From Heartbreak, Mourning, Loss. Volume One, Detach or Die
A rat in the labyrinth
For the past two months, I have been feeling like a rat in a labyrinth, trying every trick to get the food pellets and not getting any. Laura keeps repeating that she still loves me, although she admits that she is also attracted to Jeremy. In this, she is honest, and does not deny sleeping with Jeremy. I beg her to tell me if I am still an option. She can’t or won’t answer; she remains ambivalent. I despair when I feel that she has boarded Jeremy’s ship! I don’t want her to protect me against the truth.
I hate it when she says she is busy with work and I know she is busy with Jeremy. What I need more than anything is the truth, not another layer of padding with her sweet lies.
We spent the last weekend together at my house, because I still believe that, together, we can navigate through this dark sea. She spent most of our Saturday on the phone with her mom and her sister; then she washed her car, groomed her cat, walked her dog, and called her friends, read the papers. When we finally got to bed on Saturday evening, she fell asleep the minute her head hit the pillow. Laura is an athletic runner, and the next day, on morning, right after coffee, she ran a good four miles.
While my heart bleeds, she runs, she sleeps, she talks on the phone, writes emails, takes care of her cat, her dog, her car, her fitness, and I count for nothing. Why do I still care about her? On days like this, I find we have little in common. What is the mystery of my attachment to her? Laura says she is being “true to her soul” by exploring her attraction to Jeremy. How about being true to me? She says she has to “follow her instinct” and her instinct tells her to put a hold on the incredibly strong sexual bond that used to unite us body and soul. How can anybody contradict an instinct? What is that new age bullshit? What is it that I don’t get?
She does not seem to be concerned about my pain. I am in deep mourning for what used to be, and she acts innocent while torturing me with her sexless gentleness! I am fifty, ten years older than Laura. Is that why I am slower to detach? Am I too old for love? Finished? I wonder how she could have felt our love as the greatest of her life and then, poof! It evaporates and Jeremy is her new God. How innocent about love can a forty-year-old woman be?
After doing her yoga on Sunday afternoon, she showered and put on a nice dress to join me outside on the patio, to watch the sunset. It was just Laura and I again, looking at the golden light in the garden, drinking a glass of white wine before dinner, my heart ready to forgive and forget, just peace and joy again. I was certain we were reconnecting and would make love after dinner, the crystalline purity of our connection dispelling all the fog of her betrayal. Then her cell phone rang; she took the call, her embarrassment so obvious. She said her woman friend needed her to come by. It was so obviously a lie that it actually embarrassed me. Of course Jeremy wanted her to come to his place; his son safely returned to his mom, he was ready for Laura to visit. My distress peaked like sudden fever.
This arrow got me at the core. Laura left without having dinner with me, and I went straight to bed. I spent the night sweating, my heart jumping in its cage like a scared cat caught in a net. From that evening on, a week ago, I have remained in a daze; slow to feel, slow to think, hobbling haltingly from one necessary task to another, but with a heart beating too fast. I get food, eat food, digest food. I wash dishes, do my work, put my body to bed, and obliterate every thought or feeling. I am slowly progressing toward emotional catatonia.
I feel a weariness of every organ, a misery of the oldest kind. I guess you would call it the death wish, or maybe love-sickness, because it does feel like a sickness. My imagination is stuck in the hope of receiving even a crumb of love from Laura. I am trying, as my friends advise me, to “take care of myself.” There is only one person in the whole world that can take care of me: Laura, but I have lost access to that person.
What is Love? I don’t know anymore; I am utterly confused. I used to believe human love was the highest form of spirituality, and now it feels like the cruelest lie. I have experienced love as a great spasm of pleasure, an exclamation of joy, a physical and spiritual high, and now that same love in my heart feels like a tumor, a cancerous growth, a force that keeps me in bondage.
If love is not bondage, how can I explain that, after six months of her coldness, I am still, hoping, waiting for Laura to come back to me?
