WTFWJD?

I wish I had more to say today, but I just don’t. I’m going to try and pull out feelings, but mostly today I’ve been asleep. I am not ignoring the fact that I don’t have a job, but I am also not ignoring that it’s nice not to have one in the midst of recovering from the worst thing that has ever happened in my world… and my world was broken before. My mother dying is just the latest thing that’s happened. In fact, my landlady and my adopted family speak of it, and not in hushed tones (blessedly), but straight to my face. They believe I have endured so much, and this is just the shitty icing on the burnt cake.

Let’s review, shall we?

Dana and I broke up in Feb. 2015, after having broken up in 2013 for approximately an hour and a half… not knowing why I couldn’t make it stick, but I couldn’t, so that the denouement was painful and slow until it was traumatic. It seems cruel to have asked her to pick up her life and move with me to Houston and then break up with her, but she had enough of her own money that she could have done whatever she wanted. I did not feel like I was making her stay anywhere, or that I would have left her out in the cold had she had none of her own resources. In fact, if I’d been the one with the large sum of money, I would have given it to her, because my heart was broken but my brain wasn’t… Just because I couldn’t continue to be married to her didn’t mean that all my friendship neurons disappeared. To me, being friends and being married were just different commitments, and I did not want to break both… at first.

I broke up with her because she had once again, broken my confidentiality with something I specifically told her to keep quiet… a repeating pattern in my own life with Argo, because Argo thought I couldn’t keep my trap shut and simultaneously said to make sure Dana read everything so she’d know that Argo wasn’t at fault for anything… that those “in love with her mind” feelings were mine to deal with and were not reciprocated, which was how I felt about the matter. I was never deluded into thinking that they were until Dana called my attention to it (repeatedly), and because she was someone I trusted implicitly, I later thought she might be right (she was, in fact, not). Those “in love with her mind” feelings WERE my shit to deal with and I did, quite successfully, once I was out of the tug-of-war Dana thought they were having (and were, in fact, not).

The fact that Argo told me to tell Dana everything didn’t stick in my mind. The notion that I’d hurt Argo on purpose because she told me I did stuck like glue. The fact that she did not put any constraints on “tell her everything” was lost on me, and if I’d put more thought into it than I did, I would have realized that saying “tell her everything” did not render past confirmation of confidentiality null and void… nor did I realize that when she said “this goes no further than here,” that meant Dana, too. Because, as I have learned since, it’s ok to have friends apart from your partner, to share secrets that deserve honesty, but always respect. I didn’t know that then, because I’d never had a friend like that before.

It wasn’t about isolating me from Dana, it was about our relationship being separate from my marriage, and that wasn’t a bad thing. Dana and I didn’t always have to come as a package deal, and the fact that I thought we did was in itself inherently in my worst interest… not with Argo… with all my friends.

It stripped me of my ability to see myself as a complete entity unto myself, lost without my other half. That’s probably the biggest reason I haven’t dated anyone since. I don’t want to give up my independence, and want to make sure that I have healthy coping mechanisms for continuing to be self-sufficient in a relationship as well as I do without one. Because there are no more package deals. The two-for-one special isn’t always going…

So it was a nasty breakup and World War Me with Argo as we’ve gone through so many extreme highs and lows, both willing to forgive an enormous amount of shit right up until we couldn’t anymore. Neither of us should be willing to stay no matter how bad it gets, hoping against hope that it will get better when we’ve seen no evidence of it. The things she’s said to me run through my mind constantly in a good way, memories as opposed to creating a future, because the future does not render past laughs invalid.

I keep a small flame of hope alive that one day there will be this great redemption story, because to not is to think contrary to who I am. There is always redemption, even in the middle of disaster. I don’t think that way because of how she feels, but because I am a Christian, and I would be really bad at my faith if I didn’t see resurrection in all things, and I refuse to walk around in Good Friday. I want to be one of the Easter people in what is seemingly a Good Friday world.

In my own mind, it is Holy Saturday, a constant vigil for everything I’ve lost because I don’t know that the resurrection is even a thing, as the Disciples didn’t, either. I have one advantage over them knowing that resurrections do indeed happen all the time, but in this case, I cannot search for what it might be because I am not through crying and tearing my clothes over the many Good Fridays that have happened in a relatively short amount of time.

I just have to remember that they didn’t happen to me. I participated in the end of my relationships with both Dana and Argo, and my mother didn’t die because I didn’t love her enough. It happened of its own accord. In this case, it isn’t about me, and to think so is to encourage ego to get in the way. I am not the center of the universe.

However, I am responsible for my tiny part.

Speaking of which, on Sunday I am singing “ballsetto,” because we’re doing an anthem that requires tenors we don’t have. I think I’m going to go up to the church and work on the part, because I was doing ok with a strong tenor next to me at choir and when he wasn’t singing with me, I couldn’t immediately find where I was supposed to be (we do have tenors, they’re just not going to be there on Sunday). When you’re used to reading the top line, reading the third one down gets tricky at page turns, and in this particular piece, the accompaniment is no help. I’m hoping that by doing the work on Saturday, I might even be able to look up at the conductor once in a while.

I just wish I had a horrible cold, because it makes my low Fs come out so nicely.

Maybe I should go to a cigar bar tomorrow night. Nothing turns a soprano into a tenor faster than a Macanudo.

It’s also casual Sunday, which means we’re not wearing robes. I wish I still had my WTFWJD? T-shirt.

Because at this point, that’s really all I have to say.