little embarrassed right now, partly because I had a weird sex dream about Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a tattooed environmentalist, and partly because I just started crying while reading all of your nice and supportive comments and e-mails.  Thanks for making me cry, assholes.  As for P.S. Hoffman, or as I call him, Lover, there’s not much to say about that, except, what the fuck?

It’s hard not to get stir crazy here with the rainy cold weather, but it was nice and crisp and clear this morning so I went for a long run with Lula.  She’s not so crazy about running in the rain, it’s kind of hilarious for a spaniel to be so prissy about getting wet, but the cold windy weather, she loves.

I’m leaving in two days and I’m not looking forward to dealing with finding a new place to live.  I hope I luck into something good and reasonably priced and not in B.F.E but I have this sneaking suspicion I’m going to be really sad about my new apartment.  Ultimately, no matter where I live, it’s not going to be anywhere nearly as awesome as my current neighborhood, so I just have to adjust my expectations.  My big hope is that it isn’t populated by crack whores and pedophiles.

I’m finding it hard to keep it together, and would most definitely not be able to if I wasn’t surrounded by distractions.

Lula continues her war on all things cat. This morning she went after Westie, the retarded cat that Ellis rapes hugs on a daily basis. Westie is an easy target, but Lula didn’t count on Ellis swooping in to save the day. Lula got pinned down at the sliding glass door and Ellis used her as a punching bag for a few seconds while Lula cowered and yelped and I tried to figure out how to get them separated without losing an eye. I grabbed Lula by the hindquarters and pulled her out of the way and Ellis retreated back to the stairs. Thankfully, Lula’s got no follow through, which is good because while Fiona would really like one of her cats to die so she can get a kitten, I don’t think she’d like to come home to blood smeared walls in the shape of Ellis.

I keep waking up thinking this situation I’m in has an easy fix, that I didn’t try hard enough, that I can make this better, that I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, that I’m never going to have someone love me as much as he did, that I’m a big loser, that I miss him, that this has all been a big mistake, that in a parallel universe I have it all figured out, that I wish I never met him, that I wish I never moved to LA, that I’m going to see him with another woman, that I don’t know how I’m going to get back to normal, that I don’t know what normal is.

I went for a run with Lula this morning in the Seattle drizzle up some steep hills that lead to a gorgeous view of the water and wondered where I would be this time next year. Last year I was happily ensconced in a secure relationship totally, blissfully unaware that in a year’s time I’d have the rug pulled out from under me. That I’d be here, where ever here is. It’s impossible to imagine where I’ll be next year. The only thing I know for sure is that it won’t be with Louie.

My dog is anti-cat. My sister’s cat is anti-dog. Also, he’s huge and with a set of phantom balls the size of China on a large scale map.

So when Lula and Ellis get together there’s a lot of growling and wailing and scrabbling of claws.

Lula can’t help but taunt him. She’s from the streets, after all. And street rules always apply.

Moments later, Lula was crying like a little bitch and Ellis was licking his paw in disgust, for his paw had just touched a dog, and that he just cannot abide.

My present this year was given early, my mom and sister bailed me out a bit when I smashed my car. Then my mom flew me and my dog up here to Seattle when my boyfriend dumped me unceremoniously a week before Christmas. I wasn’t expecting a single extra thing from them.

But my mom couldn’t help but wrap a couple of extra things for me so I’d have something under the tree. And it’s exactly what I’ve been missing.

A hot Jesus action figure. He spouts scripture when you press his belly. He has amazing thigh muscles and hard nipples. He’s so lucky he wasn’t around when I was kid, because Barbie would have done dirty, dirty things with him. Strangely enough my Jesus action figure looks like the guy on my bus that I make up stories about, Black Jeans Guy. Now that I think about it, Black Jeans Guy always gave up his seat for old ladies and prostitutes, people with weeping sores, you know, the usual kind of needy you find on an express bus to Pasadena City College. Hmmm… maybe Black Jeans Guy always looked familiar to me for a reason?

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you get everything you needed and more. I know I did.

I had to see Louie on Saturday. I’m giving up the apartment, and in order to appease our very weird, and sometimes non-sensical landlord I decided that I need Louie to sign the 30 days notice letter. I don’t know, maybe it was a desperate attempt to see him again.

He rang the bell, which set Lula on alert. Then when he walked up the stairs, Lula barked at him crazily, like he was a stranger and he had no business in the apartment. Either she’s a very smart dog, or she was just confused because he rang the bell instead of coming in with his key like normal. Either way, it made me kind of happy. Fine, really happy. I might have even done the, “Yes!” accompanied by an arm gesture that you see on baseball fields when a pitcher throws a good one. One arm bent, fist clenched with palm toward the sky, pull in and one and two, throw your hip in it.

He signed the letter. I learned he’s been reading the blog, which didn’t horrify me as much as I’d expected it to. I haven’t said anything I don’t mean here, and I would have said these things to his face if he hadn’t pussed out and left in a whirlwind of pussydom on Monday.

He and I talked. We got a little closure. Which as it turns out is almost harder then the alternative. Because now that I don’t hate him, I… it’s not that I miss him, but I don’t know. I just… Fine, I miss him a little. There, I said it. I’m a weak stupid girl who misses the boyfriend who walked out on her without so much as a ‘how do you do.’ I do.

I’m in Seattle now and there’s a level of ‘being in the moment’ that I find I have to live up to when I’m with my nieces and that is exhausting. I love them, they are adorable, but they do not stop. And they will repeat a question until you answer it no matter how much you try to tune them out. Add to that the sugar intake (them) and the lack of mid-day drinking (me) and you’ll find me imagining shooting heroin into my eyeball in the garage, behind the extensive collection of outgrown car seats.

I’ve got to go before I tell you about the giant cat of doom that has been torturing Lula in a situation not unlike the hotbed of tension we’re seeing in the Middle East. There are presents to be wrapped and photos to be taken.

I had to take Lula to the vet this morning to get her health certificate so she could fly with me. Well, not with me, she has to fly in the hold and I’m so worried she’s going to not be OK. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happens to her. Anyway, my vet is officially more socially awkward than anyone I’ve met in a professional sense. Normally when I meet socially awkward people it’s because I’ve had the misfortune of getting stuck talking to them because they’re the only sad sack not talking to anyone at the party. I am drawn to sad sacks. I guess I feel a kinship.

So the vet was talking to me about flying and he said, “So against all advice you’re going to fly.” I didn’t know if he meant because it was bad for dogs, or because it’s a terrible time to fly so I just kind of stared at him. The pause in the conversation was highlighted by Lula’s nails as she scrabbled around the exam table. Then I said, “Well, my boyfriend left me so it was that or stay at home alone and kill myself.”

He has this really low and mumbly voice, I guess it’s good around animals. He said, “Yeah, whatever stops you from drinking.”

I said, “Well, drinking alone anyway.”

Then he stuck a thermometer up Lula’s butt and our silence made Lula look at me like, “Who is this douchebag, and what was that about flying?”

I also had to change my information with the receptionist. Lula was under Louie’s name. The receptionist didn’t ask any questions. I guess she could see it on my face. I’m not one to put a good face forward, being a brave little soldier doesn’t suit me.

I’ll be so glad when the holidays are over.

Someone just gave me a xanax. I really needed that. I’m a mess. I couldn’t sleep last night. The wind was crazy and my windows kept blowing open. Something was tapping on the wall, loudly by my bed. The dog was freaked out. I was all alone.

The problem is, while we didn’t exactly meet over the internet, we both had been reading each other’s blogs for a bit of time. So now, when I think I’m feeling better, when I think I’m ready to look at his stuff, it’s another kick in the gut. Knowing he talked to some of his new friends, his ‘models’, people who don’t even know me about our impending break-up. Knowing that he felt he could talk to anyone about it. Anyone. Anyone but me. I guess I just assumed he would keep it close, only talk about it with people who know me, people who knew us. This hurts. It hurts because strangers knew before I did. Strangers.

First of all, thank you to everyone who’s commented, e-mailed, twittered, phoned, dropped by, sat with me while I cried, bought me ice cream, and dinner, and wine, and just generally proved that I am not alone, not by a long shot. Really, I thank you.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m armed with a to-do list as long as, well, my arm, or the fact that when I look truthfully at my relationship and how bad it had gotten with the silence, and the no touching and the inability for either of us to reach out, but I’m starting to feel better. Almost normal, actually. I function with a low to medium level of depression on a day to day basis, so this hasn’t pushed me so drastically off the charts that I don’t know how to deal with it. It feels like this was some lesson that I needed to learn. Some gift from my past life that wanted to ensure I didn’t suffer through a non-working relationship because he was a ‘good guy’, because he ‘loved me’, because I did love him too. I know that is some hippy-dippy bullshit, but it’s how I feel. All the signs were there. I didn’t heed them. I ran all the stop lights. I threw my finger up at the missed exits.

I don’t want to give him any credit for this. I want to punish him. I never want to see him again. But, as it turns out he was the brave one, he was the one who made the final slice. He did it in a pretty dickish way, but still he did it.

I didn’t really blog about it back then, but almost three years ago, I broke up with Louie. I remember vividly going to my friend Andrew’s 30th birthday party and pretty much being a miserable mess for the whole thing. I was sure I was missing something, that I had made a mistake, that he was a good guy, that I was throwing something away, that I wasn’t trying hard enough to make it work, that I didn’t want to be alone, so a week later we got back together. Then we moved in together. Then the same issues I had all those months ago were still there, still bothering me, but now I couldn’t bring them up. At least I felt like I couldn’t. I’m not sure how to explain it, but I felt like I had forfeited the right to hold him accountable for those things I saw as detriments to our relationship because I had said yes to getting back together. Does that make sense?

This summer I sat with my girlfriends in a pool and talked about how I had this huge weight on my shoulders because of these issues, but that I felt like maybe it was my stuff, my problem and I was the one that needed to work these things out. My girlfriends in their infinite wisdom told me to talk to him about it. Let him know how I was feeling. But I assured them, this was not something he was going to change, so I was going to have to bend. They insisted I at least tell him about how I was feeling. I didn’t. Not a peep. I didn’t want to be a nag, or ask him the tough questions I needed to ask him, partially because I didn’t want the lens turned back on me, and also because, like I said, I didn’t think I had the right to. Add to that the fact that I didn’t know how to bend on these issues and any outsider would tell you we were doomed. Lesson learned: If your best girlfriends tell you that you need to talk about your problems with your boyfriend, you absolutely must, or you will find yourself at 6:00am, sobbing in the shower, wondering how you’re going to face the holidays alone.

Once again, my mom came to my rescue and is flying me to Seattle for Christmas, so I don’t have to worry that every car that drives by is him and he’s seeing me, friendless and alone on Christmas day, still in sweat pants, eating left over pizza right out of the box, with that fake yule log as the only light flickering on my face. My mom and my sister have been so incredibly supportive. I knew they would be, but I didn’t expect that to feel so good.

Now I’m in the questioning phase, every little thing he did in the past two weeks I’m wondering what he was thinking. He told me on Monday that he had been planning this for a while, or that he had known he was going to do it for a while, I can’t remember which. That was the worst feeling. That I know now when he sat with me on Saturday night and watched Gone Baby, Gone, that he was planning to leave me. We had a nice night, but it must have been just torture for him to know I was so unaware. So going to be blindsided. Or maybe not. Maybe he lied. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe it wasn’t torture. I’ll never know. That’s the part that’s tough about break ups, all the unanswered questions.

I don’t think in a month or a year or a decade I’ll have any of the answers. I am going to have to learn how to be OK with that. I certainly hope this piece of my heart that is now damaged and bitter and a little shriveled is going to bounce back, because I don’t want to not trust anymore. I don’t want to think every thing I do is somehow ruining a relationship.

Shit, and now the tears welled up again. I hope that stops soon.

I washed my sheets last night and I slept in my bed. I only woke up a couple of times and I feel pretty rested today. I went for a run this morning but was so underfueled that I had to walk most of it. I’ve been feeling very guilty about Lula not getting enough exercise or attention. One whole human is missing from her life. I wonder if she knows he’s never coming back, or if it matters. Last night as I was making the bed and getting ready to go to sleep she started doing something I’ve never seen her do before. All of her toys were in the bedroom and she started picking them up and moving them into the living room. It doesn’t sound weird when I type it out, but it was weird. It sort of looked like she was trying to make sure I didn’t get rid of them too. That is totally an anthropomorphic-ization of her, but I have never seen her do that. It made me sad for her. She’s just a dumb little dog, she didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t ask to be dumped.

Anyway, the run this morning was rough, but now I have my appetite firmly back in place. It was always still lurking around, but now my stomach is growling and I’m dying to eat a bagel or a big bloody steak.

I know writing these posts has helped me process this thing. I hope I haven’t been too hurtful, because if nothing else, we’re all just humans on this planet trying to figure out how to be happy, and I don’t begrudge him that. He did it the only way he knew how and that’s a telling moment in a person’s life and about a person. We wasted some of our valuable time here on the planet with each other, but that’s the beauty of being a human, we can look back and speed up or slow down that time in as many different permutations as we want. It’s all the way we look at it.

I’m not sure how much more I’m going to be writing this month. So if I don’t come back here for a while, don’t worry, I’m just taking a breather to collect my thoughts, pack up my shit and find an apartment that takes dogs. I hope you have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

I’m not sure I should actually be writing this, but seriously, he’s the one that told me on a Monday morning that he was moving out. That day. That he had no intention of talking about it or trying to make it work. He was done.

I didn’t handle the news very well that morning. There was some shouting, but only from me. Louie doesn’t shout. I guess he’s above it. But we all know I’m half-white trash so I, I am NOT above it. (See what I did there with the capitals, that’s shouting in the interwebs.)

Things popped out of my mouth that were so contradictory it’s really no wonder he stood there in stunned silence. Things like, “I wish you were dead. I want to kill you. You don’t love me?” I only wish I was making this up. I started ripping photos off his polaroid wall. And throwing them down on the ground. It wasn’t getting the reaction I wanted, he just sat there at his computer. I considered grabbing a scissors and cutting them up. I wanted him to hurt as much as I was hurting and since I’ve been with him for over three years, I knew that the best way to hurt him would be to destroy his little masterpieces. I didn’t want to stop, I wanted him to have to pick up every stupid little polaroid picture from the floor. I wanted to see him down on his knees picking up his shit. I wanted to make him cry. I wanted to set the apartment on fire. With him in it.

I spent most of that day in tears, equal parts bitterness, sadness, anger and hatred with a side of that kicked in the gut feeling you get when someone you love tells you they can’t stand one more minute with you (I’m paraphrasing) and you know at that very moment that your life is not going very well. Things are verging off course. And all this at 6:12am. That is early to get broken up with, is the general consensus.

I found myself thinking, “But, but! I have so many questions and I want to punch you in the stomach so hard. I want you to die. I want you to die and I want to watch.”

The good news is, we all die. So someday I’ll get my wish. I probably won’t get to watch, I might even beat him to it, but he’ll die someday. Someday he’ll be dead. And that, my friends, is what being bitter is all about.

When I came home that night and found the apartment cleared of his shit, I was surprised. I don’t know if I thought he would have changed his mind. Or if he would have left me something, anything to tell me he was sorry. But there was no note. No apology was coming my way. I have never known someone who refuses to apologize like he does. He’s made an Olympic sport out of taking the low road. And now by writing this, I’ve met him down there on that low road. I’ve been here before. I know the way back, I have a detour in mind, but right now it feels good to be on this low road. Mud bogging.

I have really good friends. Incredible friends. Friends who cannot believe that this is happening to me, no matter how I put it, they just can’t see how someone they liked, who they had supported in his artistic ambitions, who they thought was in love with me, could be so… abrupt is not the word they used, but I want to save those words for me, they used other more awesome words. It’s great having friends who have good imaginations. It helps the healing, I say.

I’m sad, I’m tired, I’m bitter, I’m angry, I’m confused, I’m shaken, I don’t see sleep anytime in my future, but just knowing that my friends and my family love me and don’t want to see me hurt like this makes me feel just a touch better.