What Makes Us So Crazy?

If sane is the new sexy, I am in need of a character overhaul.

I have become crazy, it seems.

Frighteningly, many of my friends and even women I only have glancing social acquaintences with have become crazy as well. What's weirder, it's the exact same kind of crazy. What happened to us? What is happening to us?

For me, currently, the insanity involves a man I'll call the Sixth Avenue Kisser--when he (and I, for that matter) last appeared on this site, I had just been kissing him on lower Sixth Avenue.

The kissing continued. It was very good kissing. And you know, we all know, what kissing leads to.

That was very good.

And that continued as well.

Then, out of nowhere, it began:

Craziness. Out of the nowhere of my soul, it crept up. One moment I was casually daydreaming about what to wear on our next date--sort of looking at the backs of my hands, wondering how many days it had been since I'd had a manicure. Then that moment passed and in the next moment, with sinking dread in my stomach, I was thinking:

Wait: Why hasn't he called?

When was the last time I saw him / spoke to him / got an email / text / telekinetic message from him?

How long has it been?

Finally: Does he not want me?

This is the savage animal that drives us to craziness. Each of us has one; she knows us by name. Sometimes she knows us by ugly names. And we know her. This is the bitch who looks us in the mirror on bad mornings and tells us our face looks weird. No matter what clothing we put on as we're dressing for work, she says, too tight. You must be putting on weight.

There are times when she doesn't shut up, this bitch. She rips it all apart; she is a ranting tornado of destruction.

And when she digs her nails into why hasn't he called, out pours a symphony of ugliness.

With my rational mind--perhaps with all of our rational minds--we know that he probably hasn't called because he is a man. Thus he was watching the game/working on something on his computer/imagining your naked breasts or looking at pictures of someone else's naked breasts (or both). But our rational minds get drowned out by this shrieking cacophany.

I don't remember when this behavior started in me, but I know that I have not always been this way. Maybe it's that with certain men I am not this way? This makes me wonder if there is something toxic and scary between me and the Sixth Avenue Kisser...and why shouldn't there be? I seem to have become a specialist in toxic and scary. Perhaps I suck it into myself like metal filings to a magnet.

This makes me worried. The more worried I get, the louder the bitch symphony sings.

Here is what I want to leave you with.

The problem is not that we will never be able to answer, "why hasn't he called?" The problem is that it's the wrong question.

Here are the right questions:

If I weren't focused on him calling, what in my life would be hurting the most? What is it that I'm drowning out by obsessing about what he is feeling for me?

Why wouldn't he want me? How many strong beautiful sexy talented funny achingly alive MEs are strolling around this planet?

And if he's not smart or sane or savvy enough to be asking himself the same thing, why would I want him to call?

What makes the nasty bitch slip into the driver's seat of our brains and our hearts? Why do we hand over the keys and slide so easily into riding shotgun?

What makes us so crazy?

The Psychiatrist, the Soul Mate and Me

This has been the most unusual, painful, and interesting summer. And it is almost over.

It started with the Psychiatrist. I loved him, briefly, intensely, in a desperate, chaotic way, from the end of winter until roughly Memorial Day weekend. He was not my psychiatrist, but rather a man, a very smart and intense and sad and lovely man. A man I want to say I was thrown upon, as we are each sometimes thrown upon the harsh rocks of life.

At the frightening end of our end, we went through several rounds of shredding at each other's fabric until each of us was in tattered ribbons. By the time the storm had calmed and I felt like I could breathe again, it was the end of June.

At exactly the same sad, weird time, I reconnected with a high school friend on Facebook. Beloved Z., or Thomas, as he is now known. I have already said too much about him in this space, and the less I can say, the better for my heart. If you want to know more about how it began, read http://thattimeofthelife.blogspot.com/2010_06_27_archive.html.

I've never told the story of how my affair with Thomas ended. It is too sad for telling. By which I mean, I can't tell it without remembering the depths of my grief at the very end. There is something about our connection with the past that is both spellbinding and beautiful and potentially deadly. Like a drug, it is hard to quit. Thomas was a powerful connection to my long-lost me.

The closest I want to come to describing our end is to say that this very dear old friend's departure from my life felt like learning you have terminal cancer at a dull weekday doctor's appointment. Speechless and heart-stopping and riveting in its quiet ordinariness. I had no idea it was going to end like this.

Grant that I never verify this comparison. I am even sorry for making it. But this is how it felt.

And my heart was already broken, recall. Broken heart upon broken heart was the straw that broke this camel's back. I found myself, one night after dance class, weeping as I walked along upper Broadway. I couldn't stop, and dance had become the only guaranteed--albeit brief--escape from my grieving. I walked home choking with tears, cooked myself dinner, still couldn't stop this painful leaking. The flood was unending. I became afraid that I would drown.

I remember sitting in the near-dark, staring at my telephone. The only person I could imagine talking to was--can you possibly understand this?--the Psychiatrist. I wanted him to tell me it was going to be all right. That the flood dries and morning comes and you want to eat a banana. I knew that he knew the blackness of the place I was in. We had talked about it, his experience of it, and I wanted him to throw me a line.

I called him. He didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, throw me a line. He yelled at me for calling and hung up. I later came to understand this. At the time, it felt like having a hot match held to a new burn.

Here is the point of all this.

Gradually, I came to understand what both men had in common. What both relationships had in common. How closely--did you know this was coming?--they resembled my troubled, ended marriage.

What they had in common was this: These men suffered from a lack of empathy so deep that in a pinch, they were able to forget, or ignore, that I existed. My existence, the reality of me, was relevant only in its ability to extinguish their own needs, to brighten their own dark places.

The point, lovely people, is that the story of a man with a lack of empathy so deep that he can even temporarily forget or ignore your existence in the service of his needs is profound. This is not the story of a man who is an asshole. It is the story of a man who is sick.

The point is that being part of his story means that you are sick, too. It means you are a little bit crazy, I think. I see now that I spent the summer of 2010 more than a little bit crazy.

I have good hope, however. As one of my favorite writers said, eventually, you will realize you've come out of the craziness:
You will have been rescued, but won't remember precisely how or when. You will look up from what you are reading and notice that the wind has died down. You will notice that you don't feel quite so insane. You will already have changed. The moment of your rescue will have passed without much notice.

I do not know that I am rescued. I do know that the wind has died down. I don't feel so insane. The ache inside of me is a dull annoyance that sometimes doesn't gnaw at all.

I know that I stood on a busy sidewalk in midtown kissing a man with lovely eyes just a couple of nights ago, and that this is a man I happen to like quite a bit. I feel sweet and not urgent about this. This is a good, different feeling.

I also know that I am seeing another man whose body I enjoy just slightly more than his company. Both are absolutely perfect when taken in short, unexpected bursts. This is another new, good, very different feeling.

If this is rescue, I think I am getting there.

It's Expiration.

I made it (http://thattimeofthelife.blogspot.com/2010_05_23_archive.html).

I will be awash in thoughts of him today, no doubt. Swimming in a sea of thoughts. But it is warm now, this sea. No longer scalding. As for the deep freeze...well, it could be better and it could be worse.

That's not so bad. Right?

Cost/Benefit

On Friday night I had to drop off an envelope at the post office for Saturday morning pick-up.

I had a specific post office in mind because I know the Saturday pick-up schedule, and this was a piece of mail that required the 7:00 am postmark.

This is the story: Over two years ago, the man who was my husband came home from work one night, a night that seemed like any other night, and said, I have to tell you something, and I hope it's not going to be a big deal.

It turned out to be a pretty big deal.

It turned out to be an extremely different night, that night. I remember that it was October, and lovely. Not quite Indian summer, but close. Warm and cool at the same time. I want to say that this night was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't know if that's true: I'm not sure it's so pinpoint-able. It was certainly the end of something, though, and it began in my kitchen on a beautiful, sunny October evening.

The story came out of my husband in small pieces, over the course of days, then weeks. It was a very long story; its tentacles stretched way back into our beginnings as a couple--back into our dynamic of man and woman. Years later, when we were in the process coming apart, he confessed that it had really all been my fault: I had wanted so badly for him to succeed that he'd had no choice but to fail. Perhaps this is true.

Anyway. There in our kitchen, the story began to unfold. It sounded fairly simple: an accounting error. Somewhere, somehow, there had been an accounting error; as a result, the government thought we owed it an enormous sum of money. In thinking so, they had frozen all of my husband's bank accounts.

I believed this. It seemed like something the government could easily get wrong--outdated systems, government employees, masses of paperwork. It seemed more like a glitch than a disaster.

It wasn't a glitch. The government wasn't wrong.

Like every woman scorned, as the full story unfolded would keep thinking, How could I not have known? How could I have been so stupid? This had taken years to grow into a disaster, and it had done its growing right under my own anxious gaze.

The world stopped gradually, for me. In stages. There were months of negotiation, months of lawyers and accountants -- and friends, friends who lent us money to pay for our mortgage, our electric bill, food. I stumbled through it like someone in a dream -- that is the closest I can come to describing my experience of those dark months. That voiceless, echoing horror you sense in nightmares, when you know that you are certainly about to die a monstrous death, yet you still have time to wave at a friend, admire her new haircut, straighten your skirt.

Somehow, finally, at the end of it, it became Spring. Spring really came, even that year. With Spring came an agreement with the government: In exchange for allowing us to live free lives, my husband and I would pay a monthy sum that was the rough equivalent of a jumbo mortgage on a Manhattan penthouse.

As if.

Only one of us was gainfully employed at this time. She had never heard of anything like the "innocent spouse rule", and even if I had, it wouldn't have mattered. We had gotten into this together -- albeit with one set of eyes closed -- we were going to get out of it together. It did not occur to me that this wasn't my boat. It only occurred to me to row, hard.

This is something I know how to do.

So I did. We were scheduled for over two years of monthly payments. If a payment was made late, the agreement would be nullified, and a new nightmare would begin.

In the beginning, I taped a calendar to the inside of our front door and put an "X" through every month, every payment made. Each month survived felt like an enormous accomplishment. I had no idea, from month to month, how we would survive one more.

We held together, my husband and I. We let the battle become us against the evil goverment. It was easier that way. Occasionally, when we fought, the truth was laid bare. We became experts at not fighting.

Much of the rest you already know. The months rolled into years, and we finally did come unglued. The debt, the government, our tormentor, became mine and mine alone. Not because it was fair, but because I could. As I said, I know how to row, hard.

So it crept up on me, this visit to the post office. I realized last week that the 2+ year mark had to be approaching. I called the government, and they confirmed it: one final payment. August 2010.

I wrote out the check with what will be my ex-husband's Social Security number on it, as I have for over two years. I had the same slightly bitter taste in my mouth that I have for the past over-two years, signing the check, putting his address alongside mine at the top. We live in two different places, now.

When I got to the post office it finally struck me: This is over. I was shaking when I slid the envelope into the slot. It was the end of something so bad, but too complex to sum up with "bad".

In a way, I loved it. In a way, I loved jumping to the rescue. It helped define me. It reminded me, every month, of what I'm good at: I'm good at rowing upstream. I'm good at rowing hard. I know how to do this.

There is so much I don't know how to do.

The Ungraceful Exit

Good lord, it is my birthday eve.

I am turning 45.

Half of 90.

Good lord.

Here is what I can say. I'm not sure any of it is particularly wise.

For one thing, ending a relationship in your forties is very different from ending a relationship in your twenties or thirties. There are far fewer single people around when you're done, for one thing. For another, those who are single are usually carrying around some kind of uncomfortable baggage--yourself included. Bumping around, bumping into each other, reminding each other of things you keep trying to forget.

You miss people more at this age, too, I find. I think it's that by now you've learned more about how to love, so there's somehow more to miss. My former lover had this habit--not even a habit really, just a way--of hanging around the island in my kitchen. Just sort of alternating between pacing back and forth and standing still. There was nothing so notable about it, really; it was just him existing. Yet it was lovely, and the memory can move me to tears no matter where I am. I still ache from it. He held my hand one night, in a hospital, in a foreign land. But I've already told that story.

As I head into 45, I have learned that your friends are the people who simply show up. They scramble to schedule a dinner date when your heart is aching. They show up at your apartment for two hours on a Thursday night because it's the only time you can find and for once you need to cry in the presence of another human being, even though it's inconvenient. They walk in the park with you, listen to your stories and sit beside you with them.

Actually, I think that's it: If it's true that sometimes grief walks in your front door, plops down on your sofa in front of your TV and makes itself at home, your friends are the ones who sit down with you, next to it. They pick up the side pillow and set it on their laps to make a little extra room. These are your friends.

I've learned that it seems to get harder and harder to make a graceful exit from one another's lives as we get older. As a friend commented the other day, what's with the ungraceful exits? Maybe it's a function of knowing that we have less time. Maybe there's a valid argument: Why stumble around minefields of sadness when you can scream 'never contact me again!' and be finished with it? Maybe when there's less time, there can be less time spent on things like kindness and grace.

I wish there were more. I wish there were more time spent on kindness and grace. I wish particularly that the men I seem to hand my heart to spent more time, and had more facility with, kindness and grace.

Finally, and only because I'm getting tired and it's time to go to sleep and make it my birthday, I've reversed my opinion on this: For a long time I believed that time doesn't really change us fundamentally. It changes the details, sometimes all of them, but I believed that the core of who you are now is the core of who your were when you were 14 or 17 or 27.

I no longer believe this.

I think I lost faith in it. Mostly because a boy I knew at those ages turned out to be a man I would not have expected, in the worst possible way. That boy with the huge heart is nowhere to be found; he is someone I used to know. I believe that something happened, life handed him something, or an entire package of somethings, that altered his fundamentals.

My childhood heart could not have been so wrong.

This saddens me, on this birthday eve. The exit from my life of my husband and my marriage--the sweetness of that safe life, as unsafe as it was--saddens me. That I still long for a lover who walked an invisible plank along my kitchen island while my heart flooded with tenderness, over and over, and that this plays itself out repeatedly in a movie in my mind, saddens me.

I have hope, too.

Tonight I hope that I am walking gracefully out of my 44th year of life on this strange and beautiful planet. Last night I danced around my living room--my new favorite dance tune, some choreography I learned in a new dance class. My heart raced and sang. This is still possible on an everyday basis.

There is much to hope for.

Happy my birthday.

Bittul

Bittul is the stripping down of ourselves through suffering. Supposedly, it is only by going through this suffering--this stripping away of the self we once knew, the acknowledgment that the things we held so dear and so close no longer belong to us--that we find peace and even an actual new self.

But on the topic of old selves, I saw a ghost just now, in the gourmet market on my corner where I buy my dinner most nights of the week.

It was Thomas, or not Thomas but Z., my childhood and then teenagehood friend (see Tale of a Thirty-Year Crush, 7/2).

It wasn't him, of course. When I walked into this same gourmet market with Thomas several weeks ago, however, he sniffed the owners out right away. They're Persian, he said. I could start speaking Farsi to them and they would answer me.

Say something to me in Farsi I pleaded, half joking. The sounds he made in imitation doubled us over with laughter. But it was as if he wanted to say, This is a language so horrible to me it can not bear repeating.

When I walked into the market tonight, I saw him. It wasn't Z., but it was--it was an almost-teenaged Persian boy, very tall, gangly, with that one eyebrow that ran straight across his forehead. I probably see boys like this all the time--maybe even this very boy. Tonight he stopped my heart like a truck.

His beauty was startling. It made me remember wanting to say something clever enough to make Z. laugh. Then it made me remember him laughing. It is such a similar laugh now, yet very, very different. Not necessarily better with age; just more complex.

I stood on line with my watermelon and my eggs and my wild arugula and my eyes could not leave this child's face. He stood beside a cash register, being teased into helping his father or uncle or cousin--an older man who nods in polite recognition to me whenever I enter this establishment. The boy was so innocent. This was an innocent child.

What child isn't?

The thought struck, hard: I want everything back to the way it was.

I want everything back to the way it was.

Everything.

I want my husband at home, hungry and restless and waiting for me to walk in the door and ask him why he hasn't ordered dinner. I want to have the same old arguments about whose turn it is to do what and whose failures matter more. I want no more time spent wondering about calls or emails that go unanswered, or take too long to be answered. I want to be on the inside of a couple again, instead of on the outside looking in.

I want everything back to the way it was.

I want my grandfather back. I want him on the other end of the telephone, his beautiful spotted ancient hands shakily holding his end of the receiver, calling me Sweetie, telling me that life is a game to be played but never for stakes higher than what I can afford to lose.

I want my mother up and about and bitter and rageful, twisting the world with her chaos and horror, not lying stilled and finally one-upped by life in a hospital bed.

I want no more ghosts stopping my heart at my corner market.

At least that is what I told myself in this moment. Give it all back to me, I pleaded. Please let me undo it all, let me hit the celestial control + z, let me make this have been a long, sick, frightening, feverish dream.

Even if it means feeling mostly empty most of the time.

This is when I begin to understand bittul.

There is no longer any way forward that does not include diving deeply into great pain.

This is when I rush home quickly, because I am certain that the sound of what is inside of me coming out will easily terrify the whole world.

Tale of a Thirty-Year Crush

There is memory and there is what actually happened, a friend used to tell me.

There is what we remember to be true, and what really took place. I think that sometimes in our quest for evidence that there will be joy available at all times in our lives, we paint history with a certain sweetness that it may or may not have had. Sugar and tangerines.

This could be a made-up story, or it might have really happened this way. Or it might have happened slightly differently. Imagine that it happened like this.

Many years ago, so so many years ago, when I was a post-adolescent teenager, I had a circle of friends who became my broader circle of friends, who became the people who knew me during the most reckless pain and choas of my growing up. This is probably the case for many of us.

Among them was my friend Z. Z. was Iranian. He played the saxophone. He was tall and dark and hairy and smart and skinny. He ran track and we talked--we talked and talked and talked through too many beer-soaked high school Saturday nights to count, side-by-side on someone's sofa. The air was always, just always, turned to on between us. He was just one of those people who makes you feel plugged in.

This particular moment in time was about three years into the U.S./Iranian hostage crisis, when radical Islamic fundamentalists in Tehran seized the U.S. embassy. Sixty-six American hostages were held for varying lengths of time, the longest for almost two years. The media, only just becoming the powerful hungry machine it is today, kept every American living room tuned daily to the hostage crisis.

As far as I know, Z. was the only Iranian kid at school.

My family was in chaos for other reasons. Now I see that Z. and I were clinging to each other, to the promise of each other, to the promise that there was promise out of these dark scary days. Both strangers in a strange land, we didn't know that everyone around us felt the same way. And it mattered less, knowing the other was there. Somehow, in Z.'s presence, I could feel both frightened and powerful--because I was fourteen, and fifteen, and seventeen, and anything seemed possible.

Not that I don't still think anything is possible. It's just that the universe has narrowed slightly.

We all grew up and went away and Z. and I only saw each other once more, as almost-adults. Right after college graduation we met for a drink--Z. was driving his own car. I remember exactly what I wore. We were grown-ups.

The night led, for the first time, to passionate kisses in the front seat of his tiny car. Such long legs for a man not terribly tall; I remember that clearly. I was actually heartbroken at the time, having ended my first real love affair with my college sweetheart, and I remember that my date with Z. took place during that very black period when you are certain you will never want to be touched by another man again. I remember thinking, through the beery sloppy kisses, it could only be him. He is the only person I could be touched by at a time like this.

The night ended, life took us.

I thought about Z. intensely after September 11th, wondering where he was and who he'd become. I pictured him living in Paris, playing the saxophone and working a meaningless job, searching for anonymity from his heritage, his culture. I pictured him practicing law in California, driving around in an expensive convertible. When the world came alive online, I looked here. I never found him.

And finally: Facebook.

I was friended by a man named Larry who had been a skinny quiet kid, also a runner from our small circle. My second question to Larry was, Where is Z.??!

Larry connected us. Z. had changed his name--I would never have found him. Now he is Thomas.

I emailed Thomas three words: Is it you???

There was silence for a couple of weeks, and then a return email: Is it you???

We exchanged more emails, made a vow to have a drink. Coincidentally, in a city the size of a small country, we live four blocks from each other. He has a 13-year old daughter and a nearly always-absent wife with an important job. He spoke adoringly of the child. Thomas had incredibly detailed memories of things we did during those years, memories that to me are like a faraway bell chiiming--something you can almost place, but not quite. They feel more like stories I heard about things that hapened to other people, rather than the experiences pulled from the pages of my own history.

We met for a drink on a hot June evening that had swelled from a humid day into a booming thunderstorm at precisely the time Thomas and I were to meet. I arrived soaked, late. He was sitting at a table, scanning the doorway anxiously. He looked exactly the same, only now a man. The skinny, gangly, running boy I knew was still there, but living now inside the body of a man. We saw each other at the same moment with a look of mutual shock and joy. Is it you?? This, one of my oldest friends.

We talked nonstop babble for almost an hour, a martini and a Shiraz and every single person we remembered and everything we knew about them now. We laughed and laughed, and when Thomas laughed he was 16 again. Beautiful.

Then somehow, for some reason, I found us pressing our flattened hands up against each other's, across a table littered with glasses. He was remarking on the smallness of my hands. There we sat, across each other for the first time in precisely twenty-two years, at a candlelit table with a rainstorm in the open windows behind me, reaching across a table pressing, pressing, pressing our hands together.

I think we should kiss, he said.

The rest took almost no time at all. Or approximately thirty years.

He has done this before, I can tell, though he says otherwise. I understand what he is hoping to achieve by denying previous affairs: Somehow I know that I am the only woman he has every felt strongly about before becoming intimately involved. I don't know where the others ended. I only know they didn't start here. I believe he was saying, there is a difference.

I get the difference.

His daughter's mother, as Thomas calls his wife, is out of town about half of the time--literally half of each month. He proposes that we try to exist in each other's lives somehow, part-time. Unspoken is, and remain invisible to each other for the other half.

Is this really possible for some people? For me? Why am I even considering it?

The answer I find is that I already love this man. Of course you ask: Do I love this man, or do I love the memory of the boy he was?

This is the best I have: Z., Thomas, has always been a conflicted, frightened soul. I have, too. For some reason, when we are together, we recognize this without necessarily giving it voice. From this vantage point, we are able to be with each other with great ease. There are not many people you can fall into like this, I find, who really do break the fall.

Perhaps we become less of the adults we are and more the unguarded children we were in the days when we would meet each other after his band practice and my choir rehearsal. We would walk through the breezeway, Thomas lugging his sax, down the corridor that led to the cafeteria and out onto the loading dock where the rebellious kids went to smoke cigarettes. And beyond it, to the rest of our lives--to now, to growing up and growing what we thought was wiser, to seeing the the world and then coming back to this city, this predicament. Arriving at loving him and knowing it is very, very wrong. Knowing it is surely creating only more chaos and suffering in the world.

In many ways, by writing this, I am asking you for your forgiveness. I am asking you to read, consider, and not condemn. Somehow. I am asking myself for my own forgiveness. I do not know if this can be achieved.

There is what really happens, and there is what we remember. In twenty years, if I am lucky enough to be in this world in twenty years, the question is, what will I remember about Thomas?

Then: What really will have happened?