Saturday, October 22, 2005

Exploding Things: Home Edition

It's been a rocky week here at Chez Gladys.

I'm going through some shit of my own, but LJ: not helping. And it all came to a head yesterday morning, when I left him an (admittedly) nasty note which contained the phrase "Really, I just don't care anymore."

I'd say "subtleties of the written word really ain't his thing, apparently" except if I'm being honest with myself, there was damn little subtlety to be had; at the time I wrote it, I meant it all the way down. And that's exactly how he took it. He called his sister and made arrangements for her to come pick up his stereo; in his mind, at least, he was moving out. He sent me a text message (which I didn't see til this morning, though he repeated the salient points in a phone conversation last evening) telling me that I'd been "acting like a bitch lately" and that if I didn't care anymore, then "fuck it."

When he said that, about me acting like a bitch, I was fairly pissed; then I thought about it for a while, and...yeah, a little. (Though he was a total hypocrite when I asked him why he hadn't said something before now--he's always telling me that if something's bothering me, I need to say something; then when he has a problem with how I'm acting, he says nothing. But that's a slightly less-important point.) I was being a bitch because I felt like I was repeating the same points over and over and he wasn't listening. It was making me mad, and that was becoming increasingly obvious.

He said "we'll talk about it when I come home." Then he stayed out til after 3--that was when I gave up waiting for him--and when I woke up at 6, he was asleep in the spare room. I thought about it for a minute, and then I went in and woke him up. Fuck it, I thought; if he's mad enough to leave I'm not going to worry about making him madder by waking him up; and if there's something we can salvage here, then it's important enough to wake up for.

So he woke up, and got into bed with me, and we talked for a while. And despite my best efforts and all my resolve, there was crying; I think I'm one of those people who cries when she's mad, too. But I think I finally might have gotten through to him. I told him, "One of the things I know about you is, you do exactly what you want to do, and nothing else. And since you spend all your time outside, and none with me, I see that as 'if you wanted to spend time with me, you would, but you don't, so obviously it's not something you want to do.' And after a while, I don't make that into 'What's wrong with HIM, that he doesn't want to spend time with me'; I make that into 'What's wrong with ME, that he doesn't want to spend time with me.'"

He was very quiet for a minute, and when he spoke he sounded really shocked. "Naw," he said. "It's not like that. It's not like THAT at ALL."

He wasn't very talkative--to be fair, I'd woken him out of a dead sleep, so...yeah--but what little he said made me feel somewhat better, anyway. And after a while, as he was falling back to sleep and I said "love you, baby," he actually said it back. Like, as the actual phrase, not couched in some complicated story--just flat-out, for the first time.

Which doesn't solve anything, really--he's still gotta spend a lot more time with me, and treat me more like a girlfriend, less like a roomie--but it patched things up between us. And I'm sure this is going to seem like more cannon-fodder for the "you're too good for him/kick the boy out" crowd--but it shouldn't be, so much, because I'm willing to admit that I've been a little weird lately.

For one thing: next weekend will be ten years since JP died. I'm not even going there yet, at least not in writing; my mind, on the other hand, doesn't seem to want to go anywhere else. It's...not easy. That's all I'm gonna say for the moment.

And then there's work. And that's the next post, because if I put this all in one post, nobody will ever wanna read it, because it's HUGE.

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