So where have I been? I've been hanging out, wondering.
You know how people will say, "I was thinking in my mind," as if they do their thinking, on other occasions, while utilizing some other organ (we all know what organ men are thinking with most of the time, but I guess some people do their thinking with, I don't know, their elbow or something)? I usually make fun of this, when I hear other people say it, but this time it's me, and I'm saying it: I was thinking in my mind (rather than with my fucked up heart) the other day, and I came to this conclusion, which will mean nothing to any of you, but means a lot to me:
Drew, the man I didn't marry, or Patrick, the man I did marry, would never act toward me the way any of the other lusts/loves of my life did. Both of them are pretty darned good guys. Patrick: the best. Certainly both of them are better at this "person" business than I am. Granted, I don't know what Drew has been up to since we broke up, but I'd bet money he hasn't changed, as Jane Austen might put it, in essentials. I don't need to know about it or anything, I'm just saying that I have a feeling that guy doesn't know how lucky he was to get away. And Patrick? I could stand to have more of Patrick's goodness rubbing off on me (that sounds dirty. I did not intend for it to sound dirty!) for another 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 years.
I'm a lucky girl, when you think about it.
Yes: think about it. Maybe in your mind, maybe with your big toe.
OK, so maybe I can give a little background on this: at this weekend's garage sale (I made $40, and then I went and spent $55 at Target), I was playing Scrabble with my mom and her friend Margie. We set it up on the driveway, so we could keep an eye on our sale. By the end of the morning, the "hordes" of shoppers had dispersed (actually, very early in the day, we did have hordes. Hordes of fucking cheapskates, yes, but there were many of them), so we had plenty of time to sit and play (I won, in spite of my mom's awesome "cleansers"). Margie, whose own two daughters have had one unsuccessful relationship after another (respectively), was asking questions about Drew, and wanted to know what the story was.
So I sort of opened up a tiny bit - I said more than my mom has ever heard me say on this subject. I talked about what a good person he was and how much I loved his family, and how nice they all were to me. Then my mom threw in that she felt sorry for him when I canceled the wedding and everything. Which I did not know. That she felt sorry for him - that was a surprise. And then I said, well, I felt sorry for him too. And Margie goes, "so why didn't you marry him then?" (This attitude, that one should marry someone because you feel sorry for them, is a bit illuminating, vis-a-vis her daughters' multiple unsuccessful relationships!) And my mother answered for me. She looked at me, there on the driveway, at an old rickety card table, under the bright July sun, and she said, "Because she didn't love him."
I have never said anything like that to my mom, or anybody, actually. "I didn't love him" are words I never say. Maybe I say, "I didn't love him enough," or I make a joke about making his life a living hell, but to put it that bluntly? I never do it. It was kind of scary - I almost felt like all my secrets, all the shit I never tell my mom because I don't want her worrying or praying for me, or nagging me - all that stuff was out there on the card table (which is of course what card tables are for, is it not?). Of course it wasn't really, and my mom will never see my true self (because I may be heartless, but I'm not crazy), but I have to say, it was a really serious, true moment without any of our usual bullshit, and I felt totally weird about it for a long time.
And maybe I still do.
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