A Memorial Day to Forget

“And those are the words of a gentleman. [Y]our arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others made me realize that you were the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.” – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

It is always hardest to write when I need to most, and this time is no different.  I have done all the things we do and I suppose I have achieved something mildly resembling peace of mind about the subject, yet I am not entirely well at the moment; not even in relative terms. I am not too well emotionally and I am not too well spiritually.  I think the cramp in my back is a good indication that I may not even be too well physically at the moment.  All I am able to do from here forward is to wait and pray… and try to forget.

A good way to put a new relationship to a test is to take a little trip together and so I invited the man I have been so enamored with to join me for the Memorial Day weekend at my parent’s cabin on Payette Lake in McCall, ID, a beautiful, serene, relaxing place where I have always been able to put the clamors of a complicated world behind me and breathe.  I had packed a bunch of food; salads, rib eye steaks, etc., books, there are plenty of board games and satellite TV there.  There is a private beach.  There are trails and hot springs nearby. The place is paradise to one who can appreciate it.

Well the weather was crappy so I had hoped that at least we could spend hours in bed talking, sharing our hopes and our sorrows… Getting to know each other all the way through.  He had other ideas.

After walking into the cabin and gushing about how wonderful it was and how we should send my mother something to thank her for letting us use it we unpacked, put away groceries.   The Man Who Never Was found something scary on television and began moaning about the lack of internet access or cell phone reception, at least on his carrier.  Having worked for years for his carrier I had, of course, warned him of the fact and let him know that my phone would work but he refused to believe it, saying that he has NEVER not had service ANYWHERE he’s ever been.

I proceeded to pull the grill out of the shed and managed to destroy a couple of perfectly beautiful rib eyes, but made up for it with some beautiful asparagus, onions and mushrooms.   He claimed to like it.  We continued eating food that a fat boy like me has no business eating well into the evening, watching hour after hour of the kind of films I just hate.  But they’re films he likes, so so what?  We went to bed, our first time in a decent quality king size bed; an experiment, really, in whether or not we could actually sleep together.

The next morning I found him in the other bedroom.  He said his dog had kept him up and he didn’t want the barking to wake me.  I felt kind of rejected, again.  But I made breakfast; standard stuff.  Bacon and eggs.  This time I did an especially good job.

After breakfast my phone rang.  My mother was calling to tell me that my step-brother, my step-dad’s only son, had died that morning, presumably of an overdose.

It was not news that I was in any way prepared to handle.  I had, and I know my mother and step-dad had always assumed that if one of the children died it would be me.  My sister ran a distant second.  I know for a fact that there were times that mom stayed up at night wondering what she was going to do about a funeral for me.  Where would I be buried?  Did I have any friends who should know.  Considering my level of drug use and the fact that as a class we addicts die with amazing regularity, even I wondered sometimes if it would be me and what would happen.  Other times the only thing that prevented me from killing myself was the fear of the pain it would cause them.

So my brother is dead.  There is no sense driving home because there is no service immediately pending while we await the results of the autopsy.  And I thought that all things considered I held myself together pretty well.  I jumped into motion so that I wouldn’t have to feel, opening up all the shutters on the cabin, sweeping the air strip sized deck, putting out the patio furniture.  All the while The Man Who Never Was complained about the cold and the lack of sufficient psychological thrillers of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre genre on the 200 channel satellite television.

Later we went to the grocery store, cheerfully enough to begin with, but I was clearly not myself.  I don’t particularly like shopping anyway, but I don’t mind pushing the cart around while someone else does.  He asked what my favorite kind of cake was.  “Chocolate,” I answered without hesitation.  I happen to know that he isn’t particularly fond of chocolate but I adore it and it was an honest answer.  “Well what’s your second favorite kind of cake?”  “Carrot,” I replied.  “What else?”  “I don’t know.”  “Well don’t you like lemon?”  “Of course I like lemon but you asked what my favorite kind of cake is and the answer is chocolate – and LOOK at me.  It’s not like I need to be eating cake anyway.”  “Well I just wanted to do something nice for you.”

If he really wanted to do something nice for me he wouldn’t have engineered that particular exchange into becoming an excuse for him to do something he felt ashamed about wanting to do for himself in the guise of doing something nice for me.

Between the death and the argument I arrived home depressed, and took a nap.  I did not invite The Man Who Never Was to join me as I had assumed that he understood that if I was sharing my family’s most treasured space with him, my bed was part of the package.  Actually I assumed that he understood that if I cared about enough to include him in any part of my life at all that he must know that he bore an all access pass.  Later on he came in and made an apology to me for his behavior in the grocery store and confessed that he has never successfully shopped for food with a boyfriend or companion.  That perhaps it is something better done alone.

I appreciated the amends and I hoped that he would stay in the room with me, and he did for awhile, but before long it was back to horrible movies and eating bad food.  I endured that for hours and at 2 AM when he tuned the television to Halloween II I told him I was going to bed.  I did, and I read for awhile. I was surprised that he never joined me.

Sunday didn’t improve.  I suggested a walk on the (private) beach.  He countered that exposure to cold air would cause his asthma to flare up and I, after all, had chosen to date someone with asthma.  The movies continued.  The lack of conversation and intimacy continued.  My depression over all of it grew and I took a nap for a couple of hours.  When I woke up he had moved his things into another room and taken enough Klonopin to put himself out for the next 14 hours.  I didn’t realize that at the time, but I figured if he didn’t want to sleep with me that was fine.  I tried to wake him up and suggest that he change rooms since the bed he was on is the worst in the place.

Monday morning he was incredibly angry with me.  He said that if it were I staying with him he would have bent over backwards to make him feel welcome.  That my personality had changed completely and that he wanted to go home right now.  He was cold and he was short, and he kept saying that when I was at his house I was a completely different person than I had been that weekend.  Plus I had hauled him out to the middle of nowhere where he had no internet and no cell phone coverage and obviously my true colors were showing.

We drove the 2 hours home in silence.  At the end I said there were a couple of things I wanted to say, not that I thought, or even that I wanted them to change anything.  First, I couldn’t believe that if he took into consideration the death of an immediate member of my family that I would remain my normal cheerful self.  I couldn’t believe that he never thought to ask me how I was doing.  That with all the time together all he wanted to do was watch television while all I wanted to do was be close to him and know each other better.  I said that his behavior in the supermarket, trying to make me responsible for his own bad decisions about food was manipulative and mean spirited.  I told him the fact that I could count on one hand the number of times he had actually touched me, whether on the knee or the shoulder or cheek, hurt me deeply.  It was, after all, one of the only areas that I asked him to make a compromise with me.  I need more affection than he naturally gives, just as he needs more stupid scary movies than I would ever willingly watch.  (And no, he would never deign to watch Pride & Prejudice or Sunset Blvd.)  I told him that the fact that he had met and dated someone else he met on Match.com before he moved to Boise, someone who actually came to Seattle to help him move, made me feel like Plan B – and I do not see myself as a Plan B.  I deserve better than that, and the fact that I came in 2nd always hurt.

As we pulled up to his house I told him that the next time he thinks that I never paid enough attention to him he should think about the number of hours I spent researching the very best vacuum cleaner made for someone with allergies and asthma and that I hoped he’d remember it especially when the $600 Oreck Halo shows up at his door next week.  I hope every time he uses it he remembers how much I didn’t care about him.

So I did it to myself again.  I found the most selfish, self-obsessed, self-indulgent, and self-righteous person I could find.  This time I found it in a stunningly beautiful package and in a person able to charm my family.  I wish to God that I could just shut that part of me off completely, that I could choose to no longer be vulnerable to the idea of a Longtime Companion.  I don’t especially feel like this kind of pain is the touchstone of anything positive, let alone of spiritual growth.

For Memorial Day the relationship I had so hoped for exploded and my brother died.  It’s sad that holidays are so hard to forget.