Well, anyway, Happy New Year

A letter I sent to W on this night. I did not hear back from her.

W,

I don’t know if you read my last letter. I don’t even know if you’re reading this one.
But I reread it myself, and maybe I was too harsh. I don’t know anymore. Was I too harsh? Or was I just the right amount of harsh? Or am I really too wimpy and it wasn’t harsh enough?
I don’t know how to do this. I don't know if there is a right way. I don’t even know if you’re reading these. As Abba says “breaking up is never easy to do. Knowing me, knowing you, it’s the best I can do.”

Maybe I just wanted you to realize that it turns out we both felt like we were supporting the other one.
And maybe I was too harsh because I wanted to get back at you for cutting me down so hard in your angry letter. I don’t know anymore.

I just wanted to clarify at least one thing here and say that I guess one of the points I was trying to get across but maybe didn't is that I felt that if the situation was reversed, and I had wanted to go out and be an artist or go back to school for a while and not work, and theoretically if I didn’t have my savings to fall back on, I never felt that at any point in our relationship that you would have been able to support me if I did that. So I guess in a way I always felt like I was the one who was there to fall back on if either of us ever needed financial support in any given month. Maybe I’m totally off base. Maybe you could have supported me in ways I wasn’t aware of, and you probably were supporting me in ways I wasn’t aware of, and that’s probably what led you to be so angry in your angry letter. I guess a lot of times one person has to be the artist and the other person has to be not the artist. That’s just the way things are sometimes. I think almost every relationship has several kinds of imbalances… that’s just human nature. But if it's a successful relationship, more than likely all the things that are imbalanced actually do balance each out in a greater sense, and maybe in different ways that people aren’t aware of. Different people have different things that they do well. The trick to it is all in how people deal with it, I guess. And maybe if we had still been together years and years down the road, the situation WOULD have been reversed, and it would have been you loaning me rent while I took classes.
But anyway, that’s what I was getting at when I said I was glad you were experimenting and trying to do it on your own.

Maybe someday we can just call a truce and just say that we wanted slightly different things out of life even though we both tried to pretend that we didn’t, and we tried to make it work, and in the end it didn’t. It’s painful to admit about a person you felt so strongly about, but that’s probably the answer.
You needed more flexibility and I needed more stability. You get nervous about signing leases and I get nervous thinking about packing everything up without a plan. That's just the way it is.

Anyway, I wanted to say Happy 2005. I miss having a lover like you, but I think we’ve both learned a lot from this (at least I hope we have).



Love Always,
E

The Expanding Universe

Here is the text of a letter I wrote to my old and dear friend S tonight:

S,

I'm reading this great book right now that made me think about you.

Old people remember exactly where they were when Pearl Harbor happened.
Young people remember exactly where they were when 9/11 happened.

I remember exactly where I was when I found out how the universe was going to end... and I was with you.

It was 1997 and I was living in the house on Greeley with D and C. You were over to visit. We were sitting in the living room, with that yellow and blue paint on the walls and the wood front door, and the couches at odd angles, one of them a most horrible color of orange and brown plaid, and the dining table in the next room made of cinder blocks and plywood.
That afternoon, I read a stunning article in the newspaper that forever changed our views of ourselves and our world, and apparently sparked a scientific revolution.
I can still remember the stunned look on your face, and that you had to sit down, when I told you the news. Although I can't remember whether you sat on the couch, or simply sank to the floor.
Although D couldn't grasp what the big deal was, we both agreed that "this changes everything".

The article was about how scientists, by studying a certain type of supernovae, had finally found solid evidence that once and for all solved the great debate over whether there was enough mass in the universe to keep it from expanding forever endlessly.
Until then, we both believed the universe was a cycle rather than a line... and that this was the ideal state of being. Progress was a myth. Nature was cyclical. Ancient mythologies and postmodern theories both based themselves on this idea. The universe would eventually stop expanding, and start contract, eventually ending in a big crunch. Perhaps it would repeat the whole process over and over again in an endless cycle, being born anew each time like a Phoenix, perhaps each time with radically different laws of physics. It was elegant and comforting and without beginning or end.
Since the dawn of man, such eternal questions as the fate of the universe were once the sole realm of philosophers and theologians, but by 1997, humanity had suddenly and unexpectedly reached the point where science could actually provide a definitive answer.
And our comforting ideas were wrong.

"Perlmutter, Schmidt, and their colleagues revealed for the first time that the force of gravity was losing the battle, and the universe was expanding unabated. Most scientists now believe the expansion of the universe will continue forever."
"Galaxies fly away from one another, dimming and reddening over time, disappearing from the skies. Stars burn out and die, becoming empty shells of cold, dead matter. The stars flicker out one by one. The universe gets cooler and cooler over time, and the last bits of matter might even disintegrate, decaying into energy and giving brief bursts of light to the cold soup of lifeless radiation that suffuses the universe. Finally, there is nothing left except for a frigid bath of cold light. Our destiny is a death by ice."
"It was a stunning discovery. For the first time in history, scientists had wrested the end of the universe from the hands of mythology and speculation and placed it firmly within the grasp of human knowledge. This will be one of the most enduring victories of cosmology."

This is from the new book "Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe" by Charles Seife, which I am reading right now.
The book is about the major scientific revolution that has happened over the last few years, and is still continuing today, because of that discovery in 1997.
It's a excellent, fascinating read, and as I sit here, I also can't help thinking of the personal journeys of discovery you and I have made since that day long ago in Houston, Texas.



Thinking about you, and wishing you all the best in life.
Happy Holidays.
Love,
E

IOU

Here is a letter I wrote to W on this date. It was in response to her telling me how much money she still owes me.

W,

Thank you for getting back to me on this issue.
At this time, I am choosing not to ask you for the money back until after your current transitional period is over. I understand that you will probably be going through yet another difficult period in your career, employment, money and possibly housing now that you have quit massage work.
First, I would like to support you in the changes you are making.
Second, I do not want you to be able to blame me if something goes wrong.
My only request is that you inform me when you think you are in comfortable space to be able to pay me back.
I wish you all the best of luck and success.

E

Re: This Is Not The Letter Either

After yesterday's interaction, I decided to ask Wendy what she seemed so upset about... as you can see, it was a simple one-sentence email. She responded with the long angry diatribe below. I question the appropriateness of this in response to my simple question. Also, why stew on this for so long and wait until December to tell me about her thought process back in August? And why kick me when I'm down?

W,
Are you angry at me about something, or were you upset about something else?
E

Her response:

I'm angry at you. I broke up with you because I was angry at you and breakfast with you on Monday made me feel angry at you again. I've been far too nice, or thinking I was being nice to really express how angry at you I've been.

I think that you don't understand anything other than your own needs. When I got together with you it was because I saw someone that was loving, considerate, fun, and present with me. I felt that you cared about my welfare and encouraged me to take care of myself and helped take care of me, too. Somewhere in there I feel like you started to take me for granted. In emotional and physical ways: cooking, cleaning, organizing, laundry, sex, being okay with your transgender explorations.

You've never learned to cook though I've asked you to cook over and over again; you obviously stopped doing the laundry at some point based on all the dumb questions you had when I specifically asked you to start doing laundry again; our room was always a mess; you seemed to not understand or care that I didn't want my personal possessions being worn by strange men or that having your business in our home and spreading it to our personal space was invasive and uncomfortable; I feel you made minimal effort to understand my disinterest in sex with you; you started not wanting to talk with me and telling me I talk too much and being silent and wierd when I'd try to converse with you; you got moody and pissy about me not giving you attention when YOU wanted it, but couldn't even be persuaded to come to bed when you were at the computer at night. And you never once bought me flowers or wrote me letter about ideas you had about how we could resolve any off our relationship issues until I threatened to not be there for you anymore.

So, yeah, I'm angry.

I'm angry that you seem to want me back because you're used to being taken care of and not have to do for yourself. I'm angry that you either don't or can't hear me when I tell you I WAS NOT HAPPY.

My belief is that if you cared about me you would say that you are happy for me that I am happy now and tell me that even if you don't understand WHY I left you, you will try to understand and you will support me in being happy. Instead I see you not caring about anyone other than yourself. I see you squirming because you are uncomfortable without me and focusing only on your wants and needs. But I feel I've seen you not caring about anyone else's wants and needs other than your own for a while now. I've seen you take and take and not give back, even when you're asked to give. Well you can't have anything else from me. I'm done with giving to you. I'm not going to give you time to try and make me feel bad that my decisions have made you feel bad (counseling) because then you'd be sucking my energy away from me again and I'm done with that.

Figure your shit out without me. Get your own counselor. I'm doing what I have to do to take care of me and there is absolutely nothing you have done since I first hinted that I was leaving that has told me you care about anything other than yourself. I don't trust you to take care of me or take my needs into consideration. And I don't trust you to try and understand.

And I don't think you like strong women. I think you like women that are so self sufficient that they can take care of themselves without you AND take care of you. I'm not your strong woman. I'm weak and dumb or I would have called you on your shit long long ago and not be so angry and bitter and biting right now. Find someone dumber next time or figure out how to take care of yourself so that you can do more than let someone caretake for you until they're sick of it and leave.

W

This Is Not The Letter Either

Here is a email interaction I had with W yesterday and today. Her anger at me was puzzling, as our last previous interaction had ended without anger.

W,
You seemed tense and angry when I talked to you on the phone tonight to bring up the subject of debt repayment.
I wish you could figure out some way to treat me with at least some baseline level of common courtesy and dignity that even strangers have for each other.
E

Her response today:

E,
I'm sorry I was rude. I have no caller ID on my home phone so have no way of knowing who is calling and really didn't want to talk to you right then. Please only call my cell phone from now on and leave me a message if I don't answer. That way if I answer it means I'm in a space to talk to you and if I don't it means I will get back to you when I am in a space to talk to you, which means I will have the ability to speak to you in a much less offensive manner than I did tonight.
W