Caveat: Expressions Ardently Unfettered

Ok, so I’m coming to terms with the entire situation.  I have my regrets, Read the rest of this entry »

I’m so totally bummed out lately. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh dear God, please help me to stop missing a thing that I know is bad for me. Please wipe out the complexities of this love into oblivion. Send me not from Your sight, Lord, but rather send his image from mine. I pray for the will to forget, for the desire not to remember what there was, for the fortitude to withstand the pain that must come. I cannot wish it never were, having known it, yet I know my former state of ignorance was a blessing. It is not better to have loved and lost, but never to have loved at all. It seems a waste of what You created us to be, but without knowledge of something, there is no want of it. I wish to God I had not known. Foolish, simple child. You know God forgives all, but you can never forgive yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday,
All my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Yesterday,
Love was such an easy game to play,
Now I need a place to hide away,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Oh God, I wish that I could forget yesterday.

Life’s not that easy, I guess. My yesterday is burned into my memory permanently. I used to be able to build myself back up after things went crappy. I feel like a patchwork quilt. Or maybe like the pieces of one, waiting to be sewn together, part of a new whole, made of remnants and broken pieces, but never the same as they once were.

Well, what I can lean on right now is the knowledge that tons of people have gone through what I’m going through and survived. Some not only survived, but recovered. Many went on to be happy. A few even became happier than they had ever before been. I hope I can move beyond simply surviving. I know I’ll be able to. I must.

I’ve felt stupid for a lot of things in my life.  Spilling stuff, breaking things, using baking soda instead of baking powder, almost getting in car wrecks, hitting poles, and other such acts of stupidity.  Yet this outdoes all other stupidities of my life.  I never, ever, ever thought I would allow any person to make me doubt myself so much.  Even now, I have to fight an unnatural inclination to think I’ve done things I really know that I haven’t.  My head knows better, but I wrestle with myself every day.  I wrestle with trying to blame myself for things that couldn’t possibly be may fault.  I am responsible for my own actions, and not those of others.  I cannot be held responsible for the actions of others.  And I am beginning to come back to my former understanding of what warrants certain reactions—as well as what doesn’t.  Eventually, I hope I’ll be able to come back to appropriately assessing situations, instead of automatically deferring to another’s opinion.  I hope I can come back to myself.  In making such a tremendous effort to understand and respect someone else’s point of view, to even put it before my own, I feel frighteningly detached from my own.  I have to remember how to evaluate things as I otherwise would have.  I have to remember myself.  And yet, something will never be the same.  Something broke that can’t be repaired.  I know that one day I’ll be happy again, but I know that I gave away a part of myself that can never be retrieved.  I know I’ll recover.  But the question is: can I be whole again?

Well, I suppose I owe “the world” another post. Or myself, at least. I don’t know if this is helping, but at least it’s keeping me momentarily occupied. And if I can avoid thinking about things for just one more moment, and then another, and then another, maybe I can convince myself that I’m slightly less depressed than I actually am. I don’t know if I’ve ever sounded this pathetic. I hope not, because this is pretty pathetic.

At the moment, I am sitting at school and freezing from the air conditioning. I could have left almost three hours ago, but I know if I go home I’ll just sit there and be sad. And I really don’t want to do that. So I thought I’d just hang out here, do homework, read, pretty much anything to keep my mind from wondering. I can’t say that it’s really working all that well, but it could be worse, I suppose.

Even Shakespeare reminds me of my own little tragedy. Brutus speaks to the crowd after he has killed Julius Caesar, one of his dearest friends, and says, “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” I find that extremely appropriate right now. I loved Caesar immensely, but I could not tolerate tyranny. I decided for the liberty and freedom of Rome. And so here I am, without a Caesar, and I’ve forgotten how to live in Rome. I sure hope Marc Antony keeps his nose out of my business.

Othello sort of makes me cringe, too, lately. Poor Desdemona, always suspect to her husband’s doubts which were planted by Iago. I’ve read in criticisms that, as Shakespeare wrote them and described their background with each other, these two may not have come to such a tragic end had they never married. As the critic Irene Dash asserts, this is because of the roles imposed upon them within the confines of marriage. She aptly describes, with a close reading of details an average reader might overlook as insignificant within the text of Othello, the relationship these two had before they were married and contrasts it with the post-marital one. It becomes easy to see the differences and, despite the fact that Iago is the initial source of suspicion between the two, it also becomes evident that the roles marriage imposes on our Hero and Heroine is what ultimately undoes them. They were not unfaithful to one another, they did not lie to one another, but after wedding they assumed the traditional male-dominated roles ascribed to marriage in that time and, to an extent, even today. Desdemona was never anything but devoted to Othello, against the wishes of her father, and Othello thought the world of Desdemona, until Iago planted doubts in his head, doubts that he was not strong enough to shake. The characterization of their dominant/submissive roles in marriage is also inadvertently brought out by Iago. He tells Othello how she is having an affair, that she lies to him, which makes him feel as if his authority were being challenged. He feels threatened. Ultimately, however, Iago only exploits a crack that was already there. Had Othello not allowed himself to doubt, our tragic lovers would never have come to such an end.

Ah, what led to that post, and to all the other posts, for that matter. What keeps me posting. Pain has its outlets, I suppose. You can’t just walk away from a marriage, regardless of the length of its duration. You’re not supposed to walk away. If it’s done, if it has to be done, you must finish it. Whatever it is that grows between two people, whatever it is that causes them to get married in the first place, when it lies there dying, you have to finish it. You can’t just let it bleed to death. Gut it. Slit its throat. Shoot it. But make sure that it’s gone. Don’t let it lie there and suffer, longing for a life that can never be retrieved, wishing, praying for an existence that can never be had again. You can’t just walk away from a life. Don’t pervert what was once beautiful by torturing it.

Sometimes it’s so easy to think you’ll be fine, you’ll go back to the way things were. You were fine before. You can be fine again. But then you wake up at four in the morning, thinking, remembering how you used to sleep. How the bed used to have a heavier feel, and how it was almost too warm under the blankets sometimes. How you never slept without touching skin that wasn’t your own. How you grew to feel safe from someone’s presence. You remember, and you can’t breathe, and you cry, and you can’t go back to sleep. The only way to sleep sometimes is to pretend you feel that warmth. To pretend you feel safe. But it never fails to disappear as soon as you wake up. You can only fool yourself for so long. I guess I’ve fooled myself long enough. But I have the feeling that I’ll be fooling myself to sleep for a long, long time . . .

It’s depressing, but I think I finally understand why people are so nice and so congratulatory when you get married. It means you have found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. And that really is something to celebrate. Not that I didn’t possess this knowledge before, but when that foundation is so violently broken, you come to better understand what love is really about. If anybody’s reading, I’m sorry for all the depressing posts. My foundation has been shattered, and I just can’t seem to piece it together again, no matter how hard I try. How do you love someone forever and never see them again? How does the rest of your life just walk out the door, without so much as “goodbye”?

I’m beginning to see that, when you start a new life, and that new life is broken prematurely, that you can’t simply pick up where you left off in the old life. Nothing works anymore. Suddenly everything that was so recently familiar is awkward and strange and almost unnatural. Eating alone, sleeping alone, waking up alone—it’s all so foreign—and so utterly depressing. I keep telling myself that it must get better, it’s going to get better, it has to get better, because it can’t possibly get worse. And then I think about how small my paycheck is, how large my bills are, and I remember then that it can, and probably will get worse. After all, I can’t abandon a newly-made home, with so many fresh memories, memories that I can’t bear to let go of. Because I won’t be making any more of that kind again.

There’s an empty place in my heart,

That no one can fill

But you.

There’s an empty spot in our bed

That lies cold now

Abandoned

Awaiting your return.

There are empty shoes on the floor

Abondoned

That once belonged to you.

There are empty clothes in our closet

That once

You wore.

The wine bottles are not empty, though

Because you are not here to empty them.

The milk will soon go sour,

Waiting to be drunk by you.

Your bread has long since molded,

Your coffee and tea and your cookies

All gone stale.

Your evidence has been erased from the bathroom

No more toothbrush

No more shaving cream

No more razor

No more cologne

No more you.

But worst of all of these empty places

Is the bedroom.

The bed is forever cold

Even under the covers

And the light in there doesn’t look the same anymore,

It seems somehow dimmer, weakened

Like me.

When I enter our home

And I see everything

Just as you left it

When you went away,

How can I touch it?

How can I move the last thing you touched?

How can I erase your mark?

How can I make any move to ease the aching of my heart

Without breaking it further?

There is an empty place in my heart.

So cavernous it seems

That nothing may fill it up again.