So there used to be this woman I was nuts about. Just completely head over heels. We got married - and she dumped me.
I'm still sorting it all out.
More below the dooblydoo.
We didn't live on the same landmass, though we did speak the same language. Mostly. Australian English is different, but understandable. We were on different time schedules, different phases in our lives, but close in age. She was married (ha! and still is! Jokes on me...) and had children - I was still single and pushing 40. We were different religions - I was an orthodox Jew and she was Strega - a practitioner of Italian Witchcraft. But I was sure we could work it all out.
I look back on it now and see of course that it was impossible. Not just because of the disaster of an ending - but because there were always too many things that were too distant beyond geography. We were financially in different world - I was extremely poor toward the end, and never doing great at my best - her kids went to private school. I was undiagnosed schizophrenic - certainly not helping anything - and she was trying to raise a family and deal with her own issues, which I will not discuss, as I don't have her permission and we don't talk anymore. Despite the fact that we still have an unresolved legal entanglement in the United States.
But I felt like we had a special connection - something beyond anything I had ever experienced before. From the very first time we wrote to each other - a simple email exchange in a Harry Potter for adults book list. Her email was completely innocuous, completely ordinary really - and yet it wasn't. It stood out like magic somehow. The voices whispered to me how this one - This One Must Be Answered - and my entire life changed.
Not particularly for the better, though we were able to rely on each other through the ups and downs of life over the years. I leaned heavily on her for support as my world got smaller and stranger over time. Honestly - I don't understand how she didn't run screaming the other direction. Moodswings, drama, obsessions and delusions - she put up with ten years of that crap and hardly ever complained. I don't know how she did it.
I can only assume that actually spending a month with me in the confines of a small unfinished boat in a small town - while having her family constantly calling her telling her to come home - it was too much. Too hard. I can understand that. I really can.
But I'm still mad as hell. Largely because she didn't actually tell me that until just before our first anniversary. She just... disappeared. And the thing I feared the most was abandonment.
The rabbis say - gamzu l'tov - only for the best. Things happen only for the best of reasons, no matter how shitty they look from here. And I suppose that is true. I had a complete mental break down when she finally dumped me. I stopped functioning, as the dream of actually being together finally was the only thing vaguely holding me together. I wasn't able to care for myself anymore. In the end my parents coaxed me home after I had called them one night in the middle of a meltdown. That was almost a year ago and I'm still here.
But I have doctors and the right pills in mostly the right doses. I have fewer voices and obsessions and a better perspective on things - I think. I still have bad days, but they are much less drama and suffering than they were. I can look forward to trying to go home and still make plans to sail. But I've given up on love. Love can go hang.
I'm too weird for the world I live on the fringes of - no orthodox woman or man is going to live on a small boat - and I don't really think I can find one who would settle for me anyway. I'm never going to consider a non-Jew again, the distance is just too great.
I tell myself - and I tell other people I don't want to know I'm nuts - that I'm helping my parents. They are older, scared POX bots and my dad is a drunk who collects cats. The environment isn't the best for me in terms of support or asthma control, but it's mostly comfortably physically - no extreme temps indoors, no leaks, no 1/4 mile walk to a shower - no shortage of food. But it's not home.
But then is home really home now? It's a shell of what it was when it was packed with dreams of couplehood. Have I picked up enough pieces of myself that I can eventually rebuild my home and find a new lease on life? I don't know. I really don't.