"Dear M" first draft, unfinished

Dear M,
Go fuck yourself.

No no that will never work. I don’t think I really think I felt that way anyway.

Dear M,
I wish I never met you.

Sometimes I feel that way. But it’s probably not exactly true either.

Dear M,
Are you fucking nuts?

That is far more suitable, though only because she left me. Leaving me may have been the only thing that showed she had any fucking sense at all. Among all the reasons we could have theoretically worked well together there are at least as many reasons why we can’t seem to. And that is not including the symptomatic behavior of belittling each other, being mean, shouting yelling, distrusting, arguing over everything, never seeing eye to eye, and of course, the classic punching myself in the head syndrome.
Yup somewhere along the line last fall I began regularly punching myself in the head. It’s a behavior that became more and more frequent and intense. I first would do it on Sundays, withdrawing from nicotine, when I quit smoking for a few months. Then I started doing it in arguments, and then, eventually, at the slightest thing that appeared to be the entrance to an argument, I’d give myself a good slugging. At some point all I had to do was roll my lips in my teeth and M's face would drop to terror and disapointment knowing I was about to punch the crap out of myself.
I could have picked another spot like a leg or my chest, like an ape. But no, the face and head harnessed the best results. What ever feeling I was looking for, that was somewhere in the family of a suicidal tendency, was in my face and head, slaps, full on punches, a barrage of ones and twos on the ol’ noggin rocked out for the moment. Such an act quickly turns every situation into a bad one. But I guess, somewhere in my mind, the whole deal, each day and each moment were weaved into one timelessly bad situation.

I’m not saying I have permanent damage, but the right side of my head pretty regularly feels funny, kinda like swelling or that something is wrong with my eye. But as far as I can tell nothing is wrong, at least my vision seems ok.

I guess I did all this because the whole thing was fucked up. Maybe it should have never happened, the marriage and all. I think she probably feels the same way. Maybe she doesn’t, who knows the fucking truth. My friends like to think she’s fucking nuts and I agree on some things, mostly how she sees reality. Her world view and her view of what is actually happening resists a bit of logic. But not everyone can see things realistically Again this opinion has little to do with blame for leaving me. And Again, that decision was probably quite sound. Someone had to have the balls to admit it wasn’t going to work. Evidence of M's lack of logic is in expecting me not to move from Albuquerque so we can resolve the divorce. If someone needs to be here it can be her. I’m not attempting to be selfish about this I was two weeks away from moving home before she decided she didn’t want to be married anymore and was not willing to attempt to work it out and then had her folks come to Albuquerque and move her and her stuff back to OKC. And now, for the sake of the divorce, she wants me to stay. Fucking my ass.

I am currently earning a meager eight dollars an hour, part time at a local tv station in town. I have six years of production experience; I recently graduated from the University of New Mexico with a BFA, Summa Cum Laude no less. I am not going to waste away in this shit hole. To add to the exigent desire of flight would be that I have three friends here, far more there and hell there is just life out there that I need to go live. She left almost two months ago. That is more than enough time to file a petition for divorce. And to top it all off, she has the petition in OKC, she is just sitting on it, waiting to sign it, taking her time. This is why this stuff is fucking ugly.
I’m not trying to be ugly about it. Nor am I saying she is either. But not being in her mind I can say little about what is going on in there. I have just tried to be passive at best, I don’t really know how else to be. In the week it took for her to decide to leave, she announced once, recanted, then days later announced again, I begged, I pleaded, I offered the ends of the earth with all sincerity. She was a no taker. Once she left I guess I decided, that A) it was real and over and B) it was out of my control and to allow it to proceed with little intervention of my own. That decision was also amongst the desire to only attempt to control my own life, which has proven a strange task.
I have had little contact with her, a couple phone conversations, a few IM’s and a bunch of emails. I can’t really handle it. She calls to be friends, to see what is going on, how I am doing and what my plans are and I have little to say, it makes me want to just nap. I don’t get angry about it or at her, I often cry, it’s often the only time the feelings rush me. But yesterday I got mad, when she stated I shouldn’t leave and if I did I could pay for the divorce and on and on. On a side note I haven’t hit myself since she left, but I almost did yesterday. Thus, hitting myself is a perverse and either immature or animalistic reaction to a feeling of lack of control. I prefer to think it’s the latter.

But, what went wrong? How did this union go so awry? I want to say that it was a union that should have never occurred. Maybe that’s too easy or maybe that’s too honest. I knew early on that we had vastly different world views. I also knew I was extremely attracted to her. And although I cheated and left her and all that, the attraction continued. I loved our sex life; I loved it more than any other sex life I was participating in. I could feel my soul attempting to connect to hers when we made love. I could never get in deep enough and every time the goal was to touch her heart. Time ceased to exist and our sex life continued this way until shortly after we got engaged. And this is where it got complex.

I don’t know exactly what happened but I think by in large it was the beginning of the end.

Somewhere in there she started taking birth control. She didn’t want to really and she was totally freaked that it was going to make her fat. She swears it did, but no one else could tell. Did I mention she was a dancer, the modern kind, not the stripping kind. So here comes some fucking honesty, ready? While on the pill she was having trouble having an orgasm. Maybe she’d never had one, maybe it was just then, I’m not sure. Nonetheless, I think she also made a comment of an inability for me to find the clit. Now, hang on, maybe I should have just proven to her I knew what I was doing. But man, she knocked me right off the fucking box. For those of you who know me this needs absolutely no explanation as to why but for those who don’t I will indulge you. I’ve spent a large number of years prior to my engagement with Meredith researching the female body, researching my penis and most of all just plainly womanizing as those who are just plain haters like to claim. Nonetheless, my reputation preceded me for many years in many cities. I loved sex and I loved women, and I arranged my being to get as much of both as I possibly could. In that, I felt I was relatively capable of finding the clit, wrapping my tongue around it and pounding the young guest of my mouth into orgasmic euphoria and I had many return customers for years. So this little bit of premarital honesty, slammed my confidence in a way I was fully unprepared to deal with and I think shaped my perspective, I either should have immediately called love line or walked away from the relationship, because to bring the swelling down on my bruised ego I just thought what the hell does she know, this inexperienced young woman, how dare she. And from there our sex life quickly began to cease. There were other complaints such as why we had so much daytime sex. I personally love daytime sex to no end. And I have found when you live with someone sex tends to be good that way, it keeps it interesting and spontaneous, but it also seems like, while, co-habitating schedules change and you end up reading more at night and fucking less. Maybe it’s just me. But when you don’t live together you do your thing all day and accumulate sleepless nights meeting for a good romp. When you live together so many things begin to settle. It’s an unavoidable truth that I have yet to begin to take on. It needs taking on though ‘cause it fucks everything up.
This leads directly into the rest of the collapse and what may have collapsed the relationship with Cybil, the first girl I lived with. The wisdom of Chris Rock says, married and bored, single and lonely. Currently though, I am single and married and bored and lonely. The nut that I have to crack and want to crack is how to have a fucking relationship and not feel like I am trading off the whole fucking world. Once Meredith and I moved in together, which was once we got engaged, it’s like I automatically gave up all my friendships, especially those with women and not just because I was fucking them. But there I was, sexually in a bad spot, slowly throwing my friends away and attempting to play the same god damn game of house that I played in nursery school. What then was the purpose of all the experiences between four years old and what 29 years old? Clearly, none.
So, there we are, two big kids playing house in nursery school, with real rent and real bills and planning a wedding in all of five days, having lived together for a week and never really seriously dating. What I mean by seriously dating is they way some of my married friends lived together for years and years, but they weren’t much of players, they weren’t out there smelling the flowers. I was, I was smelling every fucking flower right up until I got engaged. For me, that’s how I knew I wanted to get engaged, thoughts how I knew I loved Meredith, I systematically debunked the myths of many women in my head, except for a couple, who still haunt me to this day. Wrong or not that’s how it rolled.

In this mix somewhere was the weight loss. Who knew weight loss sucked so bad. By accident I lost about thirty five pounds in the fall prior to getting engaged. Sounds great right? Made me hot and attractive. Really, I just looked like a cancer patient. Nonetheless, I had to buy a new wardrobe and was constantly in fear of gaining more weight. Further steps into the downfall, along with having my manhood questioned, and entering a household, moving into her house, with a different world view, I had shed who I knew I was and had to redress it. Way too much vulnerability right there. There was a brief period in all this in which I felt like some strange Vietnam vet. My hair was too long, I was wearing to much brown and was starting to get angry. Then I really felt like a retard ‘cause I cut my hair too short. And then the fucking semester began. All this came together during winter break. A few nights after fucking Min- a graduate student, much older then I, who was the worst kisser in the world but was hot as hell- I called Meredith and we went to meet her parents in Oklahoma, discussed marriage, I went to Baltimore, got my grandmothers wedding ring, flew to OKC again on Christmas and proposed in Albuquerque.
The semester began, I took one of the most humiliating classes of my academic career, questioned all my choices and the snowball began to tumble. We were married by the summer, I didn’t invite half my family and we were well on our way to misery. I was trying to get past it. I was trying to get past the little things, the control, how she had to decorate the house. I was trying to get past her Baptist dad and Midwestern family that believed in proper -there version anyway, M seemed to think I had no understanding, of course, I was raised in a house by my english grandmother, so I had a whole other understanding.) and thought I was a freak. It was impossible. You probably shouldn’t marry into a place where you don’t fit. We went to OKC like once a month or they came to Albuquerque. They thought I was selfish ‘cause I didn’t like anyone talking to me in the morning. The reality is I didn’t like them. Just before we got divorced I began to like her dad and her extended family. But I was still this odd ball. I had no space. Meredith never worked, her family paid for her, the summer we got married we were stuck in the house together all the time. She began questioning my ability to be an artist. The things I would confide in her about my own desires, the questions I had about life and career she used against me. Trust and safety were slipping away. I wasn’t looking like a man, I was looking weak. Our world views were so vastly different they endorsed my weakness. She saw her parent’s life as utopia. I knew there life was death. They were as middle class as it gets. The safety of jobs and insurance and good credit, I could give a fuck less. I despise the corporate structure. I want excitement and adventure. I hate working for people. I like to read and think and make art and hang out and discuss the world and all it’s elements. And my wife, she wasn’t much of a reader.
I blame my mom really, genetics, upbringing. I began listening to NPR at 3 years old. Probably earlier I just don’t remember. I was Ronald Reagan in the third grade. I loved politics and war. My folks were hippies. They lived in communes and my dad served time for going awol. As much as I want to fit in the club, married with stuff, I just can’t, my experience, what I know, what I’ve learned, who I have been won’t let me.
And the arguing rages on… Those apposing world views clashed again and again. She could no longer trust that I was capable of holding a job, even though I always had one, the same one actually. My fox like interests in the world lead her to believe I was to be nothing. And after she went to a dance residency for a month in Boston, she returned, we had sex and I could tell the attraction was gone. I had fucked it up, hitting myself, yelling at her, arguing to hard. Though it wasn’t me it was us. Her distrust caused many fights. Her belief in her midwestern background constantly put us at odds.
But how do I, how does the world accept it as us, the fuck up, we? It was just me. What was I thinking? Why did I marry someone I barely knew? It was clear she was so different. I saw an interview with someone famous the other day and they said they were going to get married, they hit the point where they would have married who ever he was dating, he just lucked out that she was the right one. I think I relate, I was searching hard, I didn't want to be single and lonely, I wanted to be married and bored. I wanted to marry a women who respected family as much as I did beforfe mine fell apart. Unfortunately she didn't respect me. Unfortunately she was just a little too uptight. It's hard to say how she should have been. I have no idea what other personality is going to work with mine. I say all the time I will always regret not marrying Cybil. I do know and have for years. If only I knew then what I know now and on and on. It's true though, it's not greener grass. But if "I only knew then", then how can I or we, the world, how can we ever have a god damn relationship? I am not sure what I know, or think I know about Cybil can be applied anywhere else, it's not the same permutation.