Why We Can Never Be Friends

Posted on by learning to live like water

Friends and enemies

It seems crazy, I mean really mind-bending crazy, to say I miss him at all. Because every thing I think about that I miss about him, is now tainted with the deception and the lies.

I miss sitting outside, on my deck, and talking till the wee hours or in the wee hours of the morning. About anything….and just talking, and laughing. And flirting. Flirting until we wanted to go back upstairs to my room…..

I miss that.

But now I know that a lot of those nights last summer, he had come to me from her, or was going from me to her. So it’s tainted, and now it hurts to remember. Or makes me angry. Or some of both. And I’d just rather not feel any of that, so I just shut the door.

I miss our intimate sexual conversations. But they too are tainted. When Betty found out, he tried to say we were just kidding around, that he wasn’t serious.

But he was. Then. But now he denies it. He dishonors it. He makes me feel dirty, and stupid. He says it meant nothing to him.

But it did. Then.

I remember quickly, that he denied her to me. Just exactly as he denied me to her. So it’s just who he is. The narcissist who plays women for all he can personally get from them.

He used to say, in general, why can’t people remain friends when they break up? So they had some bad stuff, they couldn’t make it together. Does that have to negate all the good times they had.

I think, that in this case…. Yes. It does mean that. Because when lies and deception undercut a relationship enough to destroy it, it also undercuts everything about that relationship. All the things you valued, all the things that made you excited to see each other, that made you want each other, that made you enjoy each others company, that made you laugh til you couldn’t breathe, and then make love the same way, are all undercut by the lies, by the deceit. None of it seems real anymore. It seems like it was all a lie. It was all just a deception on someone’s part.

Not mine.

So, we have to let it all go. We can’t just let go the actual incidents that caused the break-up, we can’t just let go of the pain that caused our hearts to stop beating, at least for the seconds around the moment when we realized the truth.

We can’t keep the parts we wanted to remember forever. I can’t remember being on the beach in Matunuck or driving around in the car, or Watch Hill, or East Beach, not my deck or his or my bed or his, or any of it, not one second, without a question mark at the end of my memory. Was he playing me then? I wonder. Then? What about then?  Why did he take me there, and tell me it was his special place….and make me feel so honored he took me there. Why did he share so much of himself?  Was it even true, or just a ploy to make an empathetic loving soul have one more reason to love him?  So that now, I have a beautiful, tainted memory that I have to let go of. That I’m not sure of.

I’m letting it all go, I’m almost done. Really. It doesn’t hurt much anymore, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t keep any of it, and think it’s real. It all is pretty meaningless now. I didn’t want it that way, but he did. Or he wouldn’t have…..done what he did.

So I’ll live like water, I’ll go with the flow, and I’ll let it all go. Because that’s the way it has to be, to move on.

Prayers For My Kitty, Maggie

Posted on by learning to live like water

My little cat Maggie is sick. She’s been bleeding for about a month. It would get better, then worse, then better. But I realized it was not going away, and last week made an appointment to take her to the vet today.

It is no small task to get her in the cat carrier. She is not a lap cat, and hates to be held. Carrying her around is a dangerous endeavor. She will sit next to me, if I’m meditating, lol. She hangs with me, she follows me around the house. But try to catch her. Not happening.

Last time she was sick, she was throwing up constantly. I chased her around the house for an hour and then called the vet and told them we wouldn’t make the appointment. A week later, when she was too weak from not eating, I was able to catch her and get her to the vet. They gave her a pill to settle her stomach and she was fine. She’s been fine ever since.

Til now.

I made the appointment for late afternoon. I had to go to work for a half day to do inventory, and I wanted to make sure I was home. Luckily, today I only had to chase her for 20 minutes, so we actually got to the appointment early.

The vet said she could feel something, a mass, in her abdomen. She said gave me some choices. I could do an ultrasound for $275, and then do surgery if the ultrasound warrants. Or just do the surgery to spay her, and see what’s there then. A simple spaying could cover it, or it may take more, so the price could be from $240 for a simple spaying to $600 for a more complicated procedure. And of course, if they find it’s spread all over her, they would put her to sleep then.

I’ve had her for 8 ½ years. I hope they can fix her. She seems so normal, she is eating normally, playing normally. I hate to lose her now.

So, if you think of it, send a little positive energy her way. She’s a sweet little thing. (She’s tiny, she only weighs 7 ½ lbs. But is healthy except for this one thing.)

Thank you….. love and light

Which Will You Be?

Posted on by learning to live like water

strength acourage

Strength

Measured in lies

Measured in pain caused

Measured in lives destroyed

Is weakness.

Is less than zero.

 

Strength

Measured in open hearts

Measured in joy given

Measured in lives connected

Is power.

Is heaven on earth.

 

Courage

Measured in willingness to lie

Measured in willingness to deceive

Measured in willingness to devastate

To crush, to harm

Isn’t courage.

It’s cheap cowardice.

It’s emptiness of a soul.

 

Courage

Measured in Willingness to to be honest

Measured in willingness to trust

Measured in willingness to show oneself

And be seen, truly be seen

Is courage.

It is wealth of spirit,

It is fullness of soul.

 

Which have you been

The weak morally bankrupt coward?

Or the courageous, powerful rich spirit?

 

Which are you?

 

Which will you be?

Throwing Stuff At The Wall to See What Sticks

Posted on by learning to live like water

throw shit

I went to Star Wars this afternoon with my 23 yr old son.  We went out to eat before to the Texas Roadhouse and got these humongous burgers which neither of us finished.  Then on to the movie in 3D at the Imax theater.

It was so good.  I am not a sci-fi fan.  I’m really not,even Avatar didn’t strike a cord with me.  But Star Wars always has, since I saw the first one almost 40 years ago.  I took my son when he was 4.  I remembered during the movie driving to 5 different Toys R Us stores looking for a storm trooper’s gun for Christmas.

I think it’s the movie’s epic battle of clearly defined good vs. evil, of light vs dark.  And the humanness of it.  This movie was not a disappointment.  And the 3D Imax combination was incredible, and so comfortable!  Lots of legroom, high seat backs so you can rest your head.

I was thinking about coincidences today.  Like, I don’t believe there are any.  I think people come together for specific purposes, even if we can’t understand what those are.  I think things happen because they are supposed to.

For instance, Scott put his FB page back up long before Betty came back into his life, but didn’t tell me.  I just didn’t go looking for one, because it wasn’t there when I first looked, and I believed him (unearned trust…) that he didn’t have one.  But he put it back up, risking that I’d see it.  He left the comment by Betty up, on the picture of his friend.  Risking that I’d find out who she was.  I didn’t find it for 6  or 7 months, but it seems out of character for a man who was so concerned about me using his first name in a blog, and so concerned about security, to have put that up and left it up, not to be concerned whether or not I found it.

I think, subconsciously, he wanted me to find it.  He had to know I’d figure out who she was.  He had to know I’d demand she be told.   It may be that he thought I loved him so much that I couldn’t say no to him.  It may have been a miscalculation, that he didn’t believe I could make him tell Betty.  I don’t think he thought I could stand up for what I believed.  He tried pretty hard to engage me after I knew about her, to get me to see him then.

I think that he thought, probably subconsciously, that it would be the easy way out for him.  A big blow up when I found it and then I’d be gone, and he’d live happily ever after with Betty.

I didn’t find it until we’d already broken up, so I already knew about her when I found his page.  I suppose he thought he was home safe.  Apparently he thought I’d just “let it be” (his consistent advice whenever something bothered me. “Can’t you just let it be?”).   No. I couldn’t.  I wanted the pieces to fit together.  I wanted the whole demise of our relationship to make sense, because I was trying so hard to do everything in my power to make it work, and I couldn’t.  I also know that the truth will always bubble up. I’m patient that way.

Only a narcissist would be so clueless to other people’s feelings that he wouldn’t imagine my reaction.  Only a narcissist wouldn’t consider the way it would devastate me, would break me, would rip my life apart.  Narcissists are so incredibly self-absorbed and self-important.    Apparently he didn’t think that discovering the depth of his lies and deceit would make me determined not to stand idly by while he lived a lie with her.  I was not going to be an accomplice to his deception.  Nor was I going to allow him to misrepresent to her the relationship that we had.

But I do think that he left the FB page up intentionally, so that I’d find it.  He’s got a way of throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.  He just didn’t realize how much shit would stick to this wall.  He couldn’t be bothered to break up with me in a humane way, and sent me a text where he blurted out the truth. But he couldn’t be bothered to tell Betty in a humane way either.  He called her, on the phone.  Wasn’t about to go face either of us and our pain that he was 100% responsible for.

Narcissism.  It really blows my mind how they can detach from what they’re doing to everyone else, and be concerned only with getting what they want.  They don’t care what they say, what they do, who they hurt along the way.  Just mind-blowing. I never realized how many people there are who have absolutely no moral compass.

What a way to waste this one sweet life we are given.

 

Stardust Connection

Posted on by learning to live like water

We-Are-Stardust

It’s another weird late December morning.  It will reach 60° again today, though it looks like the last warm day.  The world is shrouded in fog, and my head too is a little foggy from the late night last night and the wine.  It’s a peaceful kind of foggy though.

No pressure today, no ghosts of the past filling me with longing this morning.  Nor the demons of shame, or guilt, for my part in what happened.  I loved, that’s all.  I loved deeply, intensely, without limit, beyond reason.  I don’t now, I will again. And today, I will let it go at that.

It’s easy to see our flaws when we look backward.  It’s easy to chastise ourselves.  But why?  We are all the same thing, the universe manifesting itself through us.  We are here to evolve, to grow, to learn.  Bitterness will take away the beauty of the lessons we learn.  I choose to hold them dear to my heart, so that as the future unfolds, greater joy will come into it because I didn’t waste the lessons.  I didn’t waste the time.

Like my current favorite teacher Brene Brown says, (and I am paraphrasing), we are hard-wired for struggle, we come into this life that way.  But we are also, from the moment of our conception and for no reason other than we exist, worthy of love and belonging.

I have read  a few blogs this morning about shame, our personal shame, and how excruciating it is.  Let me say, that verbalizing the shame, and not burying it, is the only way through it.  Allow others to feel empathy for us, because empathy is the death of shame.  Iyanla Van Zant says those things that we bury do not die.  They rot and they fester and they will make us sick.

I believe in putting our shameful experiences out there.  I believe in sending the energy to the universe, and that the universe, as a loving parent of us all, will atone, and make right what we did.  I believe that in owning our stories, we gain strength, and perspective, and understanding and compassion.  More importantly, we also make connection possible.

Shame isolates us.  Owning our stories, and letting go of the shame connects us.  To feel isolated, is to feel separate from others.  How can we be separate, when we are all created from the same stardust?   Shame, and isolation is us not believing we are worthy.

We are.  Each and everyone of us.

 

 

A Fun Night Out

Posted on by learning to live like water

The Gris‘

I went out with a friend tonight.  We went to the bar at an inn in the town of Essex Connecticut, which was burned down the British during the Revolutionary war,and somehow this inn remained.  It had been an inn since 1776.  I know that in terms of many of the places in the world, that is young, but here, in the US, it’s pretty old, as old as our country.

They have a piano player every Saturday night, who has a sing-along.  There is the piano, and a guitar, and a washboard and spoons.  Everyone in the bar sings along with songs from 60’s and 70’s, and show tunes, and Irish drinking songs.  It was so much fun!

We got there early enough to get a table, because the bar is small and there aren’t many tables.  Nor bar stools.  We had a little food, a few glasses of wine and we sang along, and danced in our seats.  The picture is one I took when the guy in the turquoise shirt was singing, he’s 81 years old.  There are pictures of riverboats covering the walls.  The crowd ranges from young, like mid 20’s to my age.

Fun place to  be.

It lifted my spirits to be out, with people, having fun.  I showed my friend the new FB picture that Scott’s girlfriend Betty put up a week ago.  The other ones I’d seen showed her as a blond and from a distance.  This one is a head shot up close, with her hair more of a brownish color about the same as mine, which is light brown with blond highlights.  I thought she was very attractive for a 60-something woman.  My friend said, yes, she is but she’s weathered.  She looks older than you.  She looks like a smoker, maybe a drinker at one time.  Like she was really pretty in her 20’s….”

Which I gotta say, made me smile.  lol.  She’s younger than me, by maybe a year or two. Scott always said I was the oldest woman he’d ever been with.  I’m 64, 3 years younger than him. Well, technically 2 until the end of January.  He also told me she’s in her 60’s.  Whatever.

I don’t think she’s still reading my blog, I hope not.  I was not stalking her.  I used the search feature on FB to find someone else, but it runs pics of your recent searches when you do that.  Since I rarely use it, her picture and Scott’s both came up as recent searches.  When I saw that she had a new pic of herself, I clicked on it.  Before she had a picture of dragon flies, or something.  She doesn’t post much. I think her last post was 2 years ago.

Well, it’s off to bed.  I am up way late tonight, but I had so much fun.  I wanted to get it written down here.  I’ve been in such a funk for a couple of days, it was so nice to be out having a good time, being somewhere that felt alive with human connection.

Love and light all…-

Chastisement, or I Think I’m Clear Now

Posted on by learning to live like water

Scott eyes

I’ve been doing little things around the house that need doing, to keep busy, to keep my mind off of the stuff that takes over if I don’t keep myself busy.

I sat down for a few minutes to have a cup of tea.  To put my mother’s silver in the wooden case made for it, because she gave it to me a year or more ago, and I hadn’t put it away.  I hung an outdoor thermometer.  I cleaned my stove top really good and the counters.  I vacuumed, changed sheets.  I went on ebay and bought a new tail light for my car, and had to open my mail and reset the password for ebay, because I couldn’t remember it.

Then I decided to start going through all the mail I’d sent to Scott over 18 months, and deleting it.  I was reading last summers mail….things I would write him in the morning, or evening when I wasn’t seeing him.  My God, how I loved that man.  I took it all on myself, as to why we weren’t getting along, I was shouldering all the blame, I was so hurting.  I never wrote here about being with him, because he’d asked me not to.  So I didn’t, instead I’d write to him, I’d email him and tell him how it hurt that he only would come for a few hours on a Wed or a Friday or a Sunday, and how he would never spend the night.  One weekend he told me he had to work, the next that he was busy, and I always believed him, I always went along with it, and blamed myself that he didn’t want to make time for me.

And all the while he was with her….all the while, he was the one putting up barriers.  Keeping me hanging on, while he was with her.  Not telling me the truth, allowing me to be in pain, and blame.

He used to call himself “incorrigible”.  Like he thought it was kind of cute, a funny kind of impish thing.  It’s far too good a word for what he was.  In late April and early May I was sending him emails about our plans for Florida.  By May 10 he had changed his mind about going.  So…that’s when it all happened, that’s when he saw her, that’s when they got back together, and he made up so much crap to me, so I would believe there was something I could do to change things.  And hang on, and on.  Despite an obvious knowledge on my part that it couldn’t work out if we never saw each other.  And his obvious wanting to keep me on the side.

I stopped reading them when I got back to the time before her….that was just too painful.  I’m leaving those for a different day.  Brutal.

I loved him so fucking much.  And he was such a self centered son-of-a-bitch narcissist, lying and deceiving and putting all the burden on me.  And giving me scraps off his table, playing push-pull, just taking in all the love I could give him, and giving it to someone else.  He had to rob me to give to her.  Because he had nothing of his own to give anyone.

Empty soul sucking vampire.

He wanted me to believe he loved her at the end.  Sure, Scott,that’s why a month before you finally told me about her (because I was about to show up at your house), you came to me, climbed into my bed, then and looked me in the eye and said, “I’m so disappointed that you would think I’d jump back into a relationship with her after what she did to me.”  In September.

You’d been with her since May.   And you denied her, over and over to me.

And you think that you loved her in some way?  That making me, or anyone, think she was not a factor in your life was loving her?  Honoring her? Respecting her?

Then I find out she’d done nothing to you?  And you’d betrayed her, when you were together before me, and then again with me, all the time…..not letting me go.  By fucking me when you could, when I’d accept the few hours you offered me because I fucking loved you so much and missed you so much, by making me believe I was the only one in your life.

I think I’m clear now.  It wasn’t how I wanted to spend my afternoon, but it gave me clarity.  Self-serving, self-absorbed, blood-sucking, unable-to-stand-on-your-own-two-feet vampire.

I have prayed for you, that you can find a way to live that doesn’t devastate you and everyone you meet. That maybe you can learn your karmic lessons still and not have to repeat them over and over.

Now I just hope no one else falls victim to your pathological blue eyes, and sob stories.  I hope Betty has learned her lesson with you, and never talks to you again.   I fucking loved you so so much…..Geezus.  I’m guessing she did too.  I’m not worried about her.  She’s a beautiful woman, she will find someone else, someone who will care for her the way she deserves.  So will I.   You empty hole in the ground.  Call the prison whore, that’s all you deserve.

How Do I Stop This?

Posted on by learning to live like water

Dreams-facts

I was perusing old posts yesterday, God knows why.  Just still trying to make sense of my life I guess.

I have written a couple of blogs about how when I dream about him, it’s so real, it’s like he was there.  I can feel him, smell him, taste him, hear him.  I’ve awakened from those thinking he was in the room with me.  They are so much more than a dream.

I found an old post, a poem I wrote on September 30, 5 days before he told me about her.  It was my first of those dreams, but was happy to have it, because I thought we were together.  He had planned to come to my house for the eclipse two days before, and then fell and hurt his back.  But we were texting and talking intimately, intimating plans to be together.  It was the first time in months I felt like he understood me, that he wanted me the way I wanted him.  That whole week.  Right up until the moment he blindsided me.

I remember the dream still, that I woke and thought I felt him in the bed with me.  I could feel the warmth of his body next to me, I turned over to find him, I thought I could hear him breathing, could smell the scent of him.  Of course, he wasn’t there, but I was happy that I dreamed it, because I wanted him to be there so badly, and thought that in a few days he would be.

Of course, a few days later is when he told me he was going to be with her that weekend.  Ripping my life apart.  Callously, carelessly, painfully, thoughtlessly.  Cruelly.  Just cruel.

So that’s three times he’s come to me in a dream, so vivid, so real.  These are the only 3 dreams I’ve ever had like this.

I need to cut that cord with him.  It’s a thick, hard, old, maybe ancient cord.  But I don’t want him visiting me any more in my dreams.  I know it’s not him, in his current state.  I know it’s his old soul, which is not letting go of me.

I don’t want to go to bed at night and wonder if he will find me again.  This is my work.

Let Me Go, Set Me Free

Posted on by learning to live like water

set me free

The middle of the night is a lonely place, in my bed, alone, remembering him next to me, and then not.  His blue eyes laughing, sparkling, smiling. And then cold, like the blue of a glacier, floating in a cold ocean. Unfeeling, uncaring. Waiting for me to blindly crash into him and sink.  Missing him, why?

The hole he left in my heart….he filled it with ugliness.  Why in the world would I miss someone who used and abused me for his own pleasure?

I beg the archangels, cut these energetic cords with him. The cords that cross centuries, the cords that cross lifetimes.  I don’t want them anymore. I don’t want any in this lifetime.  I don’t want the old ones to pull me in and make me ache for what I don’t even know, or understand.

Cut them from my head, from my hands, from my heart.  Or pull them out, by the roots.  Send them back to him, or out into the universe.  There are times I don’t even know if I’m feeling my own emotions or his.  Cut them, protect me from them.  Let me know that the pain I feel is my own.  I don’t want to have to deal with his pain.  If I am.  My own pain is sufficient burden to carry.

Let me forget.  Forget the emotions which make me remember the lost dreams, the love I lavished on him. That make me remember the lies, the deception he lay in my path, to stumble across as I ran down it, my eyes blinded by my own tears, and fall flat on my face, broken, bruised and bleeding, with no hand to help me up but my own.

But to hold space, for him….because I can’t not love him, but I can’t be hurt anymore.  I can’t wake in the night any more and miss him.  I can’t continue to have emotions about him that defy the reality in which I live.

I have sat with these emotions long enough.  I beg the loving energy of the universe:  let me go, set me free.