Together alone with myself

November 12, 1987

Oh, I'm sure

write to music

never could.

November 16, 1987

Oscar Wilde 1880, unknown photographer

Oscar Wilde
I saw his picture in a book
I stopped and stared.
I checked the name
Oscar Wilde
My God, what a handsome face.

I might go insane.
I don't know if I can just go ahead and leave. My head starts to ache. The pressure is really intense. I'm really too afraid to act.






November 18, 1987

This is the way the video should go...
Women talking in the house - Jan to Halle.
Record this whole conversation on tape altering it by editing superfluous information and repeating things.
The other action should be in the driving with silence. The conversation stopping suddenly and Halle driving the back - repeating?
Images in slides could possibly be "couples" generic couples in love or bodies intertwined - fleshy, sensual would work very well.

(Evening)November 18, 1987

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
- "The Story of an Hour" - Kate Chopin

November 19, 1987

It has been so hard for me to write. It seems a time to reread what I have been thinking. I want to talk no longer. I cannot.
Cris wears Lisanne's black shirt. The cuffs of which cover his hands to his knuckles. Upon the last button hole, hangs a silver heart.
She came for dinner and [later] we [Cris and I] talked about us. We are going to be friends, that's what I need.
"We called a cab in fear of your reaction to her staying the night even though we probably would not have slept together."
The insensitivity to my feelings smacks me in the face. Cris wears Lisanne's shirt like a trophy. His bodily scents oozing into the black cotton fibers, weft and warp holding his essence.
When he returns the shirt (which may never happen, he is such a thief), Lisanne can take it to bed with her, wrapping her arms and legs about the shirt and deeply smelling it.

I need to just stop. Cris is such an asshole really. I am not finding him at all attractive, at all.

Cold, cold wind blow
See what's left of me.

God! Jesus Christ! I really make myself totally sick at times. Here's something else to think about...

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone.
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
- Avignon - Oscar Wilde

=================================================

I wrote a lot. I left a lot out. It is strange how after 23 years, I skip the horror, write of video editing and quoting short stories. I mention a conversation finally after three days of hell.

The end of my marriage started on the 16th. I had forgotten my notebook for my afternoon class, so a friend offered to drive me home. I burst happily in the door, my children turned, smiling at me. As I stepped in I saw her. A young woman was sitting on the couch. "Oh, hai", I said, grabbing my notebook off the bookcase. Back in the car, as I buckled in I said, "My husband is having another affair." 

That was what my three sentence observation was about. I was thinking of leaving. I had threatened Cris before - that he had left the last time - leaving me with 3 young children - alone - distraught - empty. I had threatened to leave him the next time.
On the morning of the 17th. I was going to register for my second semester at MCAD. Cris and I had a routine. I had morning school, he had afternoon school. I worked some evenings. He went out and romanced women the evenings that I didn't work. This morning, he had not yet arrived. He had stayed out all night. He had not done this before - at least not since he had moved back home to me. I guess since I had caught him "red handed" the day before, Cris decided to drop the pretense of a "study group" and indulged himself in a romantic evening.

I watched out the window. Waiting. Growing more and more enraged. Where Was He? Where Is He? I Have To Go! The children played nervously in the next room, leaving me alone. A half-hour after my time to register, the city bus stopped and off came Cris. I grabbed the window curtain, tearing down the curtain rod. I screamed. I beat the window with the rod. I turned and beat one of Cris's paintings, ripping it, screaming enraged.

As Cris entered the duplex,  I opened the door, continuing to scream. I grabbed handfuls of books off the shelf next to the door. I pelted him with my Dostoevsky books, "War and Peace", "The Idiot", "The Brothers Karamazov", down they flew, hitting their mark as he climbed the steps. 

He reached the top, grabbing me violently and pushing me backwards into the bedroom. He threw me down on the bed, choking me. I kicked him, struggled to get away. The children stood silently at the foot of the bed watching - or were they crying? I did manage to get him off of me. I called my sister to get the children. I called my friend Halle to come get me, take me away. I had a video camera checked out to film my final project for class. 

I was bruised and swollen. Halle drove me to Stillwater to her friend Jan's house. She had not not planned to rescue me that day. She had planned to rescue Jan. Jan had woke up that morning to find that her husband had taken the children in the night, leaving a note on the table. She was distraught. 

Needing to tape anything. Anything. I pulled out the camera, setting the microphone into the bowl of fruit on the table. I held the camera low and listened to Halle talk to Jan. Jan began to open up and as most people do, she started to forget the camera. I turned it on and began to tape her stories. 

I did actually get a great story. She was the cheater in her relationship. I hated her. I was able to piece together a story and outtakes into a video that meant something to me. I made her stand for my husband, I made her seem petty and insensitive. The entry on November 18th was "faked" to make it seem as if I had preplanned the whole video. If I checked my visual journals, I am sure I could find the actual story I had wanted to film. I don't have the energy to look - and that is beside the point.

 After missing my appointment to register, my life took a drastic turn. I decided to leave MCAD, to apply to the University of Minnesota to peruse a degree in Art Education. After working on my video until midnight, I went home and gathered my things, then left.

I did it. I left Cris for 3 days, well actually, two nights and three days. I slept at a friends house the first night, on the wooden floor, waking early, sore and going to school in the same clothes I had worn the day before. I slept the next night in my car, in the MCAD parking lot. It was late November. It was cold. My windows iced up. I was frozen. I changed my clothes before going to the restroom to brush my teeth before class. After class, I defiantly went home. I hugged my babies and ordered Cris and Lisanne OUT! 

I  am still pretty sly, hiding all my turmoil in quotes from books, and quick conversations. I am still like that now. I am quiet in my discomfort. I speak to no one about my pain. I do have a secret blog where I confess my dissatisfaction, my despair, my sorrow. You could look at me, and only see either boredom or disgust. Those are my expressions. I am a secret that nobody knows. 

My husband, Anthony, never reads my blogs. It feels empty to me that he doesn't. He sits next to me, coding. I am alone.

When I think you are in love with another

November 9, 1987

When I think you are in love with another,
I must continually go to the bathroom, my bowels turning to rid myself of this disgrace.
I clean the little things in my life.
Scrubbing with Mr. Clean the motif "Crown" on the stove until the years of grease embedded in its intricacies are removed, along with the paint.
The bed moves too much, threatening to collapse on my little ones.
I tie it up with hooks sunk deep into the window frame.
Using clothesline, I think "This was once used to hang your diapers to dry when you were much younger."

You come home, still smelling of incense.
I only have harsh words for you.

---------------------------------------------------------------

I have stared at this page for weeks. Every day glancing at my journal sitting to the left of my computer. I pick it up. I open it to the marked page and remember. I close the cover with a shudder. The pain I feel at reading my words is deep and invisible, my heart pounds as adrenalin is secreted into my body. So here it is November 9th, twenty-three years later. I will face the pain.

Cris was a cruel man. How could a man with three children and a wife at home continue to seek out and pursue new, younger women - bring them home while I was at school to play with my preschool aged children? How heartless. The man is an emotional vampire, a sociopath. 

This prose may not seem all that dramatic to you, after all the other much more obviously painful posts. Yet, the pain is for me is as fresh as the day I wrote the words. This is the raw scab that Cris kept ripping open. That I allowed him to salt and watch fester. It is a description of the way I experience emotions. Body feelings. I never knew I had such a limited emotional vocabulary. Alexithemia is what it is called - to not be able to identify feelings with words. So I describe the sensations.

I express my years of nausea as "needing to go to the bathroom". Two years of constant stress were taking their toll on me. I felt fear all the time.

After reading a self-help book about relationships, I told him that I was setting him free - that I could not force him to love me. He took it as freedom to continue his romances more vigorously. I had thought that it would give him pause - make him think about his children, about me - just what he was giving up. I think a lot about it now. How my underdeveloped Theory of Mind could trick me into believing that people would react to my words the way that I would react. I had no way of predicting the behavior of others. People were such a mystery to me.

My children, now adults, attended Cris' birthday party last January. He threw the party for himself. He invited only young women - most younger than his children. My children described his behavior surrounded by the young, squealing girls. They played a suggestive word game - the girls giggling and carrying on. Cris' girlfriend sat in another room, drinking herself into a stupor. The children choose to leave when one of the girls suggested they play dress up downstairs in Cris' makeshift studio. It makes me physically ill to imagine it. 

I feel sympathy for his current girlfriend - whom he refers to as his "wife". She is just like me. All his girlfriends end up like me. Empty inside. He is an emotional vampire. I was his first victim. I wonder when she will find the power to escape him. I wish her well.