In a humid fog I sat across the picnic table from Joe on Friday afternoon after having been pressured persuaded to give him another opportunity to hear me and my side of the break up story.
My noted resistance and anger towards him and his request is rooted now, lush. Steamy, muggy, sweaty, vibrant anger. Oh yes, I cheated on him. This we know. This is punishable. And my punishment is a complete loss of identity in the breaking apart of our life lived together.
Joe asks me to give him my “side of the story” again because his pain “isn’t the only one that matters.” I tell him how repugnant it is to be truthful to him and watch him pathologically ignore my words. I told him I feel like I’m not allowed to be a real person. I told him that his story in his head matters more to him than my reality.
He didn’t stop pushing. He couldn’t recognize that I’ve said all of this already, repeatedly. He can’t see that he listens to me speak and ignores it all. He sees only that he doesn’t have satisfactory answers to his questions. He speaks the talk-therapy lingo he’s recently acquired. He speaks in emotional one-liners, simulated solemnity, like he’s directing his own role as Heartbroken Self-Knowing Hero.
I agreed, reluctantly, to meet him after work on Friday for one final attempt at a conversation in which there was room for both of our truths.
And so I met him in the bright glaring sun, opened myself again, and in an instant he struck. Immobile, I watched the girl shrink and hide, taken back to the hot summer night when she sat shivering at the foot of his mother’s bed while his mother spat and hissed, venom seething, her body wracked with hatred. Poison. Poisonous. Cruelty is inherited.
I left. Disturbed by his total passivity in the face of the “permanent damage” I’ve inflicted on him, his newly acquired “abandonment issues, trust issues” for which he has given me all the credit. Disturbed more by his instability and talk-therapy-ism’s than by his distorted, hateful view of me.
Petulant, bitter little boy. Storming up the stairs of our home, “You’re making me do this” yelled in protest of a conversation not going his way. Beating a steering wheel, beating a futon, beating a wall.
That’s right, you don’t have any responsibility. It’s all me. All because of me. You’re not driving; I am. I’m responsible for you. I’m responsible for your actions and attitudes and scars. You’re not a sum of your experiences; you’re a sum of mine.
What capacity I have. What inefficacy you have. Such cruelty exists in place of your lack of capability. Such culpability you heap on my shoulders; so much power you give me.
And now I really am a bitch. And you really are weak. But who’s responsible for that?
Oh, let me guess: I am?
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell. -Oscar Wilde
