wind

 

I have been very aware of wind during this experience. 

In the initial crisis, I took many walks through the park in which I felt the wind and sun on my arms, rippling my arm hairs, warming the follicles.

Then there was a tornado that swept through Brooklyn, dropping huge tree limbs on hapless cars.  I understood that.

The sound of wind outside while I am in my room with my cats.

Then today I was teaching and noticed how the wind was rustling the leaves outside the classroom, making the most beautiful spooky percussive sound, revealing the lighter undersides of the leaves (elm? maybe elm), and I thought: well, nothing stays still.

Wind.

fie

asunder

schmuck

poignard

It’s September 11th.

It’s September 11th. The morning light is golden on the buildings and the leaves. I have been up every hour or so, body still pulsing with fear, although I have moments of calm, too. “It comes and goes,” a wise friend said. I did sleep for a few hours in the night, having tried to put myself to sleep first by reading the New Yorker, then with oud music. The NYer article, “A Cruel Country,” was a little too applicable to my own situation: Barthes mourning his mother. His words leapt out at me, not as solace but as empathy.

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it – or without being sure of not doing so ¬– although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.

…the apartment is warm, clean, well lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever [?] I am my own mother [husband].

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?

Everyone is “extremely nice” ¬– and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis.”)

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

So, Gary comes to pack today, moves tomorrow. I sit in different parts of the apartment, buzzing with confusion. What has happened? It was fast and it also wasn’t fast: the pot just boiled over. I don’t know if writing is good now. Is writing good? Sometimes it just excites me more, when I need to just calm down. And yet I find myself writing. A kind of baying. I’m baying. I do want to make literature out of it, I suppose, since that seems to be the only thing I can do. What else can I do? This is who I am: who he helped me to be.

So I wrote yesterday, among other things, this is a little censored:

World as oyster. Oyster beds. Beds. Profound ugliness at the core, inside the bed: a sharp pea that exploded. That false elation: elastic predicate, coming boomeranging back. Icepick, so rinky-dink. Tautological mayhem. It goes around and around. I was alone anyway. I stole this notebook. I was alone anyway. The idea, the thought, might be… to be less alone, more delighted. Idea, a book of one-sided letters. But that would be “dwelling.” Spin on your heel, turn on a dime, move on, don’t hesitate. “New Life” starts now. Soon: Sunday. mercury out of retrograde.

Jams, jellies: ineffective protection. The drawer empty now of the protection he didn’t need with me. Reeling. Little monsters in the underwear. I had a dream: the sky scowled. Dizzy as an undertaker. Washlet. Bidet. Who was my body, did I have a love.

Everything backfires (unruly love of others) in the acoustic slop of this broken century. Decade of mayhem. My “personal” life. Great tumult. Must turn on a dime. I have half a mind, I walked the line, I fell into a pit of an idea of an idea (bad idea, but I couldn’t help it). Snakes. Hair shock. Immobile device, claws at my raw fever. I stole this notebook.

Charged and golden with fear as a rare verb,  a hooting outlier  in the cold forest of betrayal. That limply idling liar. Liar liar liar liar liar. A magenta fool’s cap: his betrayals were tatters: he ralphed my world, wrinkled it, tore it up: resisted as stupendous blockage. Time for another time, robins. Hello robins. The fires are wending, kooky, feeble, blending – I am oxymoron in the dusky blandness of this awful pain, circular and huddled in the rain of fiery consciousness. Hooting.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have a horny hide – the hammers of sense and how I took him to the hospital when his hand bled. The blood came out from his hand. I put the cap on him before the surgery. I brought him the cool towels for his forehead. We each were able to shit as the other showered. I made him rice. I saw him fall down. I watched him come. I wanted to believe in our twin edifices, but how much, really, was only artifice? Now the long blue lights pierce the clouds to remember the day that changed the world, etc., and I am learning to experience the strange extremity of every moment.

It’s expensive to break up.

It’s expensive to break up.

For one thing, there are the trauma expenses.

Because I felt like I had been electrocuted, I paid $120 to an acupuncturist to stick needles in me, and torture me with twisty cups and herb plasters. Then I paid another $100 for herbs that are supposed to make me forget and able to love again.

That feeling of wending my way through the 95 degree metallic screechy city to get to his office, the sheets spotted with blood, his dirty uniform…my desperation…just to get to some sort of balance again. Actually, it did relax me, eventually, sort of: “relax your liver,” he said, “relax your gall bladder, relax your small intestine.”

Luckily the therapist is not too expensive: just a $20 copay. She takes my insurance! and is two blocks away! And, oh, she is very wise.

Found also a miracle bodyworker: $95 a session, well worth it. I will do that instead of the scary acupuncture.

Another $20 copay for the doctor who wrote me the Ambien prescription ($10). The Ambien let me sleep one night. The next night I took it and woke up with the wildest palpitations like a flurry of bats in my chest. So I stopped the Ambien. Kim told me that even if you can’t sleep, just sort of horizontal resting all night will get you through, is almost as good. Now nothing stronger for me than Tylenol PM. I’m not sure I totally remember what really deep sleep is.

I need to change the colors of things now, so another expense is new paint, a kind of Versailles pink for the bathroom, a soft wheat for the kitchen, there goes $100. That’s only the beginning, as colors of other things will need to change, too.

I need to buy a new bed. The week before we broke up I was emailing him links to beds. “Which ones do you like?” I wrote to him. “I don’t know, nothing too over-the-top,” he responded. Well. Now my bed can be as over-the-top as I please. I am a few years away from fifty and I have never had a beautiful bed. Now I will have a beautiful bed. Years ago, in another crisis, he had promised to buy me a new bed, but he never did.

And there will need to be new sheets, and new pillowcases, and pillows, because the molecules of our coupledom are all up in the old bedding. That doesn’t come out with laundry detergent.

Some things are cheaper, like food, because you don’t really have to buy as much. But now I am the only one buying food for the cats, and paying the maintenance here myself. That’s a fairly large expense, but that’s OK, because it helps to make clear that this is my sweet sanctuary, this place. That someone might have overturned the flat world for a minute, but hey, I have superglue on the bottoms of my feet and I’m hanging on.

Other kinds of expenses that one realizes in a breakup are not necessarily financial. I mean, I have really been charging up my friend credit. One friend stayed here with me for two nights. Another talked to me for two hours, from one to three in the morning, when I was about to call 911. Another came over with soup and rescue remedy and sage advice. Another let me stay for a night so I could have a break from the apartment and all its memories. Another walked me around the neighborhood and let me sob while G. was in the apartment getting some of his stuff. I know that friendship doesn’t work on the same economy as money. It’s a better sort of system, really. The investments grow in beautiful and surprising ways, like the ad hoc topiary of morning glories.

Of course, the greatest expenses are emotional. I’m not really ready to tally up those expenses yet. Well. If I’m ululating now, it’s with very great sorrow.

I’ve had many little mantras getting me through these two weeks. One was a trick my mother taught me of asking myself questions: “Why am I doing so well?” “Why am I coping so beautifully?” “Why am I so relaxed?” and so on. This worked for a little while but started to feel a little OCD. (i.e. “Why am I doing so well” : a dactyl followed by a third epitrite, so I had to stop that.) At the moment I am singing to myself a song that got into my head when Marianne and Jim came over so kindly to watch Singing in the Rain with me at my request: “Would You,” that most beautiful love song. I printed out the lyrics and keep singing it as a way of making the emotions move up the column of my body instead of staying there as boxed and searing fire. I am thinking I should record it and use it as the soundtrack for something. “I just wanted to see what it was like to be with someone who wasn’t an artist,” he said. Well, huh. Why?

Another mantra that has been very useful has been this one:

We met.
We changed poetry.
We changed each other.
Now, time for another adventure.


When I get past the rawness, I’m sure things will be better. Already I notice a sense of relief when I come home and I notice there is no one here to resent or ignore me. I mean to stay positive even in the throes of this despair. I loved Gary, I really really did, even though it was at times a very troubled partnership. I thought we were going to be able to hang on and get old together; I thought he would be really great to get old with, because he always made me laugh. But OK, well, now I see I need a new scenario. Wish me luck, my friends, and infinite resourcefulness.