Tonight is the first night of Spring that is rainy and over 40 degrees, and thus the night when salamanders wake from their winter burrows driven by lust to travel great distances to bright vernal pools to fuck.
Thursday night the spring peepers and the wood frogs were out, the cacophony of spring in sudden shouting orgy in the vernal pools in the hills. Joined tonight by the salamanders. All driven by lust, by the need to fuck, to mate, and more importantly, the cause to live.
I know what it feels like. To have lived in hibernation, in stasis, in my own deep burrow, going nowhere for 12 years. And then, suddenly, awake, driven by inexplicable desire to do what seems natural, what seems essential, in order to live. To travel far through the mud and the muck, across uncertain terrain, under the threat of predation, to find that clear spring pool, to find that other creature, also driven inexplicably to that same place, to be the end to each others journey, and mate. To be gloriously alive, together.
M is, however, unhappy with me, tonight. She hates G, who inventively and sneakily tries to find ways to engage me, even negative ways, her own form of continuous low-level torture. I told M that G likes to fight like M likes to fuck. Each has her own language of intimacy. Unfortunately for one, I don't like to fight, and fortunately for the other, I do love to fuck.
But M is frustrated with me because I don't stand up to G in ways that M would. M literally threw her last gf out, changed the locks, and got a court order of protection. But I am not M. Perhaps I am just weaker, perhaps I am full of mistakes, perhaps if righteousness required that I simply and unceremoniously tossed G and her things out I would opt for half-righteousness (a cruel joke in my mind between being assed and half-assed, perhaps) - even as I angrily and desperately want G to stop trying to engage me and wish she would let it go. Perhaps I am not hard enough or strong enough to be abrupt, though G would aver that I have been as bitterly abrupt as ending a 12 year relationship is wont to be. I am clearly a disappointment to G, as I see I am now clearly a disappointment to M as well, in this regard. And now I feel as if I have failed twice.
This is hard, this working out how to create a new relationship that is not tainted by the poison of the last. And perhaps this is that great caveat about not starting a new relationship until the last is dead and gone. But like all things in my life, I apparently need to do things in my own way, driven at times by an inexplicable urging, the desire to follow a path that may not be the shortest or the surest, but is my path. I hope M does not give up on me, but I understand if she does. The world, like this night, is filled with hundreds of thousand of salamanders who have found their way to bright vernal pools, and with hundreds of thousands, lost and broken, who have not.
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You’ll Get What’s Coming
4 weeks ago
3 comments:
You are two different people with two different personalities and it sounds as if jealousy is rearing it's ugly head to boot.
Crack through those arguments now because if you don't learn to negotiate, they will sprout up sooner rather than later.
Sit down and talk. Get it over with and figure out what your approach will be and then do it. You don't want this set of problems to follow you into the relationship.
Yes, we are two very different people (I assume you mean M & me), and after this very difficult interaction (reeling from which I wrote the post and she read it) we talked. It is, frankly, what we do best. And this ability to talk through some very significant differences in our personalities and styles, this shared belief that what separates this relationship from each of our past relationships is our ability and our courage to talk, is the glue that keeps us together through many daunting and difficult challenges.
I am not usually one to give into a low point, but I guess breaking up with one person and beginning a new relationship with another, in such overlapping order, is sometimes a bit too much stress, even for me. And I do wish to mindful of the stress this puts on M, as well.
And I agree that it is always important to face issues, and never to set them aside for "later" unless later is the next morning & you know that you are both committed to being there together. I suspect the success in a relationship is not that you never fight or fail at times (human nature), but how you recover and heal and mend together. We become stronger with each hurdle we help each over. My relationship with M is more conscious and intentional than any I think I have ever been in before, and know this is true for her as well.
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment, I do appreciate your thoughts and advice.
so beautifully written. i hope m will see your point of view. you are a tender soul and patient. this fine quality will someday benefit m as well as g. as long as you are safe, i hope m will not be so hurt and will see this as the lovely, transformative thing it is. good luck to you both :)
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