I Wish I Was A Fool For You Again

 Entry 1     12:13 a.m.

28 Days Later 

The day I tried to move out in 2021. 

I am scattered. March has 5 Thursdays in it this year. Tomorrow  Today is 28 days later. I am absent-minded like some German physicist in a Looney Tunes cartoon.  I walked into the office 4 times to turn the lights off and three times left without doing that.  I am just lost. Experiencing grief is like being a sponge. You just keep soaking up and soaking up the pain, and even when it wrings out, you are still wet to the core with sorrow. 

Yesterday, Jenny's sister told me a story that I hadn't heard before about Jenny and Jason, which explains why Omi suspected there was an affair happening. The incident took place at a YTN play in which Abby or Leiney was performing, likely in October of 2011, when I was three months into my new California job. Omi and Moni had come to see the play and were sitting with Jenny and whichever non-performing kid came, when Jason entered the space with his kid. They greeted each other with a full on kiss on the lips, not a peck on the cheek, not a hale and hearty "well met," but a kiss on the lips. We had hosted Jason and his kid over at our place many times since he and his wife separated. I can attest that I had never seen Jenny kiss him, or anyone else other than immediate family, on the lips.  

Later, Moni asked Jenny what gives. Jenny laughed it off, telling her sister that she and I always kiss people on the lips, explaining it was a "New York thing," something we picked up there. Dear friends, I was in New York many years, as were or are many of you.  Can we talk about how many people other than Jenny I kissed on the lips? Ballpark? Zero. Moni didn't buy it, but gaslighting being what it is, she was clearly relieved when after 11 years I disabused her of the whole New York state of greeting claim. 

A reminder: Jenny denied having an affair with Jason, and then when pressed, admitted it to me some hours later when we met to exchange cars in Redding.  She then, subsequently, denied it, and continued to do so for the rest of her life--although she never got angry at the question nor was she particularly vehement in said denials. Omi suspected Jenny was having an affair. Moni asked me about it right out of the gate when I told her about the el pinché affair. When Leiney told me she knew about Jenny and el pinché, the first thing she asked was "what about Jason?" 

I am sad, then, for her terrible fate, her horrible death, the hole in my life that she once filled, and the further realization that I lived with a stranger beside me. 

I was going through boxes of photographs of our young family, when images rested somewhere between digital and paper. There are so many good memories, all centering around the kids, really. We had great times together in some instances, to be sure. Many. I want to cling to those memories, and try to blot out what I can't change, what I can't know but what worries me. 

I want to surround myself with these memories, roll in them like a dog in cut grass, blotting out the pain and hurt and centering on the good. On the other hand, and may fate prove me wrong, I am determined to stay single for the rest of my days. I don't trust my own heart. I am damaged goods, was before I was married, and this experience has only exacerbated it. How can I trust the heart of someone who, with 20/20 hindsight, saw what my therapist saw in 1998, what my darling friend Ella saw in 2011? I couldn't hear them, didn't listen, wouldn't heed them. I don't say this with sadness. I say it with the assurance that I will be far happier making my own choices, my own mistakes, saving my own ass, or driving it into a ditch, than I would if I had a copilot.