Defenseless - 6-26-09

I love him, I love him, I love him. With each passing day that he holds himself away from me, I love him and face my helplessness. It’s been over two weeks since I’ve seen him, and sometimes, he takes on an air of unreality, like I conjured him out of my loneliness. But then I think of his quirks and flaws and know that I would never have made those up, and I feel almost a gratitude for those flaws, those differences from me – they mean he is real, that he exists.

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It is breathtaking – a little more of my breath stolen every day and not given back – to see how defenseless I am to him. Whatever he does to me, whatever comes of this trying time for him and for me, I am laid open, not even an inadequate hand to flutter protectively over my bared chest. I would give him everything. Everything. I love him, I love him, I love him. I love him so helplessly it is difficult in this shadowy time to use his name – it has too much power over me. There is at present too much potential for destruction in that name. His name is locked in my heart, branded there. I have two tattoos now – his name, like his scent and his voice and his mouth, has marked me for his.

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In the blessed intervals between my crippling uncertainty, my wobbly patience is laid over thickly and securely with my glowing conviction that he is mine. He was made for me. I am for him and I claim him. In this difficult time he is going through with his family, of which I know almost nothing and of which he shares nothing with me, I cover him with my love. I speak my love over him, wrap him up with it from my side of the ocean he filled with his doubts and his weariness. I protect him with that rare thing – my love, that which I have held from every other male I have ever known or tried to know. Will he ever know the crushing value of what I offer? Will he ever truly understand, should he ever take me in his arms again, what it is that he holds? He would have laid at his feet in silk and ribbons and patience and awareness the sum total of all this woman holds within herself. Worlds within worlds within worlds. A love that would burn for him and him alone. A lively brain and instinct for miles and a quick-learning wit. For all my flaws, I can love well and I can love long. His children are in me. Does he know this? Does the idea occur to him in unexpected flashes before he pushes it away in his uncertainty?

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Can all the wanting and almost awed wondering I saw in his eyes truly dissipate so quickly, so suddenly? It is rather debilitating to have gone for thirty years never being made to feel wanted and beautiful and finely made, innocent and good to be so, and then within a few weeks have all my defenses dashed in his open admiration and tender care, only to have it all sucked away into an unknown void like a star going supernova. It leaves me shaken and waiting and so silent and always wondering. My head hurts with all the questions. And all I am left with is prayer. It is all I can do.

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I spread my love over him like Boaz’ cloak over Ruth, claiming him and standing for him in all the unknowns that lash me. Surely my love and God’s love are enough to bring him through this and back to me. Surely this is not all to be wasted. Surely I was not laid open like Christmas turkey, utterly defenseless against him, after all these years, just to pray for him for a couple of weeks. Surely God is far more efficient than having to sacrifice an already teetering, dying heart that so easily came to life, for the sake of a man who could feel honestly before leaving just as honestly. Surely, all of this, all of the startling coincidences, all the tiny pieces snapped into place, all the love I was never able to give until this big, warm, kind man unlocked it with his inimitable scent – surely all those harmonious pieces are not to go dashing about the board with no hand to draw them back together again. Surely, surely, it must mean something that I, who has never come close to loving a man before, who stayed untouched for so long I came to think I was untouchable, have chosen, or been chosen, to love this man with all the heart, all the need and passion and purity, that I’ve been harboring for so many years.

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I was made for him. The fact that he cannot warrant how wonderful I find him shows that all the other women were wrong for him – not because they were bad or more flawed than me, but simply because they could not see him. I can see him, like I have the only set of lenses that can focus on him, or I’m the only one who speaks his language. I see him as so wondrous precisely because I can see him so clearly, as he cannot yet believe. He is a marvel, wrought by God’s own hands, just for me. He is for me, and no woman will ever be able to love him as I do. I think he is exhausted by stress on all fronts and scared of the quickness and surety of my love. I think he went on Match.com with the right idea of what he wanted, but didn’t realize he wasn’t ready for what that was to be dropped so quickly and easily into his lap. I think he was not prepared to be loved so well, or so truly, or so quickly. He does not know – as well as he knows me – how sure and true a thing like that is precisely because it’s me who is giving this to him. He knows but still doesn’t accept that it has never come close to happening for me before because he is the only one with the key.

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And so I keep grasping for faith where I have none, somehow finding bits and pieces of it that weren’t there before in the waves of love that sweep over me. I love him. I love him, I love him, I love him. And someday, this torture of wanting what doesn’t want me will be over and I will be truly loved back.

Is It Coming? - 6-24-09

Oh, God, I don’t want to hurt anymore. I don’t want to call this into existence, but I have such a feeling in me. I don’t quite recognize it. What is this expansive, airy horror, this great big, still, spreading thing? I think it’s fear. Fear of the coming pain if what I am afraid is true is, indeed, true. It’s the anticipation of the agony. It’s seeing the torturer coming, seeing the despair in the distance that has no obstacles to stop it from reaching me. After so many years of pain and despair and loneliness, barely making it through sometimes, I can’t bear the promise of more of it. I’m afraid of the pain. I can hear the boots ringing out as they come for me, the sound of the key in the lock, the grating of the door. I’m so afraid of the pain that could be coming for me. It’s going to hurt so much.

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And my heart will not break. It will not rip or tear or fall apart. It will merely shrink back, lose the volume it took with love. It will take on the hardness of porous coal or the tough stringiness of a piece of gristle. And I may not even cry. Thirty years of being alone trumps a few glorious weeks of being in love and feeling safe and whole and free. And I will not speak of it to my friends or to my parents. I will not even speak of it to myself. It will be as if he never existed. And if this love does end in pain as it must if it does end, then I, who has valued even pain and trial for the truth of the experience, will say it would have been better never to have loved, never to have met him and seen the locked door of my dreams creak open at last to shower me with the warmth and light of possibility. A few weeks of love are not worth more pain after a lifetime of it. And I will survive and not weep and have nowhere to go from the pain of the loss. And no one will see the crack. Because there will be no crack. You can’t be alone for thirty years and not have learned how to be alone again. Force of habit.

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But oh, God, please, I don’t want to hurt. Please say you will not go from my side, that you will not leave me for one moment if this comes to pass. Bring him the love he is looking for, peace and joy and wisdom in his every decision. Fill him up with life and hope and faith. I love him, I love him, I love him. Does it make any difference that I love him? I love him. I lift him up to you and pray that he makes the right decision and has unprecedented wisdom straight from your head. Oh, give him the life he deserves. He is so wonderful and so honorable and worthy of such respect. Show him the path to what he wants, even if it is away from me. And should it indeed lead him away from me, shore up my heart to bear the reasons for it from his mouth, and please don’t leave me in the echoing silence left in his wake. I am afraid of the pain.

Pulling Away - 6-17-09

I wish he would come to me now. I wish he would take me into his arms and murmur to me that he wants me, that he wants only me, that he will want me for the rest of his life. I want him to listen to me, to hear my need, and to tell me he wants me to belong to him and him alone. I want to be wanted, more than anything he has ever wanted. I want to be loved.

The Unthinkable! - 5-1-09

Oh, my God. I can’t believe it. I am in love. It has actually happened. This is not one of those numerous visualization entries. This is happening now, this day. It is here.

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His name is B____ M____, and he is me, in pants. We already share half a brain. And what makes this so incredible, aside from the obvious, is that a matter of days ago, I had no idea he actually existed. Then he found my profile on Match.com and emailed me and the rest will be history.

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And the kicker is that I haven’t even met him in person yet. We’re going on our first date tomorrow night. I have fallen in love with his mind, his personality, his character. And he ain’t bad-looking, either, I can tell you that! He is funny as hell, honest, decent, clever, funny, ambitious, kind, gentlemanly, funny, chivalrous, mature, easy-going, grounded, and funny. He is a lawyer who is in it to help people. Our jobs are so similar. He can really understand my situation. He’s been there, but he, like me, is at heart an optimist, always wanting to believe the best in people.

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He has so many of the qualities I wanted in a man. He has a large, close-knit family locally based, he makes a good living and probably could support me. He is all the qualities I mentioned above and the most amazing thing is that from talking on the phone with him, I truly think he would not only understand my values and my virginity, but value it as I do. It didn’t come up, of course, but it’s a definite comfort I have in that regard. And as a prosecutor for Newport News (ironically he works a few miles away from me), he deals with violent crimes all day, so I would imagine he would truly value my innocence, my inexperience, my virginity as an antidote to what he deals with all day long. I always wanted to be that for someone, but never thought to articulate it, even to myself. He also is concerned about me working in that part of town. He said, “I don’t even know you, but I just want to give you a hug! You shouldn’t be working there!” And I felt all warm inside. He is protective already. He really would be good at taking care of me, and at the same time, he is cool and easy-going and doesn’t give the impression at all that he would be intimidated by my smart, independent side.

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B____ is 6’5”, 210 lbs, size 15 shoe. He never put himself down, which is a real turn-off for me, but he clearly has a sense of humor about it. But I love it. I love that he’s so much bigger than me. Already, though his voice and his emails, I feel surrounded, protected, and safe.

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I am amazed. I am just astounded. My cheeks have been hurting for two days because I can’t stop smiling – grinning, more like. I couldn’t help myself – I told my friends, and they could all see how giddy and grinning and happy and giggling I was. I can’t wait to be able to go public with him, with all my friends and family – they will fall in love with him. He’s just so sweet and outgoing and smart and funny and good! And even though I told myself I’d wait till I had actually, you know, met the guy before telling people about him or saying I was in love – I couldn’t. from everything I know of being in love, even though I’ve never been in love before, this is it. I have never felt this.

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And like another visualization entry, I am so looking forward to tomorrow night. B____ just makes me so comfortable. I’m not nervous at all. I keep thinking, in fact, “Do I have to wait all day till I see him?” Now that is astounding.

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What’s so great is that my friends who have known me the longest, Analiese, Annie, Rachel, and of course Jessica, all really know how big this is. They know how significant it is that I, who have never made the first move, was the one to give B____ my personal email, then my number. I was the one who actually said we should hang out. And I’m glad. I’m glad that first move was me because it really showed me how natural this felt.

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I’m like all those people who are in love whom I always just watched before. I check my email constantly, grin and giggle at the thought of his hilarious emails, daydream about him. Ever since yesterday morning – God, was it just yesterday? – when I read his email where he said “Everybody’s Changing” by Keane is one of his all-time favorite songs and I flippantly called my mother on my way to work that I had to marry this man – ever since that moment, I was gone. He is the one. The One. He is my husband. I’m now thinking about the wedding, the kids, the family holidays where I’ll knock this take-out-raised kid’s socks off with my cooking. I won’t tell him all this yet of course. But he’s just as into me, I can tell. He took his profile off Match.com right after we talked on the phone last night for the first time, and he called me “hon” in another email which made me want to dance a little jig. He is not looking anywhere else, but he’s not rushing me. He’s genuinely content just to get to know me and go at my own pace. Amazing. Unbelievable. Miraculous. I think I may just get a fall 2009 wedding after all.

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I actually woke up last night – after taking 3 melatonin – at 2:45 from thinking about him! He woke me up! I am in love. Honestly, if he asked me to marry him tomorrow night on our first date, I’d say yes. I’m in love. I’m in love!

I Have Become Faust - 4-7-09

This won’t be a long entry. All of it is gone so this is just paper and ink and has become a job. I have put off journaling even though there is much that needs to be recorded because it’s just so much work. So I will leave off meticulous detail and poignant words – if I could even find them in the first place, which is doubtful.

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Zoloft is quite effective. I didn’t notice much that first week of half-doses but by the time I was on full doses, it became exponentially easier to do my job with a quiet voice, a smile, and gentle eyes. The only thing is it took all the rest of me away. In order to do my job, my life drained away into those little blue pills. I didn’t feel drugged, exactly; I wasn’t a zombie. To all eyes, I seemed to return to the old Nicole and on several levels that was precisely true. But to keep me from feeling the bad things too much, the medicine kept me from feeling anything too much. And it kept me from really minding. It was with a distant concern I noticed this and kept my mouth shut except when I was taking these pills. Because it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter than I no longer missed the runs, neglected my journal, and had to real desire to write. None of that mattered in the face of what I gained – I could do my job and whether I was no longer miserable or couldn’t feel the misery in any case, I couldn’t really care. I had to face the reality that I would need to be on this medication for as long as I had this job, as long as I was in this profession. I would have no soul indefinitely.

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Because that is what it really boils down to. All those things that made me me, everything that made my heart flutter with anticipation and my muscles flex with satisfaction was gone from me. Price for sanity? One soul. Well, isn’t that perfect. That’s exactly what I have to offer. What a Faustian bargain.

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Days passed and my writing languished. This journal was never opened. The one or two times I went running, I was going on fumes of remembered glory and anticipation only to be gutted when I saw yet again all the garish orange lights at my marina. They took my sanctuary, my destination from me. The loss crippled me, squeezed the breath right out of my chest. But I didn’t cry. The pills take that from me, too. I don’t remember the last time I cried, let alone wept. Incomplete tears and half-gasped sobs were all my body could manage for the terrible loss of my marina.

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How high is too high a cost to do your duty? To survive this job, everything of meaning has been carved away from me, a pound of flesh. They took my meaning away in my writing and my purpose away in my running, for what is the point of running if you have nowhere to run to?

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But I begin to suspect that it is not just the medication. Now that it is Spring Break, I cannot afford to let this precious freedom pass without writing. I cannot just sit by and lose myself in movies and computers when I could be creating. So I whittled my doses back to half a pill a day last week and then stopped taking it altogether as the week came to a close. True, I didn’t notice the Zoloft take effect till after about a week so maybe it’s too early to tell the effect of cessation. But I suspect with each passing unchanging day that maybe the medication only brought to the fore the truth – maybe this job, this year, truly has changed me. Maybe I am not unscathed and I really have paid the toll instead of inching by with my hand on my wallet. Maybe pieces of me really are missing and can’t be recovered. Maybe I will never have my running or my writing again. Maybe I will always bear these scars that no one seems to notice because people only see what they want to see. Maybe I am a broken toy and have lost those pieces of me that make me work, all in order to make a living. But there’s a big difference in being alive and making a life.

"Suicidal Patient"?! - 2-27-09

I went to Dr. Palting today. I’ve never been a “suicidal patient” before. It’s an honor I’ve managed to skirt. Not sure I like it much now it’s caught up with me. That’s how the nurse put it when she was on the phone making an appointment for me with counseling services. I overheard words I knew I would never forget, that dropped into my chest cavity one by one like lead musket balls: “I have a suicidal patient. She’s actually attempted suicide.”

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They are wrong, but I suppose that is just semantics. The cutting I specified turns into suicide implied. It’s all the same to them. I understand.

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But what a weight on me at those words, seeing the wary alarm in their eyes that I had wanted to avoid – this choice colors all lenses, tints all glasses that people will squint through trying to see me.

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I did not attempt suicide, nor have I ever, but it was close enough not to matter. Who would understand that my parents have chained me here with their blinding love to ever leave such an option open to me? Who can know that a couple of cuts and the soft thought of permanent escape is all I can ever have when it gets this bad? There are some times when thoughts don’t lead to actions.

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But oh, what anxiety is in me now at this label. And it is so ironic that life had begun to turn for me. The irony of my life will be the death of me one day. After Rachel called me and my dad spent the day with me the next day for Valentine’s Day, I began to feel normal for the first time in a long time. The numbness had cracked and splintered like a spring thaw. And in a whoosh, the writing I had been hunching over with all this pain informing it exploded to take the place of my burdensome reality, and all of a sudden it became my reality, my true reality. My writing was my bliss and I was good at it. It was my true vocation, my real job, and without warning, those loathed hours at school seemed to take on the look and feel of a thin, watery film I could poke my finger through. I had joy again, good feelings, certainty in my future. I was going to write and write and write, every night, at work, on the weekends. I was going to write because I had to. And wonder of wonders, I was able to go into work on Monday morning and all that week with a perfect peace. This was not my life. My writing – that was my life. I was going to get published. It was miraculous! All the storm clouds had split apart and the sweet moon was spilling through. I was happy. God, it stunned me. I even began to wonder if I needed to go to the doctor. Would I waste my time and money on medication I didn’t need?

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Then as if in answer to my query, last Sunday night, I had a startling drop into the old dread at the thought of going in the next day and deal with all the behaviors and all the work and all the crap. It took my breath away because it was so unexpected. I gasped with the sudden tears because I had been so certain that I had had more than a week in me. And where before I hadn’t journaled to chronicle this miracle because I was too busy writing stories, now I walked past my journal because I didn’t want to have to write of that glorious change in the past tense.

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I calmed down and my chest unclenched but it answered my question. I couldn’t trust any unaided good feelings in the maelstrom I was navigating through.

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So I kept on with my writing, having to take a couple of days away from it to just watch a movie and cross-stitch, because as lovely as my second job was, I was still working two jobs. And I put in leave for today’s doctor’s appointment. Good thing I didn’t take a half-day. I’m between appointments now, scribbling away with a heavy heart before my emergency counseling appointment. At least it’s a woman I’m seeing. I just don’t want to have to unearth my whole dating history and mindset and motivations like I did with Dr. Rabinowitz. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Not that I mind the subject matter – it’s just so complicated, I’d have to untangle it for someone outside my own head. But it’s a big part of it. While I think it might be a relieving thing to tell someone everything, I sigh inwardly and gird my loins. I am a suicidal patient after all. I wonder if I should have just lied about the cutting to the nurse and Dr. Palting. I hate to lie; it itches, sits wrong on my skin. But honestly is sticky – I’ve been burned before by it. I truly think if I just got the medication I’d be fine. I don’t think I need counseling. But it’s out of my hands now, isn’t it?

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I had just been starting to feel normal again, not so broken anymore. I have been emailing with this guy on Match.com, with dad giddy over my shoulder. He makes me laugh in his emails and he doesn’t make me nervous. And when I feel broken, I just don’t see how I get started with him. When I feel normal and just ready to feel good and all my defenses are gone, I don’t feel any anxiety about him. He may be the One, he may not. I’m not thinking ahead. I just want someone to make me feel good, feel safe. You make me feel good, I’m yours. Simple as that. But now, this thing is hanging over me, this label, this diagnosis or whatever it is. And again I wonder if any man would want someone with these scars?

Visualization Entry - Hey, You - 2-27-09

Hey, you. I’m so glad to see you, to feel things I feel when I’m close to you. You’re here with me, and it’s all all right. My bones are loose and my muscles slack. My walls are rubble around me and it feels so nice. I’m here, with you, and it’s all all right. You make me feel good. I’m not broken with you. You see me, more of me each day, and make me feel so safe with your eyes on me. I’m floating free, no longer holding my limbs close to my body, no more defenses. You see everything and you’re still there. You don’t see anything wrong with me, no broken toy soldier but a lovely china doll. I’m lovely and seamless and whole, and I’m here with you.

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My eyes rest on you, on your sweet face, your jaw and hand, the shadows in your eyes that hide me. You’re all around me and it’s all all right.