Weddings and Other Sacred Events

My sister’s wedding was beautiful, spiritual, and full of love and hope much like my two must have been. I remember the first one fondly and have for some time. Even when things were the worst between us, I never hated any of the memories of him or of what we did. But the second, the one closest to heart, is also the most painful to remember. I find myself loathing those memories as they pop up. And I don’t want to. I want them to remain, as they are, sweet and pristine and full of the laughing and fun that filled that second time around. Like the fact we almost got run over by a train on the way back from picking up the flowers because he was so nervous to be married. It was the second time around for both of us and the wedding was exactly what each of us wanted. Small. Simple. Beautiful. But we acted as a couple that had not been around the block. Perhaps marriage does that to you. Makes you sweet and innocent again. I want that memory to be forever wonderful. Protected under a glass done. The taste of the cake with its raspberry crème filling, the vows he said to me, his voice strong in spite of being so nervous his hands were shaking. The cigar he and my mother shared.

But it is difficult not to color the distant past with the recent past. Perhaps it is because of the way things happened. How he chose to implode so rapidly and without warning. Removing himself from our lives so utterly that the void was as vast as an ocean. Didn’t he understand that an implosion of that magnitude warranted an equal and opposite explosion in my life. Something had to fill the void and what did was pain and sadness, loneliness beyond anything ever felt and all the while him, running and laughing as if it were his wedding night. Spending on fancy places to stay, good things to eat, going to those places with her that I had always wanted to go. The crash and reverberation was so fast and large that I felt as if I would never recover.

Things are still exploding, expanding to fill that void. This hole that he left threatens to chew up all of the good memories, falling into it like a sinkhole, flowing to the bottom to collect and drown in each other as if it is only the hole that is important anymore. Is it the same for him? Has this disaster touched him, made him see that this was not the right way to do things? Is it stupid of me to think that someday he will face me in person and explain himself?

I think to some of our recent correspondences where he asks for a trade of equipment he thinks I might still have (stuff, I have to write here, that he left behind and told me on several occasions was my replacement for what he did and for him). It was true, he did have something I wanted and I wanted to give him everything I had left even the hole in my heart and the burring memories of our good times. But when it came down to money I knew I was lost. I thought about all of the money I have spent over the past few months to clean up the mess he has left. I got too tired to continue the talk and stopped. I came up with things like; well I am paying 126 a month to keep you in health insurance because I wanted to make sure you were OK. The lack of appreciation for that is deafening in its silence. I don’t want it to get petty because it so easily can. I want to hold onto the memories that were good and remember him as we were and as we loved and push the thing that he did aside, bury and burn it as I have the person he is now so that it won’t negatively affect me for the rest of my life. He is still a person, not dead, still out there being somewhat who I thought he was, but he is not my person, he is not my husband or friend. He belongs only to himself, not even to that other woman who helped him in his implosion, not to the other woman who claimed to love me and wrote me love notes, the one I was desperate to be friends with not realizing that for her, friendship was just a disguise like a Halloween mask warn at Easter.

I took pictures at my sister’s wedding. Smiling faces, tear streaked cheeks. Hands held across emotions. People bathed in and held together by the feelings that weddings bring up. There were some there like me. Happy for the couple but tinged with sadness at their own misfortune. None of us can help but feel that. My own mother, I could see, missed my dad at that moment. Looking across the isle at the mother and father of the groom, able to be next to each other at this event she had to attend alone. If my father were still alive I would not talk to him about what had happened to me. He would hear what happened and be sad and angry in the only way a Norwegian farmer can be, with silence. We wouldn’t discuss it, instead he would tell me stories and say odd things and be more himself then himself to make me feel better. Some of that connection between us had been lost over the years that I was away from home. He had grown closer to my sister, the one he knew would stay, but my father and I were so alike it was impossible for us not to communicate our feelings to each other, even if it wasn’t through words.

I talk to him still. I think of him many mornings, as I get up early to write, knowing he was his best self early in the morning when the sun started to color the eastern edge of our land. Even in his later years, living in town, napping often, the bones and blood refusing to spring awake as they once did when he was young, He was more himself at six in the morning then at any other time of day. I should have called him more, visited more often, made more time to just be with him. The last occasion I spent time alone with him was my first wedding, which is now so many years ago I have a hared time believing it. I had friends staying out at the farm and he wanted to take a ride out there. I was busy with wedding preparation but for some reason I decided to go.

We started off from the house in town, not taking the road over the big hill the one that gives you a panoramic view of my hometown from the top, but going straight. It was my favorite way, more windy with a little bridge and a tree, but we did not turn at the regular turn, instead we kept going straight past McCully’s place and truing down the section line that held the dam where we fished for bullheads a few times. I am not sure why we stopped there. Maybe Dad just wanted to be with me at a place he knew I liked. Where he remembered me as a girl, where I was dependent on him to get the fish of the hook. It took me years to realize that no one can really see into your heart unless you let them and on that day, my dad was open. His heart was full of love for his family and for the love he knew we would have in our lives.

But he was sad too, he was wiser then I knew. I feel like he predicted that I would have a dramatic life and he took me to that fishing hole to remind me that there are safe places in the world and in ourselves that only we know and that sometime we would need to go there weather we were happy or sad. I hope the outcome for my sister is much more the conventional long and happy life with a loving and devoted partner then mine has been. I feel more akin to one of the odd cases people have in their families. The crazy auth Ethel to whom something happened and the children of the children of the siblings of aunt Ethel forever wonder how she got the moniker “crazy” and what the stories were the surrounded her life.

My soon to be second ex-husband asked me to stop writing about him or at the very least not sharing that writing, but I feel like this is the only way I will not become that crazy aunt Ethel. The one who dies in some far off place, alone with no children to tell her story. The family gets pieces of her. Her three cats need a home now; her sparkly red Dorothy shoes need to go to Good Will. Her hundreds of wigs sent somewhere for children to play dress up with. But none of the stories of those things will ever be told because Ethel, because I, did not have anyone to tell them. My cats all have names and personalities. My Dorothy shoes are beautiful and make me feel like I walk on air even though they hurt like hell. My wigs turn me into a different person each with a distinct personality. The stories of why I have those are mixed up with and because of the story of him. I can’t extract that form me. Not now and perhaps not ever. This is the explosion that is filling the implosion. My dad knew this then, at that spot and I know this now.

For the rest of my life, weather it be a car ride, a funeral, a wedding, a concert, I will have memories of him and they will make me feel and I must write them or I will forget and they will forget and everything will become nothing instead of becoming one of those sacred events that marks each of our lives.

The love I thought I had lost forever, but perhaps, never had

So many things have been on my mind lately, Now that the big show is over and I have a break until I have to be in Boston again, I am back in my tiny new place leading my tiny new life. The worries: 1. The house - still the bullshit continues and I am going more and more in the hole. It is literally down to one more month and the bank gets it. I imagined I'd be able to live there - but within a few weeks it was quite clear I could not. I imagined selling it would be painful but pretty easy. It has not only been painful but perhaps the least easy process I could have gone through. I saved the Robot from much heartache for sure, but in doing so I did not save anything of myself, in fact it has made it impossible to mentally move on from the place I was in March. Every time there is a glimmer of hope I either have to deal with yet another disaster at the house (the latest is the septic is STILL a problem, in spite of every thing passing in from the town, the total bill is now 53, 175 and change and perhaps there is still a problem (that is not counting the 8K in fixes and improvements I had to make to it just to get it on the market), the other is the furnace and a leak and small fire - all happening while I'm lifetimes away. It really sucks to deal with these things yourself. I wish I could have kept the house, lived there, been happy. But they were in every room, I found so much no cuckolded wife should ever find. The notes were both forgotten and on purpose, cruel.
The second is I've been ill. I played our CD Release party with a temperature of 102. As far as temperatures go, 102 is not that bad for me. I generally run high fevers. Or should I say ran, when I was ill, before robot even came into the picture. There were hospitals, trips to the emergency room, infections without cause and cure, crazy drives to the Doctor holding my bleeding throat wishing someone would kill me or that I would have the guts to just let myself bleed on and on and be done with it. I have a diagnosis, a baby step to the big a big one some day (or not, no one can tell me - that kind is not for sure until your muscles are water and you are a brain only)- I refused the chemo, refused the drugs and I was fine. For years - now some of the symptoms are back, and I haven't let myself be scared, but at night I have a hard time sleeping the physical evidence is more and more. I need to go back to the Doctor but I know what they will say and I wish hard to not go through any of it. Robot never had to deal with this, I hid when I was ill because it made him so crazy, made him mire ill, perhaps it was good for me, perhaps not.
The saving grace is that from before, I learned not to sit too still. Sit still and feel sorry for yourself, sit still and not be able to get up again. I got up, I have to, I rest, sure someone is making sure of that and I think him because I wouldn't without that. But, like the release party, sometimes you just have to, no matter what the consequences, no matter the pain and agony. Never let it show, just keep moving.
The reality is that these things that are happening could just go away. Exercise a bit, lose some more weight be calm and slow and DON'T worry so much and the body will heal and keep this at bay. I am trying so hard to do that, trying so hard to let each little knife in this terrible six months pierce me but then heal. Don't pick at the wounds, don't get drawn into silly emails, don't say - well yes I could give your stuff back, if I had it (why don't you just sell it - he told me over and over - but I couldn't it was like selling a liver or a stomach), but you never wanted it (And I gave you so much you just left behind - what about that stuff - so I get any credit for not burning it), yes I want my domain back but what can I give you - I spend 125$ a month to keep you in health insurance because I was afraid you did not have any - is that worth the price of my domain. After several emails back and forth, nothing was resolved, still bargaining, like he always used to with others but never with me. Now I am on the other side and it hurts so much, I can barely think about it. After all those years of trying so hard for him to see me as a person and as someone who wanted to help and how loved him so deeply, it is down to bargaining about a stupid domain - yes I want it, but can't he see I've done so much and I have nothing left physically or mentally. Never let is show, just keep moving sigh it is so hard. I have to concentrate on the good stuff. In spite of yet another trip to MN with pokes and prods, there will also be a wedding - which is going to be happy in spite of me being sad and negative about weddings. But their wedding has none of the sadness and they are doing it their way. So after the poking and prodding I will be out there smiling and hugging and hoping beyond hope that things go well forever and ever for them. That they realize that each other is the important thing and you can make yourself happy for a time by ignoring those who poured heart and soul into you, but it will all come back around, eventually. I am not saying I was all good, no one is, but I did not deserve this, I did not deserve the action or the aftermath. It was cruel in the extreme. So cruel that even in his mustang and long hair and new leather duster, he could not look at me in the eye and that is and will be the last time we see each other. Some times I miss so much that person who was so funny, so talented so full of life and theory. One of those rare people who comes up with something so out there, but then can back it up, and if helped, can make it happen. This is not about what I have now, this is about he past and how it intrudes into my healing time and is making me ill. I would be dead now if it weren't for those people who have helped me thus far. So many of you and a few that have gone so far above and beyond. I love you all so much. Thank you for keeping me looking forward as much as I can, and for giving me the love I thought I had lost forever, but perhaps, never had.