St. Valentine's Day [Reprisal]

Below is a direct copy (with link provided down below) of a post I made some 8 years ago, but with a response in two parts:
The First; a highly biased yet thoughtfully crafted, creative interpretation of an imagined reply built upon a long and arduously researched analysis using a number of documents and sources, for the purpose of catharsis in the face of rampant cowardice and pointed betrayal.
The Second; my own thoughts washed through the filter of hindsight and time, and if I am honest, just a little bit of booze, depression, self-loathing and good old fashioned cast-iron stubborn grit in the face of my own odd reticence.

The end of this blog is coming soon, so why not precede the epilogue with an emotive flashback?

~~~

Do you know, my love,

How much I love you today?
[What again? / I told you every single day, even when you made me question it.]
How it is so much more in comparison than the day before?
[You never shut up about it but never bother to show me in ways I want, even when I make you guess what they are / I never stopped loving you, even as it now tears at me to the point of an all consuming numbness at your apparent disdain or hatred of me, stunting my affection and desire.]


Do you know, my love,

How much I miss you?
[God, I can't take it when you're gone, but I can't stand it when you're around. / I still can't understand how a person can make another feel so alone, even when in the same room. And if I ever did that to you, then I can't even start to explain how that thought guts me.]
How much it hurts, inside and out, to be without your touch?
[I can't be bothered to overcome my damage and meet you halfway any more, but I'll make sure to punish you for making me feel neglected no matter what. / Why would you knowingly deny me something I told you was so elemental to who I am? Intermittent reinforcement is abusive in ways no one fully understands, but experts equate to creating an addict. How self-absorbed can you be?]


Do you know, my love,

How much I care for you?
[You better, because almost no one else will put up with my shit long term, but don't expect me to look kindly on yours forever. / Was giving up on, delaying or literally selling pieces of me and my dreams really not good enough for you?]
How much I worry for your wellbeing and happyness in all things?
[I don't care what you've lost or given up or what you put yourself through for me anymore, I don't know what the fuck I want, but I want it now and I am tired of everything you've given me not measuring up to what others have. / I guess running myself into the ground, putting myself in harms way, and self-immolating my sanity and happiness to keep you alive when you have no one else who actually gives a shit about you and/or can/will do anything about is somehow selfish. I wish you had been that kind of selfish with me now.]


Do you know, my love,

How many my thoughts are, for you and what you do and where you go?
[If I don't hear from you constantly or you don't instantly respond to me, I freak out and guilt trip you, or berate you like an idiot dog, because my feelings are more important, but don't expect me to return the favor when you feel the same way or respect you for it. / If I could have gotten away with spending every waking moment with you, I would have. But the real world is not conducive to the romantic ideals of idiot teenagers. I thought we were better than that. I thought you were better than that.]


Do you know, my love,

How much I want you?
[Anything more than hugging is a micro-aggression and a product of the patriarchy that want's me to be barefoot and pregnant, and that's all you want from me anyways. / It's hard not to grow to resent someone who gets pissy at you for hugging them close for more than ten seconds, when you feel physically ill from being touch starved by the very same person who you are emotionally closest to.]
To hold you, and kiss you, and to pour out my affections upon you right now?
[I hate myself for loving it when you physically dominate me, to the point I'm willing to discount your feelings and needs because I'm scared the ideology I've had shoved up my ass for the last two years won't hold up under the weight of you fucking me into submission again. / If I could package the levels of longing, frustration, need and distress you put me through for the same 2 years, into a weapon, I could wipe the whole west coast of North America off the map in a single shot.]


Do you know, my love,

How much I need you?
[I don't care because I'm unhappy with who I am, mostly because between myself and the people I listen to, I don't know who I am or how to change and it doesn't matter how many times you tell me what you see in me, it is easier to give into my fears and nature and not believe you. / You used to make it worthwhile for me to drag my ass outta bed every day (and stay in it with you) but now your lack of focus and empathy expose how selfish you really are, which is far more than you ever thought or claimed.]
In my life, in my arms, and in my heart?
[I don't know any more. Even in the face of you telling and showing me for nearly ten years straight. / I never thought that you completed me, but I always felt like you filled in a lot of gaps, and soothed a lot of the hurts I had. If I'm ever able to let someone else get so close to me again, it will be a litteral fucking miracle or act of God.]


Do you know, my love,

How thankful I am?
[If I don't care or feel like it, does it even matter? / My gratitude was absolute, even if I was not always very good at expressing it or explaining it. Now I don't know why I ever bothered to try.]
That we met, that we are best friends, that we are lovers, that our hearts are inertwined, that you are my other half?
[Whatever I felt, doesn't matter now, and whatever you felt matters even less. / You were what I needed, when I needed it, even when I didn't realize I needed it. You were my best friend, the one person I trusted more deeply than any other on earth, and I could see, and feel the connection between us as if it was a tangible thing. Lie to yourself all you want but it was real damn you.]


Do you know, my love,

That I am so much more now, than I would be otherwise?
[You're less than, you're a childish abusive egotistical monster, selfish and ignorant, my family and the people I trust implicitly all say so, they were all right about you. / You once provoked me to be better than I was, you motivated me to know myself better, to push myself to dream again, to be a man, for myself, for you, and for us. It kept me sane, and alive whenever the darkness would sink it's hooks into me and try to drag me down, it healed my soul when it was bleeding out from the damage of others and this catastrophic event known as life would beat me down to a pulp. You made me dig deeper, believe that I could be a good man, a hero, even if only for you.]


Do you know, my love,

That I love you more than these words could ever properly express?
[I don't care anymore, your words mean nothing to me, your actions even less, all I care about is how I feel, what I've been told it means, I don't care if you misspeak, or struggle to articulate yourself, I'm tired of digging below the surface. / I never knew if you fully understood what all went on inside of me, all I ever really knew is that I would try, and you seemed to respond to the effort. Right up until you stopped responding at all, with anything other this exasperation and disgust.]
I know, and you know, and no matter what anyone else says or thinks or knows, we know, deep within our hearts, and that is all that matters.
[It doesn't matter anymore, I've made my choice, and I'm done with you. / You can believe all of the shit others tell you, ignore what you know is true, blind yourself to what has happened, to what we shared, what we had together, all that you want. But in the end, you are not likely to find lasting peace in mortgaging someone else's emotions and investments for what you think you want or need, based on the words of others who don't really know you, and have not seen you or poured into your life or cared about you, for as long as I have, in the way I have. We both know this, but it seems only I can still admit it.]


Live, Love, Endure,
~Caleb

~~~

There it is.

The thing is... The person you spend the most time on, is the person you care about most.
Right up until you left me, that person was always you Kristen.
But for you, even before you actually left me, that person clearly wasn't me.

You and I both know who it is.



Take from that, and my previous comments, what you will, that is if your head is on straight enough for you to not be freaked out by everything outside of your control again.

[Original Post: https://calebs-eyes.blogspot.com/2012/02/st-valentines-day.html]

Art predicting Life

The following is a monologue I learned in my second semester of college while taking Acting Theory I and it was used to grade me for my final.
I got an A.
It was spring of 2006 and I was 20 years old, in the single biggest gulf between relationships in my life, just months before I ended up in a retarded relationship with my former Jr. High crush/"Girlfriend", the girl who took my virginity at 15.

In hindsight I now realize that this monologue and that relationship, would set and/or predict the tone for my romantic life (if not my sex life it now seems) for the next... 14 motherfucking years...

Here's some NON original content for a change, chew on this and gossip you copper plated Canuck bitch, and you know who you are, and for everyone else, my final posts here will be pending, as I finalize my transitioning to my new blog, and refocus on my podcast (hosted on PodBean) and YouTube channel, and don't worry, links will be provided when appros.

~~~~~

"Phil" - Boys' Life - Howard Korder (1988)

"I would have destroyed myself for this woman. Gladly. I would have eaten garbage. I would have sliced my wrists open. Under the right circumstances, I mean, if she said, “Hey, Phil, why don’t you cut your wrists open,” well, come on, but if seriously…

We clicked, we connected on so many things, right off the bat, we talked about God for three hours once, I don’t know what good it did, but that intensity… and the first time we went to bed. I didn’t even touch her. I didn’t want to, understand what I’m saying.

And you know I played it very casually, because, all right, I’ve had some rough experiences, I’m the first to admit but after a couple of weeks I could feel we were right there, so I laid it down, everything I wanted to tell her, and… and she says to me… she says… “Nobody should ever need another person that badly.”

Do you believe that? “Nobody should ever…”! What is that? Is that something you saw on TV? I dump my heart on the table, you give be Dr. Joyce Fucking Brothers? “Need, need,” I’m saying I love you, is that wrong? Is that not allowed anymore?

And so what if I did need her? Is that so bad?

All right, crucify me, I needed her! So what! I don’t want to be by myself, I’m by myself I feel like I’m going out of my mind, I do. I sit there, I’m thinking forget it, I’m not gonna make it through the next ten seconds, I just can’t stand it. But I do, somehow, I get through the ten seconds, but then I have to do it all over again ‘cause they just keep coming, all these… seconds, floating by, while I’m waiting for something to happen, I don’t know what, a car wreck, a nuclear war or something, that sounds awful but at least there’d be this instant where I knew I was alive. Just once.‘Cause I look in the mirror, and I can’t believe I’m really there. I can’t believe that’s me. It’s like my body, right, is the size of, what, the statue of liberty, and I’m inside it, I’m down in one of the legs, this gigantic hairy leg, I’m scraping around inside my own foot like some tiny fetus. And I don’t know who I am, or where I’m going. And I wish I’d never been born.

Not only that, my hair is falling out, and that really sucks."

~~~~~

Well... at least MY hair isn't falling out, just going gray. Spinners and MILFs seem to love that shit, so maybe it's time to do some hard turnabouts and live like the other half for a bit...


With all due respect, to this most recent chapter in my life and every single one (two or three) of you who has been central to making 2019 the single worst year of my life, bless your hearts, and may you receive every single "good" and just thing you have planted into the fabric of reality this last year, this window of opportunity to do the right thing in this chapter has now closed, maybe it will open once more at a later date, but don't hold your breath, I know I won't, so for now kindly fuck off.

And for you Kristen... Well, you turned into your mother anyways it seems.
Cowardly or not, I can give you credit for this much:
In the end, unlike herself you at least had the guts to pull the trigger and double tap a 10 year relationship right in the heart. I just wish you'd had the honor and courage to do it to my face, not that it would have made it any easier, but I could have at least still respected you for that.

~Mac

(In)formal apology

I'm sorry.

Now that the linchpin is out in the open, everything that is held together by that, now needs to be unpacked.

In my life, I have learned that when a wrong is committed, the relational status between the people said wrong has happened, will then exist in one of two states: the first and far less common, is of little to no effect. For whatever reason, be it the nature of the wrong, the strength or age of the relationship, or even the wider context of events and circumstances, the mistake or transgression is easily ignored or forgiven with little to no need for any formal gestures or even acknowledgment.

The second, more common, and possibly more telling, is of some noticeable pause or shift. It is what should provoke some kind of gesture or admittance, which ideally would lead to some effort of restoration. As you can well understand of course, the world is not ideal, not by design, and not in anyway thanks to the people that live in it.


To that end, I have realized that my own failures in my marriage, were due to just a few surprisingly simple mistakes I was late in identifying, despite my constant efforts take responsibility for my mistakes, and my understanding that seeking peace and working at maintaining a dialogue are vital to any healthy relationship. I still to this day am entertained and amused to no end by the responses of others when I say I am sorry or take responsibility for something so quickly, or when I show a willingness to entertain the notion that I am mistaken, illinformed or ignorant about something.
People are always saying that I act like I know everything, or that I think I never fuck up, even when I have never in my life, ever made such claims, as underscored by my previously stated penchant for taking on the burden of responsibility or apology.

Much as I disdain doing so, much as I dislike being wrong or making mistakes, I was taught and exampled from a very young age by my late father, that the fastest and best way to learn and grow, and to gain favor and protect yourself, is to, as some have so eloquently put it; "Own your Shit" which I have also taken to the other extreme and applied to accepting credit when it is due, for excelling at something as well, but without hording or fluffing yourself up.

As my mother, now Ex-Wife, coworkers and so many countless others will likely testify to, one of my more madding traits is to seek out whatever good or positive there is, and contrast it with the bad and the negative in any situation. Maddening because I take a very hardline stance on understanding the context of something, and I demand that the reasoning and intent be acknowledged as well as the effect and the result.

Moreso since my entrance into the Security Field and the concept of "totality of circumstances" has been so brilliantly engraved upon my person. In simple form, this is the idea of finding the balance between the known, and the unknown.
Or as a long since late family friend once put it to my parents (and once to myself at a very young age) "all things being equal, even though they aren't, if you can come to the place where it really does not matter what choice you make, only then can you make an informed and reasonable decision."



All of this being said, I now address the rattlesnake in the living room...

From my own perspective, my marriage was ended by three things, beyond my control to effect, and to which I reacted to both too late, VERY poorly.

A lie (or rather more accurately, a lot of mistaken or malformed information and opinions), and a choice to not only believe said lie, but to abandon a relationship based upon that, and because of an inability to consider the idea that just because someone has a bunch of expensive letters after their name, does not automatically make them smarter than someone without.

In a word, this was a failure of trust.

I say this, with a sack of rock salt in hand, with the understanding that I do not have all of the information I need to make all things equal. But then no one I think ever really does. The question is if I have ENOUGH information to make any kind of decision at all. I honestly don't know if I do one way or the other, but a choice I must make, and thus take a stance, and so here it is.

Kristen, I apologize for my mistakes, my turning inwards in my depression, and my delay in addressing my issues, and your own. I am sorry I was not strong enough in both my moment of crisis as well as your own. And I am repentant in my panicked reactions to things I had inadvertently ignored or did not understand.

I was complacent, distracted, weak, hurt, overwhelmed and scared, and what is more, I hesitated and became passive when what I needed to do was push you, and myself to rise to the challenges that came upon us, instead I stood by until I was smacked in the face with the enormity of the circumstances I had allowed to form and fester in our life together, blaming things I could not effect, and not acting when and how I should have in the things I could.

It is not easy for me to say that, and it hurts, in some ways, more than the divorce does, if only because I think that it is in some central part, what provoked you into removing yourself from my life.

It is the only reason I can also forgive you for your failings of me.

Someday, I might articulate them, if only for the sake of fully fleshing out my acceptance and fully realising my part in them, but for now I will only say this, because I think it is vital you understand:

It was never about my and how I couldn't accept that asexuality is or is not a mental or physical health problem, it is the fact that you refused to exclude the investigation into your own physical or mental health and wellbeing to ensure that it was NOT.

As I said more than once, it was/is hard for me to reconcile our early physical relationship with the end of it. I do not understand how you could so readily accept the notion that because you had such low sex drive before we met and then again had such a low drive at the end of our marriage, it somehow meant you NEVER had a sex drive, which ignores the factors of your always fluctuating physical health and how it affected you in all things, or how you could so fully dismiss out of hand, my observations of this.

Beyond that, I will not say any more, as I have not the energy or will to even consider it right now.

Guess maybe I'm still a bit of a coward. I'll work on that.

~Caleb