Strangled

I feel the specter of strangulation looming over me. The dark hands of loving you.

I keep trying to figure out what it is that upsets me so much. This thing I cannot put a finger on, this feeling that we are not the kind of couple I want us to be, or I want for me and an other half in my life.

I know that with you, we will always be the negotiable factor and secondary in your life. The one that can be put aside first until things settle down, which in my mind will be never, or at least until our parents leave this earth and our family members are settled in their own lives.

Maybe it is wrong for me to think that way. Maybe I shouldn't ever expect too much from a relationship with another woman, or a woman like you.

Maybe I am just impatient.

Maybe, I was not made to share my life with someone. Or that you and Creature are right, and that I can only be with someone who can remain committed to me wholeheartedly - and the truth is that no one can meet that standard.

I do not want you to be unhappy. I think I can actually be happy on my own, free from the encumbrances of someone else's family.

What is it that makes me so insecure about us? Maybe it is the way I feel, solely, that causes this rift.

I don't know anymore.

All I know is that without you, I feel freeer, unfettered, and calmer.

Your presence only serves to provoke all sorts of negative feelings and thoughts that I don't want to have, but can't help.

I am so tired. Tired of fighting and feeling this way and trying to battle my own feelings because they are not right. At least according to you.

I need to drown out the white noise. Last night I spread myself out on the large bed, and actually enjoyed sleeping alone. Without you. I slept well, you were in my dreams, on the fringes. Just like I feel you are in my life.

We are separate units. Not one. I don't know how to explain that to you, because your definition of togetherness is different. It is not something I agree with at all.

I don't know if I want that in my life. Really.

Detachment

In my fourth decade, there have been interesting lessons of and for the self.

I now know that being alone does not mean I need to be isolated. It is okay and well within the rules of aloneness to share company with someone - be they in the same room or virtually. It is also okay not to.

I am still a little amazed that I actually now enjoy my own company more than I can remember in recent memory. While I was, as a child, a loner, come teenagehood I craved company. Being alone became a terrifying prospect. I didn't know what to do with myself, beyond killing time until the next person came along to fill the void.

Now, with Tigger in my life, and the circumstances of our un-togetherness, I have discovered that there are many periods of time when I actually do not want her around. When she goes away, I meld to my home or my surroundings better, senses both calmer and heightened. I feel lighter and happier with myself.

I have often now questioned what this means. Do I not love her? Or do I simply just not love her enough?

Or, do I think I do not love her because loving, all this while to me, has meant constant togetherness, without which love becomes too painful to bear?

In the past, I would not have tolerated the absences that I now face. Even now, I wonder how this will all hold together. This lack of clear finish lines to the absence, the ever-changing goal posts of when we will finally share a real home together, where responsibilities are shouldered in halves and not wholes.

But speaking to a friend from across the world, and watching my sister periodically mourn her absent husband have made me wonder whether loving needs rules after all. Today, jobs and financial practicalities that beset the price of living mean loving sometimes needs to happen in two places. Over space and time. Without the ability to reach out and physically touch each other.

Funny how technology in a way, has played a role in reviving the old-fashioned romance of lovers enduring the trials of long separations. While Skype and mobile phones mean we can now be closer than ever to people far away, it has also meant couples now tolerate the notion of being apart more. It's okay, because we can Skype every day.

But is it really? What has happened to the notion of going through the drudgery of daily life side by side? The changing of diapers, cooking of meals, bathing of dogs and shopping of groceries in each other's company, bitching about each other's bosses at a communal kitchen table over a short-cooked dinner - when does the absence of these little things begin to erode the sense of a shared and unified life?

I am staying tuned for answers. All in good time, I presume. After all, there is nothing else or little choice left but to let everything run its course.

So Close

Now that I am so close to our old dream, I think of you from time to time and how things have changed.

I wonder how you feel now, knowing that all this was actually really, truly within our grasp.

It's weird. I don't know at times, whether I do wish we had stayed together or not.

I know it could have worked and I could have been happy, but I also realise there were a lot of pre-conditions, or maybe just one. That you could be happy too. And the truth is I think you were not happy with me in the end. I was perhaps the only one in love for some time.

Wow, that just sort of hit me square in the eyes right then as I wrote it.

There it is. I loved you, but you didn't love me, at least not in the end.

You loved the life you had with me. But you were not in love with me anymore. Or perhaps never was.

Unlike her. She is in love with me in the most ordinary way. The way that assumes a togetherness, a pairing of two souls that is unquestionable. Just like married folk. I didn't have to teach her, really. She just understood and assumed. Like it was the most natural thing. And perhaps it actually is, except I had become so used to the way you and I existed that I thought I was the only person who believed in togetherness despite the lack of a marriage certificate.