M
Who is Michelle?
Michelle no longer lives here. All that remains is the swan song and a childish but extremely therapeutic graphic. After thirteen years she tried to give my heart back but only after she had mangled and crushed it so that it could not fit back into the hole in my soul anymore.
This is the best explanation I’ve been able to come up with:
I live in a small world and she needs to live in a big one.
They are really the same world but in my version you make small subtle movements. Peace comes from a canoe in the middle of a lake, building things with your hands, and hammocks and porch swings. There are rules and set behaviors. You dress up for Mardi Gras and you dress down for work. It’s mostly black and white. You die trying to keep your word and promises. And because of that I will always think she was wrong to give up and leave.
But in her world there is a wide-open space that must be filled by collecting attention around you and spinning it until it’s a whirling dervish of activity. Movements are big and that’s what brings happiness. And that happiness is more important than any vow or self-sacrifice. I can visit that world but I can’t live in it.
It comes down to a point of character. She left me. She has offered no more than an “I’m sorry it worked out this way.” She will not actually admit that there was a wrongness in giving up on our marriage or alternately wrongness in taking the marriage vow without sincerity. Until she accept one of those points, I feel she is unworthy to befriend even small mangy animals.
But if you want to hang with her or read her online journals, feel free. Just don’t let her rub off on you or turn you into a bitter troll like me.
Of course she is also the mother of my children and I would not change a thing in the world if it changed my children.
She will claim that she brought up counseling over the years. She did, in fact. But she will also say that I blew her off with responses like “Set it up and I’ll be there.” I believed I was sincere. If she had truly been serious, she would have actually set the counseling up. She would have told me what she needed. Who knows, I may not have been able to give it to her; but at least we would have made a true attempt together.
I have a friend that describes divorce as a vampire movie: one moment you are adventuring with your best friend and the next moment that same person is an evil monster trying to suck out your soul.
Another local friend speaks of his divorce in terms of no longer being really mad at his ex, but not liking her anymore: “Anyone who would do to someone what she did to me wasn’t my kind of person. And that’s really where I settled down on. I don’t hold any grudges, I just don’t want to be Friends with someone who screwed me over. My approach is “neutral”. That’s about as good a place to get as you can, imho.”
To me she is like the opposite of a ghost, a shell with no soul. Or at least not the soul I thought I knew… Just a constant reminder that she allowed me to live with her lies to herself and me. The sad thing is, she was my friend before my wife and lover. She grew to be my best friend over the years. But the denial of the love has destroyed the original friendship.