My wife wanted me to help her off the floor.
I stood over her and said give me your hand.
She said can you just reach down and pick up my hand?
I said no reach up and grab mine.
She was so stubborn she wouldn’t do it.
I wouldn’t give in.
After ten minutes she got up without help and went to bed.
My wife and I know each other well enough so that if one of us says something boring, there’s nothing to keep us from seeing how boring a thing that is to say.
It’s going to be a fast and fucked up week. I’m working twelve hour days every day from now until Sunday. Then one day off and then another three days on and then I’m going to my other brother’s graduation and then I’m going to a Tool concert.
I stopped meditating about two or three weeks ago, whenever Morgan showed up, because it’s hard to meditate in a house with two bedrooms, four people, and three cats. I think I noticed a difference. In any case everything seems more awful than before.
I stopped working out, too, on May 7.
I’m at work looking all fucked up, just wanting a drink and shit. I been drinking a lot at work. The girl I’m obsessed with only works one day a week any more, so getting through the work day is fucking difficult. I’m not even obsessed with her any more because I don’t see her. Out of sight, out of my mind, and all of that, to an extent. I’ve a lot of experience cutting people out of my life. Just moving on. Usually physically moving. Why let anyone get close? Just someone else I’m going to have to hide from.
But you know, I talked to the girl about the whole thing and she made me realize that, while we were playing perhaps dangerously close to a cliff, neither of us had done anything actually wrong. Well, I suppose I had done something wrong by not talking to Molly about the fact that I was falling in love with another woman, but you know what, we don’t even have time to talk these days. She works sixty hours a week now and she works during the day and I work during the night. That’s why I need a new job, you know, so we can see each other.
But anyways like I was saying, here I was all beating myself up about shit, because I was in love with this girl, but I remembered you can’t control how you feel, you can control how you act. I was all thinking in my head that we’re in some kind of sexually charged dance, me and this girl, and that was some kind of sin. Probably because as a super Christian back in the day, the only relationships I could have with girls were exactly this. I would have called this girl my girlfriend back in the day because we smiled at each other a lot and were both into each other. That doesn’t constitute a fucking girlfriend, for fuck’s sake. But there it was, hanging around on the back shelves of my mind, this whole box of bullshit about what a girlfriend is. That’s fucking dumb. No wonder I don’t have a healthy relationship with my wife, I don’t even know what a wife is!
I’m like a fucking guilt factory. Churning out the guilt. Like a fucking goat produces shit. What does a goat need to produce shit? Any fucking thing. A shoe. A fucking heirloom tomato. A bag of dicks.
You know why I’m a fucking guilt factory? A fucking super high efficiency guilt machine? I would have told you it was my parents. I would have told you it was Jesus Christ and the motherfucking bible. But you know why it’s fucking lying that’s why. Weak character, brought on by having no stressors. Only one artificial stressor, maintaining the fucking lie, man, is what.
Say I was to fall in love with this woman. I tell Molly about it and what does she say? Who fucking knows. Maybe we have a long talk about how we don’t fucking talk any more or have enough sex, maybe we modify our relationship, maybe we decide fuck it, I like you as a partner in life, I don’t give a shit about your emotions. Maybe we decide not to act on anything for now, because we’re both busy being broke as fuck, and put that shit on ice for a year, and if nothing changes, then we got to make some decisions. Who knows what the fuck we could even decide because we would both be strong people who knew each other, instead of me being some kind of weak ass bitch fucking creeping around like a depressed little crab.
Why do I curse so much? People asked me sometimes. Probably because I’m fucking angry all the time way down where I can’t even hear myself any more because I built this huge guilt machine to manufacture fucking lies all day to keep me from ever having to experience anything real.
Yeah, so anyway. Me and this girl are just chilling now. It’s not even a big fucking deal. I build it up like its a fucking world changing event, me liking this girl, and really it’s just that she’s super awesome and super hot and she’s attracted to me. Why does that have to be a big deal? Because I’m scared of myself because I don’t even know who I am, that’s why! Is that Molly’s fault? Is that Christianity’s fault? Is that Society’s mother fuckin fault? Is that my parents fault? Nah mother fuckers that’s my fault for lying my ass of for no reason all my life.
Oh shit now I’m going to feel guilty about that!
Haha nah I mean I could, but guilt doesn’t come from taking responsibility for your actions. Guilt, at least the kind I feel, the destructive kind, comes from a kind of self-censorship who’s aim is to keep you down, crammed down inside of a fucking shell so that people will accept you without any effort on their part or your part.
Unlike dumbass indulgent guilt that comes from overthinking and lying to yourself, taking responsibility for your actions empowers you.
Yeah so anyway I meditated and worked out today.
I used to think that if Molly got mad at me I had to fix it right away. Stop everything, find the source of the problem, make it right. Sometimes I would do all that and she still wouldn’t be happy and then I would get frustrated. Especially if we were on vacation or something. It felt like the vacation was being ruined, that we would remember only that time when she was mad over some insignificant thing.
Today she got mad because her plan didn’t really work out and we wasted two hours driving around. Instead of trying to fix it with words or touching, I just drove around acting normal. I didn’t try to pretend that it didn’t suck that we were wasting time. I didn’t try to make it into a joke to make her see how trivial it was to worry about such things. I just let her be mad about it as if that were a reasonable response, which it is, really.
I guess I used to think that you could die at any second so you might as well not worry about dumb shit like the fact that you’re wasting time because shit didn’t turn out like you had planned. I also used to believe that nothing really mattered, so I couldn’t see the point in getting worked up about anything really. I said I believed in that kind of shit, but I would get worked up about shit, too, just much different shit.
So now that I am allowing for the fact that things have value, I can see that being all mad about some dumb shit has its place, and maybe the reason Molly used to be mad for so long was that I was just quietly acting like she was an idiot for even bothering to be angry.
This time I let her be mad and I didn’t pretend it wasn’t frustrating and she got over it quickly and I didn’t get all stressed out that she didn’t like me or something.
I think a big part of why I built up so much resentment towards her over the years is because any time she would get mad I would blame myself and then slowly I would get mad at how unfair it was for her to think that it was my fault when I hadn’t done anything. So all this dumb shit was going on inside my head that didn’t have any basis in reality and should have been handled externally.
Any time I start to say something passive aggressive, I’m now trying to stop and instead say something more direct and constructive. And if Molly says something passive aggressive to me, I try to swat that shit down aggressively so we can fight about it instead of internalizing some made up bullshit. It’s not always easy and I don’t succeed every time but it’s not as hard as I thought it would be.
I used to have these revenge fantasies, not against Molly but against other people, strangers mostly. So someone would do something I didn’t like and then I would fantasize about beating the shit out of them, some disproportionate type shit. But in reality I wouldn’t do anything, probably be even nicer to them the more I hated them because then slowly I would start to feel bad because I hated them so much and they hadn’t really done all that much shit to me.
So I have this darkness inside but I try to lock it up and pretend it doesn’t exist and it comes out in fantasies and in a growing resentment towards humanity. Instead it would be better to integrate the darkness into my personality and react to things I don’t like by making sure people know that I don’t like those things. Even get mad sometimes. I used to think that even getting angry was a sin. And then after I stopped believing in God, I thought getting angry was a sign of weakness. But I think now that getting angry is necessary for having a healthy relationship with the outside world. People should know when they’ve made me angry. I don’t have to hurt them with words or actions, but if I don’t indicate the fact that I’m unhappy how arethey supposed to know to change their behavior? And besides it becomes so much worse when I just resent someone quietly. Instead of just snapping at someone and apologizing for it later maybe, I end up smiling at them and wishing they would die.
It’s important to have a healthy relationship with anger instead of just trying to avoid it in myself and others.
Calling a goddess a goddess isn’t a compliment.
Calling a woman a goddess is an understatement.
I was surprised and delighted when I came home and my wife was not in bed.
She said did you drink?
No do you want to have sex now?
She said she had a stomach ache and has to wake up early.
Click here to start at Part 1.
Why couldn’t I leave my wife and do whatever I wanted? I wasn’t strong enough, that’s why. I had never really broken up with anyone, and I had also never really had a confrontation with anyone, thanks to my uncanny diplomatic abilities.
And so that meant I had to make it seem like I was a good husband. I had to do everything I could to make her happy, and besides that I had to avoid having a fight with her. I couldn’t stand to fight with her, and besides, I had nothing to say to her in a fight. I had no will of my own. Why should I have an opinion when nothing can be proven or disproven.
So we had no fights, except the ones over my drinking, which was out of control. I would drink and not text her because I didn’t want to have to fight about it and I knew if I texted her I was drinking she would say something snarky and then if I got drunk enough I would drunk text her a long nicely worded ‘fuck you.’
But those were our only fights and we didn’t delve too deep into why I was drinking like that.
So with no fights our relationship didn’t really grow much from when we had started. I was a different person than the guy who started dating her years earlier, but I acted the same towards her, only now I drank.
Since I was too weak to break up with her, I had to maintain some kind of normalcy, even though I had these self destructive urges. I had to keep them in check. So I resented her for that, but even then I knew she was kind of keeping me alive.
Now, looking back, it’s crazy how my whole life seems to have revolved around women. I guess that’s not very original, but I didn’t see it coming.
Anyway, I guess that’s what I’ve got to say about that. I am ready to have real fights and really get to know her now, and hopefully one day I will be strong enough to tell her everything that I ever hid from her. As for now, I’ll just do my best not to create new things to hide from her.
The girl with whom I was formerly obsessed and I still hang out and talk. It’s possible I made up her reciprocation of my feelings for her, but even if I didn’t I haven’t given her a reason to feel heartbroken if I never make a move or tell her how I feel about her. She is smart enough not to trust married men, I’m sure.
I guess, like many children who were raised as Christians, I’ve always had a problem with sex. I didn’t even have actual sex with my girlfriend of three years from the age of 16 to 19 because it was one of the hard lines of Christian morality that I would not cross. All I did as a teenager was think about sex, but I knew I mustn’t act on the thoughts. I even felt super guilty when I masturbated.
When I met the woman who became my wife, she was so beautiful that I couldn’t resist her. I didn’t tell her until months in that I was deeply religious and had felt that all the sex we were having was a sin. She thought that was weird and kind of hurtful. Immediately after that conversation, we had the best sex we had ever had up to that point.
Two years into our relationship, I stopped believing in God. I derided any kind of belief in anything, even that the color of a t-shirt could be known, and prided myself on not being delusional. I began to internalize that life was a cruel joke.
Sometimes after that, my wife would want to have sex, but I wouldn’t feel like it. I would be too busy thinking about how I’m going to get myself out of this hell. I thought the answer was make more money so that everyone could leave me alone, so that I could stay home and brood and not have to do shit.
One of the few things I still enjoyed (with the other things being eating and doing drugs, mostly alcohol), was courtship: the parts leading up to sex that you were technically allowed to do as an evangelical. I assumed it was too late to court my wife, so I would court girls at work. Mostly they were girls I didn’t find attractive, so there was no danger of me getting caught up. Sometimes they were girls I found attractive, but who were used to the game and would play along with no interest in going any further.
But on two occasions, it seemed that I had found a soulmate.
The first girl did a lot of drugs, so we were able to forget about our problems and just live in the moment. Before anything happened sexually, she had some kind of breakdown and disappeared for a few days. In the time it took for her to re-establish connection, I seriously contemplated suicide one day and got fired from my job for blacking out at work and being creepy the next.
The second girl, this recent one, doesn’t drink, so instead of just checking out, we have long talks in which she challenges everything that I believe.
I had to ask myself, did I make a mistake getting married? At first I thought the answer was yes. Slowly, very slowly, I realized that I didn’t really love this girl. I loved the idea I had of her, and what my life could be like if I wasn’t bound by the only thing that kept me in the world of the living: my wife.
Why hadn’t I broken up with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, when I decided that life was meaningless and cruel? If nothing mattered, why couldn’t I just leave her and do drugs and listen to music and fuck the world?
If you give me a secret, I’ll give you one in return. I’ll lock yours up with what’s left of mine. The fuller the box gets, the lighter it seems. Sometimes I wonder, though, what you’ll do with mine.
I do my best to guard others against discomfort, especially those closest to me. Turns out it’s not helpful, it’s impossible in the long term, and it hurts me.
Anyone's Ghost 