Does Anybody Love Anybody, Anyway?





--Margaret Atwood

It is a quiet Sunday morning. I'm soaking in the bath.  Jenny is up, just.  She told me the lower back pain she has been suffering from since the terrible retching of a couple weeks ago has been largely improved by using heat and ice as our friend and LMP Diana suggested.  Finally something works.  So her back is better, her digestion is better, her spirits are improved.  It's marvelous news and I'm thrilled for her.  It also means that she will see Eric the pinché motherfucker this week, which isn't new, but grates.
 
I have given up worrying about the agreed upon rules.  I'm sure she lies about when she sees him, that is nothing new.  

I have given up worrying about her texting him at hospital. It is strangely liberating to just assume she is doing so. 

I have given up being concerned about her texting him in the car. She used her phone all the way to and from VM on Thursday for chemo, and again on Friday and Saturday when I took her back to get IV hydration. Another agreement broken. The one she railed about me violating in therapy.  

Why would she follow any rule, she hasn't for years?

Yet, here I am.  Holding on to the curtain of illusion like I'm dangling  from 30 stories and the building is on fire.

I wonder what I'm worth. I do.  Less than a dumb jock.  Certainly less than I had hoped.  People tell me this is terrible. They are angry for me.  They are puzzled.  They have no words, except weak words of praise. What can I do but what I do?  Why am I stuck in this painful pit.  Its a lose, lose, and lose again proposition.  That should be the title of my blog.

The view from
my writing desk
I am soaking still. I felt pretty okay before I climbed in the bath.  But then I read some Whitman and Eliot on betrayal, and my feelings took a turn from believing like I'm moving through this pretty well and sent me crawling back to my old pal, despair.  How long will this last?  I need her to get better, so I only have to grieve the loss of this marriage. I felt so good the last couple days, having adopted an idgaf attitude, feeling the most separated since I moved into the apartment at 65th and 35th.  No deep questions.  No ponderous declamations.  Just a simple recognition that this is all, and by this I mean EVERYTHING, a pointless exercise. We, each and every one of us, get dispossessed, repossessed, and decompressed eventually.  Until then, I'd like to do more than muddle through.

Her nausea is still in check.  So, that's good.



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