exes

Part of what got me through the whole process of suing my ex was daydreaming about the wicked blog posts I was going to write.

The ones that explained my side of the story in gory detail. The ones that excoriated him and made him look as bad as I felt he was at the time. Posts that drew what meagre bathos there was from a very painful situation.

I almost did it, once or twice, when I got whiffs of the stories going around. When people who'd always been friendly with me wouldn't look me in the eye.

Knowing before I started the suit that people might think I was a bitch for doing so didn't make it hurt any less when I saw them thinking it.

When I got those feelings, I was at least smart enough to talk to people I knew would talk me down. "Let it blow over," Shelley said. She's a smart woman, so I listened. I kept writing the posts in my head and saved them all up for one good long screed after all the shit had settled. To finally tell my version.

His last payment came through last Wednesday.

In the past few months, I was increasingly unsure how I was going to feel when that happened. For a long time, I assumed I'd be ecstatic to have it done with and to have this person I'd called any number of names out of my life for good.

For the first 6 and a half years of the 8 years we've known each other, there were big thick hanks of big thick emotions wrapped up in and around the place he occupied in my brain and heart.

The bulk of of those emotions were made up of different types of disappointment. There was resentment. Bitterness too. All of which turned to flinty anger after a while. For far too long before I broke up with him, as a matter of fact. It turned me mean.

But before all that, and even shot through the many kinds of unkind we were to each other, there was joy. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met; he has a warmth and a generosity of spirit I always found compelling. I loved him deeply for a long time.

Eventually the balance tipped, the joy fell off the scales, and we were left with only reaching for it. Both of us wanted the high of that joy back very badly; neither of us knew how to get it. We ended up trying to convince ourselves we were in love.

No one is their best self in that situation, of course, but his reaction to the suit didn't help quell any bitter emotions.

I certainly hadn't expected him to react well to being served papers, but I was shocked by how far on the other side of well his reaction landed. I was no angel, let's be clear here - I was manipulative in a way that makes me uncomfortable - but his behaviour was poor far beyond what I was expecting.

And this, if I were still angry, is where I'd let myself go. It would be pretty entertaining, if my internal blog posts are any marker. I've had a lot of time to find just the right words to shade his depths and to get myself shone up bright as Girlfriend Martyr.

But at what cost?

He and I have gotten to a point where we're friendly with each other - something I would have told you was utterly fantastical 2 years ago.

I like that we've managed that. That we've performed this impossible alchemy. It's amazing to me that the tight jaw and clenched fists and name calling of 2007 has turned into the current exchange of pleasantries, of movie and music recommendations; a casual wave and smile as I walk past him at a show.

When my bank balance showed the payment had come through, I didn't think "Thank fuck I never have to talk to that asshole again." I thought, "Huh. Wow. I guess that's done, then." I tried to figure out what I was feeling, because whatever it was, it wasn't much. A little empty, maybe, a little lost at sea.

He occupied a wounded space inside me for a long time. That space has shrunk considerably over the past couple years; in the past year, particularly, even the outline was getting hard to see. I could find it easy enough when I went looking. Occasionally when I didn't, as well.

And then there was that last hundred bucks and he just, he wasn't. I could feel a slight depression in a part of me where strong feelings once had lived. Like the flesh after a scab falls off. Pink and still a little tender. But whole.

He and I exchanged a couple of emails around the fact that it was over. He apologized sincerely, thanked me for being patient, said he'd changed.

The petty part of me, the part used to navigating around his bulk in my heart, snorted and rolled her eyes.

The bigger part of me thought What does it cost to believe him?

For those who are generous of spirit, the answer is nothing.

Not much in the tank for you, dahlinks; a busy week at work and socializing and interviewing for articles has left me feeling a little worn thin. The weather, too, isn't helping. So grey and damp. Though today is warm and that was soothing when Chris and I left for breakfast this morning.

One of the interviews I did was with an ex of mine. When the editor contacted me to do the story, I was surprised and amused. My initial reaction was something along the lines of fuck no. The break up went, shall we say, not so smoothly. It involved me threatening to talk to the police and then, much later, courts and lawyers and bitter recriminations.

Which makes a good, though unbloggable, story.

But then I waffled. I have said a lot of terrible things about that ex, both in private and in public; much of it justified, some of it not. What I was being asked to write about - his musical talent, essentially - was something that was only a problem between us in that I found it very hard to leave, for a variety of reasons.

I knew I could write generously and honestly about pretty much any creative project that he was involved in. I thought it might be good for me to say something nice.

But I didn't really think it through.

The interview went well even though the last time we saw each other in person, it was incredibly angry: with righteous tight-jawed silence on my part, and verbal outbursts on his that I left the judge to deal with. This time there was a group of us, there was something other than the dead horse of our relationship to talk about, there guinness and laughter. I even drove him home after, and we talked only slightly awkwardly of mundane things.

So I'm feeling good about him, good as in settled, good as in, you know, he's not that bad a guy. I remembered that he is interesting and funny and one of the most genuine people I've ever met. In the nearly 4 years since we split, I have sometimes looked at the sum total of what I got out of that relationship and wondered how I could have wasted 4 years of my life with him (as I'm sure he did too). This finally put that to rest. I loved him for good reason. Just too long.

And then I started listening to the recording.

Have you ever transcribed anything? If you have, you're probably already cringing. If you haven't, I will tell you that it means listening to a recording in little loops. You'll get a chunk of words typed out, flip back a bit, listen forwards, get another chunk, flip back again. It can take up to double the amount of time. And that's with a good recording.

The one I got is pretty lousy. By the end of the second time through, just to remember what we'd said and pick out the parts I had to listen to closely, I was nearly out of my skin with irritation. Even though what he's saying is perfectly intelligent and interesting, the intonation, the verbal tics, the laugh. All the same as four years ago. So it was a good interview and I'll have plenty nice to say in the article, but man. Oh man.

Just like riding a bicycle.

The personal experience I have of crack use is second-hand and of thankfully short duration.

Way back in the way back, for 4 years, I dated someone addicted to alcohol. I'm not talking the kind of person who'd probably be very uncomfortable if they had to go for few days without a few beers. I am talking about a serious and pernicious addiction that worked in a brutal and not-quite-predictable cycle.

He couldn't manage school, kept getting fired, had a hard time finding a new job. When he was drunk it was a nightmare with both of us out of control. The time he spent sober I spent sick-stomached waiting for it all to start again. It made both of our lives a fucking mess, and it took me two years of breaking up, trying to be friends and then taking him back to get him out of my life once and for all. The final straw was finding him drunk in my apartment with a teenaged runaway who lived down the hall.

The penultimate straw was crack.*

When he told me about this new habit he'd picked up - in the bathroom of a bar where he was drunk was the going story - I was only moderately surprised. I already knew that something had been going on for a few months. We lived in the same rooming house, went into and out of each other's rooms at will. He was suddenly gone most of the time, reappearing for a few minutes here and there, barely stopping to talk, in and out, at random hours. The only thing I could imagine was that he was cheating; I couldn't track him down to talk about it.

One evening, wanting a book, expecting him gone. I unlocked, fast knocked, and opened his door. It caught hard a few inches in with the chain pulled taut. It was dark in the room. I heard bedclothes rustling. A shifting sigh. He came to the door and leaned his forehead on the frame. The rest of his gaunt face was shadowed.

I have something to tell you he said.

That it was drugs made sense to me.The Other Woman spectre had been looming further and further away. He'd cheated on me before** and hadn't acted anything like what was going on. This time too, he'd gone through all of his money and an awful lot of mine, always for "rent" or "prescriptions."

You wouldn't think I'd be relieved about crack, but I was. I'd been handling his current substance for years at that point. Fundamentally, I didn't feel like this was much different. The behaviour, yes, and the scariness factor, yes. But not the core truth of it. He was no more emotionally stable when he was using just one substance. I was no more able to hold us both afloat.

After that conversation through the gap, he went into an outpatient clinic specifically for crack users. To the supposed wonder and irritation of the whole group, he found it remarkably easy to stop doing crack. Though he was a liar of pathological proportions, this still rings true. The erratic behaviour stopped and we went back to the more predictable drinking cycle, at which I was at least fairly practiced. He didn't go through money quite so fast. But he was around a lot more.

It didn't take many more weeks of that before I got him gone entirely. So far in my life, doing that is the hardest thing I've had to do.

++

This post all started because of the house across the street. It's always been a bit scoundrelly, but I thought of the tenants sort of affectionately that way. If they were scoundrels and sometimes loud, they mostly kept to themselves and seemed smoothed over, fairly agreeable with anyone who wasn't themselves or their asshole of a landlord. I thought of them as Our Scoundrels.

New people moved in a few months ago, and Our Scoundrels moved out because of them. They and the people who come because of them are a jaggedy lot, spilling into the backyard across and up and down the street.

I found out just a few days ago that it's a crack house. Lots of us on the street are upset, not so much about what is going on but how disruptive it is to the tenor of the whole street. Me included.

All of that is what I sat down to write about, my concerns with what's happening, but with my own reactions as well. But what's above is what came out instead.

I hope to get to what's going on now over the next week or two.

*I know. You'd think that taking up crack on top of booze might have been last straw material. Apparently, my head loved that wall.
**Most notably while I was in the hospital after having tried to kill myself. I was bitter about it for a long time and now it just boggles my mind.

This would probably be best left unblogged because it's a specific story about a specific person who was probably not expecting to be quoted on the Interwebs, but enh, what the fuck. It doesn't make her look bad or anything, and it's been making me giggle.

++

The first time I saw a picture of Eric's ex, A., I thought "Aha, good then, I'm his type." Not that she and I look alike - no one would ever confuse us - but we have a similar fresh-faced look about us. I bet old ladies ask her for directions all the time too.

When he and I were dating, we hardly ever ran into her. Even though she lived about 5 blocks away from me, 3 from Eric, on a major street where we walked all the time, separately and together.

Even for the near year and a half since he and I broke up, I've hardly seen her. Maybe three or four times, randomly. Generally in the distance. Considering the proximity of our abodes, and our circles of friends, it's a shock.

These past few weeks, though, we've started to end up in the same space at the same time. Neither here nor there, really, except that we were only ever introduced the once, and it was kind of odd, as it almost always is, meeting the ex, even when it's polite all around. It was also brief and a long time ago now, so I wasn't ever sure she knew who I was.

Again, neither here nor there.

Yesterday I did my regular grocery shopping, ending up at Hartman's. At one point, standing in front of the meat counter, waiting my turn for some pancetta, I looked up and there she was. It's narrow in that spot, and I had to shift my cart to give her room to pass. We smiled, said hello, how's it going, see you around.

As I waited for my meat, her outfit registered on my brain. She'd been tucking purple-framed sunglasses into the top of a brown t-shirt. Dark blue skinny jeans, brown metallic converse. Short hair, an asymmetrical cut all weekend wind-mussed.

I looked down at myself. Brown canvas converse, dark blue skinny jeans, a brown t-shirt. Purple glasses. And short, asymmetrical hair. Of a type, indeed.

It made me snort, just as the woman was handing me my fancy bacon. Then, as I checked my list and moved out of Produce, it passed out of my mind. Taken up as it was with finding dried beans and such.

For the last item, I found myself in a quandary in front of the frozen fruit. If you want to know how many questions one can ask oneself about both the economy and the desirability of frozen fruit, also as well the pros and cons of each option, please don't hesitate to email me for a free analysis. I'd probably been standing there for about 5 minutes when I noticed someone coming up the aisle on my right side.

It was A. She looked sheepish. "Um, honestly, I'm not stalking you," she smiled.

"Ha, no." I said back. "It would seem as if -"

At this point, I knew what was going to come out of my mouth. And I knew I was probably going to sound, at best, like some kind of inappropriate weirdo, and at worst, like some kind of inappropriate asshole. Whatever, I was powerless to stop the words.

"-we just have quite similar taste."

And then I blushed. Very bright red.

Because I'm smooth like that, my cover was to babble about the price frozen fruit by the 100 grams, desperately wanting to flee the scene, but then feeling strange about it, because why would I have been standing there so studiously to leave without fruit? And why should I flee? It's not like I'd insulted her mother, only pointed out the obvious. I stood my embarrassed ground and prayed that she was not going to have a fruit quandary herself and would just grab some bag of some size of some fruit and leave me to cool my face in the freezer.

She did, thank christ, and I did too, grabbing the big bag of 4-berries on my way out.

You've heard me say this before, but my brother got pretty much all the maternal instinct in my family. I would say all, but man, you put a little kid, or my brand new three month nephew, in the same room and I'm all let me just give you the biggest hug ever, it's my turn now, he smells so good, can I give you a kiss. They sit on your chest or in your lap just so warmly and loverly.

But then, I like my silence too, and there's not a lot of that with wee ones. And I would not want a daughter as ungrateful and irritable as I am myself.

It's been a busy day. Up and running fairly early this morning, and then a drive to Wychwood Park with my mom to take a million pictures for a story I need to write, and fast. Like next weekend fast.

The worst 10 months of my life I spent living around the corner from Wychwood, where the story I need to write started. My ex and I used to takes walks in there sometimes, or I'd hit it when I was pacing the neighbourhood, waiting for him to come home.

The last time I was back in the area, all that old anxiety bubbled up again. This time, I just remembered. Time is nice.

We drove by the building where he lived when we first met, the one he got kicked out of for not paying his rent, though I didn't find out about that part till later. I'm surprised I remembered it, but the railing - it had three steps up from the sidewalk to the long front walk. The railing, unnecessary for the shallow steps, ungainly spindles, legs of a two-legged beetle trapped on its back.

Then further along Bathurst, past the No Frills where I worked for three months, past the corner where the Michael Jackson look-a-like goosestepped, past the Open Window bakery, the Hemingway, the bridge Ondaatje wrote about.

And then St. Clair.

The outdoor flower shop across the street from our window is gone. The people who live in our apartment hung lacy curtains. The owners have enclosed the front stoop where we used to smoke.

Blogging is a funny thing. I opened this up to write about my Gran's 95th birthday party and what you got was half-dead memories.

On some avenue in Chicago, probably N Milwaulkee, CT looked down at me and said, "You've got a thing, did you know? You don't like to be on my right side. Even if you end up on my right side, you switch over to my left as soon as you can. No matter what."

I did not know.

Or rather, I did not know I was still doing it, 10 months later.

++

On one of our early walks, Eric dropped behind me and popped up on my other side, my right side. I did a quick twist towards him, raised my eyebrows.

He explained that he was monocular, having lost sight in his right eye a few years ago. Having someone on his right side, while not a huge issue, was just not that comfortable, forcing him to turn his head almost completely to make eye contact.

I took that quite seriously. Partially, it just seemed polite, what I'd do for anyone. Partially though, I wanted to stand out for him as someone thoughtful and nice. Not completely altruistic, you could say, but the result was the same. Seemed an easy thing to do to make someone you liked a helluva lot more comfortable.

Even so, at first I'd forget. After a block or two, one or the other of us, usually me, would start, drop back, and pop up on the other side, grinning.

After a while, I almost never forgot. It just felt natural to have a solid presence on my right side.

A little while after that, no matter who I was walking with, if the usual presence were an absence, I'd feel a wee frisson. Not quite anxiety, but on that continuum. A little rock of salt in your boot, not hurting, but making you shake your foot to shift it somewhere less poky.

The closer the person was to Eric's height, the more pronounced the absence, the more jagged the rock, the more quickly I switched.

Eric and I stopped walking together pretty abruptly, but I kept on with the habit. Not that I was was trying to keep on with anything else: it's just that I'd long stopped noticing the pokes. There was just one smooth unnoticeable cascade of feelings and reactions that lead from frisson to flipping sides, which had created its own indelible string of neurons snaking through my subconscious.

++

I had a rare trip to the Hartman's yesterday, in that I didn't run into anyone I knew, or even recognize, till I was nearly done. I came swooping around the corner to head back to the olive bar, and nearly literally ran into Eric.

We were both almost done. I just had a few things, but stayed behind him in line anyway, forgoing the express lane to chat and catch up.

I'd say it was lovely, but it wasn't even that, really - it was just normal. Or rather, it was the kind of lovely you get from running into someone you don't much hang with but is always a pleasure to see. How's school, your loan came in?, yeah, the diagram on the interac machine is totally stupid, sandwiches are for boys, i know!

We paid for our stuff, left, both quite weighed down and slow on the greasy shifty-snow sidewalks. What are you up to tonight? oh, you know, visiting with the kgrf, midnight!, really. And we got on to the topic of his glasses, which made me think about his eyes, which reminded me.

I was on the wrong side.

My first thought was to switch, but seeing as how the sidewalks were narrow and slightly treacherous, seeing as how we were both laden like pack horses, seeing as how we hadn't much further to go, I just left it. I didn't need to be extra special triple nice anymore. He'd be okay, I was pretty sure, he wasn't going to die.

But my habit? Finally, it had. Just faded away, without me noticing.

I fell apart on several people at the end of the night. I've done it on Mitch before; not Ariel, but we're that kind of friend, yknow, and I'd spent the last half hour standing beside her crying, so it probably wasn't that strange.

But James? Poor James. He's someone I know mostly from around, from running into each other in bars, on the street, a smattering of emails. We've had good conversations, whenever. Tonight, as I was snapping my coat shut and torturing myself by watching Mike's nimble fingers over the Rhodes, maybe the same Rhodes he was playing when I fell for him, remembering those fingers inside me, his smell, the way the back of his neck felt under my lips as I spooned him, all the broken promises, James walked by.

"How are you?"

My eyes were red, my face blotchy. I hadn't stopped crying since the Acorn took the stage.

The inflection in James' voice let me know he knew something was wrong.

I just shook my head.

He hugged me. My chest heaved, I buried my face in his shoulder, wrapped my fist in his lapel.

"I haven't seen him play in three years," I said, when I caught my breath.

"You didn't know he was in the Acorn?"

"No."

"He went down while they were touring with Calexico."

"I hadn't heard."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too."

He kissed my cheek, hugged me hard. I said what I'd already said to Mitch one hundred times, what I'd say to Ariel moments later.

"I'm fine, it'll be fine."

And it will.