This Is A Story About A Bed

1

     This is a story about a bed. Or maybe it’s a story about a couch, it could go either way. It's a story about a man and a woman, and I guess about people from their past. I'm the man in the story, let's clear that up right off the bat. This is brutal non-fiction. It’s also a story about mental health and heartbreak and danger. So it's a story about a bunch of things, and it starts with a bear eating my finger.
     I'm aware that most of you know about my finger being eaten by a bear. You can find out about it in another story amongst all the stories on this blog, in a story that's not actually about a bear. It comes up fairly often, although I don't see it as a defining moment in my life.
     Which is weird. Because it certainly must be a defining moment. What's the point of having a bear eat a body part, no matter how small, if it's not going to be some big moment in your existence? I don't know, I mostly view it as a great story to tell at dinner parties, not that I really get to many dinner parties in my life.
     So anyway, the bear ate my finger, and after they stitched up what was left, I was sent home to heal. I had to sleep on my side, so as not to roll onto my hand and rip the stitches or damage the hand any further.
     Initially, they wanted to remove more of the finger than I was willing to give up. They told me how having one segment or two segments or no segments really made no difference. They even wanted to take part of my hand, so my ring finger had a smooth line back to my wrist, because they thought it would look more normal.
     "In what world where I'm not a cartoon character or an alien does that look normal?" I asked, hoping I was adequately conveying the incredulity I was feeling. Besides, I had this strange notion that I had some magical regenerative powers. I suppose that was an offshoot of how we all feel like we're immortal, until one day we grow up and realize that's not true. I hadn't arrived at that point yet, and I was firmly convinced that my finger would grow back.
     It did not.
     In fact, it did the opposite. It turned black and gangrenous, and started to smell like rotting flesh, mostly because it was indeed rotting flesh. I had to return to the hospital, where they cut off the part of my finger that they had wanted to cut off in the first place. That is how I discovered that I'm not immortal, or at least not part lizard.
     Again, I had to make sure to sleep on my side, so as not to damage my finger any more than the bear and my own reptilian pipe dreams had already.
     Why is this even important? What does it have to do with a bed or a couch? Well, I'll tell you.
     The easiest way to ensure that I stayed on my side while I slept was for me to sleep on my couch. On my side, with my back pressed against the back of the couch, I wasn't going anywhere. It was no big deal, I had a comfortable couch. I was single, so no one missed me if I wasn't sleeping in a bed at night.
     Due to the original injury, and then the subsequent amputation, I wound up sleeping on my couch for well over a month. I got used to it, which wasn't so strange. Soldiers get used to sleeping in foxholes, so this wasn't much of a stretch. I liked the security of the back of the couch up against me. I found that I much preferred sleeping on my side than my back.
     In fact, I snored when I slept on my back, and I'm a fidgety sleeper, so I often wound up like that when I slept in a bed. The couch seemed better. I felt safe and secure there. I liked the extra contact I got from sleeping with my back against it.
     More than that, I found that I didn't like my bed as much anymore. I have a pretty nice queen size bed. It's very comfortable. After the relative cocoon of the couch for six weeks though, the bed felt huge and empty. It felt lonely, and it almost seemed to mock me. I didn't want to go back to the bed.
     I have had a lot of relationships in my lifetime. The problem is, they haven't really been adult relationships. I lived at home until I was almost 30, so up until then, I didn't really share a bed with anyone for more than a night or two. After I got my own place, I was dating women who were also in their 30's. They had their own places as well, or children or pets at home. They didn't want to sleep over all the time. I was kind of okay with it, because I was enjoying my first real experience of having my own space.
     And so it went. The years rolled by, and I wasn't avoiding commitment or anything, I was just going with the flow. I happened to date a bunch of women who actively avoided commitment, which was probably an unconscious choice on my part. I would lament about how no woman wanted to get serious, but I apparently avoided dating any woman who seemed stable or who wanted to live together or get married.
     Which is strange, because I really did want to get married for a lot of my life. My parents have a very successful marriage, over 60 years, and that appealed to me. The problem was, every woman I wanted to settle down with didn't want to settle down, and the ones who seemed like they might just bored me to tears.
     Yeah, I know. I see it, just like you do.
     I guess I'm just like a bunch of other annoying men who drive women crazy. I found the messed up ones exciting and sexy, and saw the dependable and responsible ones as uninteresting. I really did want long term, committed relationships with the women I loved, but they weren't really having any of that, and I must have been okay with that on some level. Still, I would make them out to be the bad guy, and blame them for not wanting to settle down. If one of them had ever done an about face and said yes to marriage or cohabitation, I probably wouldn’t have known what to do.
     At any rate, it was fall of 2004 when I lost my finger and was relegated to the couch. I never went back to my bed. Once in awhile I would have women stay overnight, and I slept in the bed with them, because it would have been really weird to have sex, and then leave them to go sleep on a couch. Sadly, that did happen a few times. Sometimes, they weren't used to sleeping with someone, or I would snore, or they had intimacy issues, and I would wind up sleeping on the couch by myself while they slept in the other room. Ah, romance!
     Mostly, though, it was just me in my apartment at night. The women in my life kind of liked having a part time boyfriend. It was easier for them. Some of them were just selfish, but as long as it made things easier for me to be lazy about everything, I didn’t mind. One woman I dated told me how her perfect man would be someone she could turn off and put in a closet, and take him out once or twice a week when she felt like it, and not have to deal with their needs or wants. She told me that’s why she liked me so much, she only had to see me once or twice a week. For some reason, this sounded reasonable to me! I had a fairly long term relationship during that time with a woman who had a kid and her own place, so we didn't have many sleepovers, and I was okay with that. I told you, I liked my couch.
     So for ten years, I only slept in my bed about 15 times, and never alone. The thought of sleeping in my bed alone was starting to fill me with anxiety and dread. It made me feel pathetic, which was ironic, because sleeping on a fucking couch for ten years is kind of the definition of pathetic. The only other times I slept in a bed was when I stayed in a hotel.
     I was happy with that, or so I thought.
     Then I met a woman, and I fell in love. For the first time, it felt like an adult relationship. We were together all the time. She had been with someone for a couple of years up until a few months before we met, and had moved back with her father while she looked for a new place. Thing was, she could do that because she had never given up her room at her father’s house. She always had it as a safety net, at 37 years old, but I didn’t find that odd at the time.
     So we met, and soon we were spending all our time with each other. She was really together, but exciting and interesting and funny and cool. I mean, she was really cool. She was a musician, she was artistic, she knew as much about music as I did, maybe more. She was beautiful, she partied, she had a bunch of interesting friends. She had traveled, she knew good food and liked to eat. She was an adult, and she was badass! My parents loved her, my friends loved her, I loved her.
     She slept at my place six out of seven nights a week, occasionally spending a night here or there at her father's house. He lived alone, and she liked to stay there for a night now and then, to cook for him and clean and do her laundry. It gave us a little time to miss each other as well.
     The thing is, I now loved sleeping in my bed with her. We slept completely entwined with each other, wrapped up tight in each other's arms. We couldn't get close enough, or have too much skin on skin. That was something new for each of us, and we couldn't believe how right it felt. In the rare night she didn't sleep at my place, I went back to the couch. The bed seemed especially empty without her there. I say that like it’s a reasonable thing, that I shouldn’t ever sleep in our bed if she wasn’t there. That’s how much that part of me was still broken.
     It really felt like an adult relationship, and the way she loved me really did wonders for me. She made me feel loved and inspired me. She made me feel attractive and desired. She gave me confidence and security, and with her, I could actually live in the moment, something I hadn't been able to do in a long time. She loved me as much as I loved her, and that was an equality I never experienced with anyone until she came along.
     I did that for her as well. She was astounded that she felt happier than she ever had in her life. We used to talk about how it felt as if we saved each other's lives, and that was not much of an exaggeration. We were talking about getting married, and I, along with everyone else, thought that this was finally it.
     So you're probably thinking that she moved in with me. I mean, she was there almost every night, and it all seemed like a fairytale romance, so why wouldn't she? We talked about it, and I was all for it, but we just didn't seem to get around to it. Part of it was because things were so great the way they were, so if neither of us was going to push it, why bother? Let things stay perfect.
     Only they weren't perfect.
     The closer we got to getting engaged, the more she started to seem distant. Her parents marriage had been troubled and turbulent, and now her mother and stepfather had recently split up. There was a history of mental illness, her mother and her aunt, and she was always afraid that she might fall victim to it. I soon found out that her fears were well founded.
     She had a history of abusive relationships before I came along. She would tell me stories that broke my heart. Some of the things she told me about that had happened to her were truly horrific. I was proud of her, because she seemed to be handling it all so well. She wasn't, though.
     She had ptsd, and I had to be careful not to get excited about anything and raise my voice at all, even if it wasn't angry. Any loud voice or noise affected her. She would panic. I had to be careful not to stand between her and any exit out of a room, or the anxiety of feeling trapped overwhelmed her. I had to relearn a lot of things so as not to trigger her.
     And still, it happened anyway. After the first six months, I started to notice how she looked for anything as a sign that I might suddenly change, and become angry or abusive. If you've spent time around women who have been abused, or even a lot who haven't, you'll notice that they apologize for so many things that really need no apology. They do it automatically, because they would never know what might set some asshole off and get them yelled at or hit. My girlfriend would tell me stories about how she would get punched for saying she liked a certain band or musician. She would get hit for dressing too nice or not nice enough. She got punched in the face once for taking a French fry off of her boyfriend's plate.
     So she lived in constant fear that I would one day start doing that, and she started to resent me for it, even though I wasn’t doing anything wrong. No matter how nice I was and how hard I tried to be calm and gentle and kind, she would see it as some sort of trick, meant to fool her, until one day I would show my true colors.
      She started to accuse me of ridiculous things; not even tangible things that had happened. Things that she thought I might be thinking, or planned to do. They were sometimes completely irrational and ridiculous thoughts, but to her, they seemed plausible.
     One of the first things I should have paid more attention to was that one day about three months into the relationship, she suddenly started telling me that my bedroom furniture was arranged the same way one of her most abusive exe's bedroom furniture was arranged. She told me how it terrified her sometimes, yet she somehow hadn't noticed it the first three months we were together. I offered to rearrange it, but she insisted it was fine, and then it passed. Everything was okay again.
     Then a month or so later, she informed me that my sheets and bedspread and curtains were the exact same pattern as his were, and it freaked her out! I was taken aback, as you can imagine. How could that be? And how could she just now be noticing that? She also told me how my furniture was not only arranged the same way, it was the same exact style furniture as this guy had years ago. It made no sense. Still, she would tell me it was okay when I offered to rearrange everything or get new sheets and curtains.
     Now, I collect old newspapers, and have some particularly nice ones framed and hanging in my room. One day, she informed me that her ex also collected them, and had them hanging in the same places as I did. Now I knew for sure that something was wrong. I asked her how that could be, and she flipped out, saying I was accusing her of lying.
     All this was happening over the course of months, and in between these outbursts and telling how my room was a carbon copy of her abusive ex, she was perfectly fine, and would apologize for thinking it. But the cracks were really beginning to show. So after almost a year together, a few weeks before I was going to give her an engagement ring, she completely lost it. The girl I loved so much, my first real adult relationship, imploded. It got very scary and ugly, and I didn't know what to do.
     And then she was gone.
     Of course, I went back to my couch. If you think it was hard sleeping in my bed alone before, now it was torture.

2

     I’m not someone who sits around and has a lot of regrets. I had gotten a lot of good things out of my relationship with her. It was the first time I felt truly loved. I felt supported and cared for, and like someone really wanted to spend time with me. She wasn't a horrible person, quite the opposite. She was damaged, but she was kind and loving and sweet when she wasn't being completely irrational, especially that first year.
     I have always had a very bad self image. I have some pretty severe body dysmorphia stuff going on. I think I'm hideously ugly, and much heavier than I am. I know it's not reality, but I can't help it. It’s a defect in my thinking, brought on by years of abuse, and it shapes my reality.
     I hate the sight of me. If I see myself in a mirror when I'm out at a bar or restaurant or store, I sometimes go into a full blown panic attack, that's how much I hate it. I’ve had incidents when I went to the restroom in a bar or restaurant, saw myself in the bathroom mirror at a bad angle or light, and it took everything I had to walk back out there and function like a normal human being. I’ve looked at myself in a mirror in a dressing room at the store, and been so repulsed by myself that I just dropped everything and fled the store, not able to catch my breath until I was in the car.
      It's embarrassing, and I feel foolish and pathetic when it happens. It's irrational, and it's infuriating that I know better, but still can't always get a handle on it. It makes no sense that something you know isn't real can still have that kind of effect on you. We make our own realities, and we don't usually create them by ourselves. We have plenty of help along the way from bullies and manipulators and abusers, and even by well meaning family and friends. People don’t understand the power of words, and how much damage they can do.
     My ex had really helped me with my self esteem. She honestly found me attractive, and while I assume all of the women who have dated me must have found me attractive as well, none of them made me feel that way. Whereas I used to have to sit in my car in the store parking lot for a few moments to give myself a pep talk and remind myself that I was no more hideous than anyone else out there, now I would find myself thinking that if she found me attractive, who cares what anyone else thinks? It kind of freed me from the anxiety and insecurity.
     The thing is, it wasn’t really a fix. I still thought I looked like a troll, I just didn’t care as long as she loved me and thought I was good looking. That’s pretty much the opposite of good mental health and self esteem. Still, it allowed me to function and breathe, and it felt better than the way I usually felt. It was one less voice in my head jockeying for position to make me feel bad about myself.
     Out of the many things that devastated me when she left, one that really frightened me was losing that feeling and that security, even if it was flawed. I had spent so much of my life so anxiety ridden about just being seen that I couldn’t bear the thought of giving that up. I had gotten used to not being repulsed by myself as intensely as usual. The thought of going back to it terrified me.
     So I determined that I was going to hold onto as much of the good things she brought to my life as I could. I would still remind myself how much she had loved me. Even though it broke my heart, I would read letters and notes she had written, and think about all the good times and good things. On one hand, it was excruciating, poking at that wound everyday. With the pain came wisdom and strength, and I managed to hold onto some of what she had given me. I still thought I looked horrible, but I still didn’t care that much, because she had loved me.
     A couple of months after she left, I got up one morning(off the couch, of course!) and stumbled into the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, which I still usually tried to avoid. But this time, I couldn't help but stare at what I saw in the mirror. I didn't look like me at all! I looked normal, almost a little handsome. My face wasn't misshapen or troll like, my body wasn't immense and bulging in weird places. I was actually frightened, because I didn't really look like me, at least not the version of me that I had been seeing all these years. I was actually seeing me the way I really looked. I didn’t look like Brad Pitt or anything, but I looked tolerable.
     The difference was so startling that I really feared for my sanity. I thought maybe something was really wrong. I can’t even describe how bizarre and jarring it was. It was like I was looking out of some alternate reality version of me, like my mirror was actually a portal to a different dimension, one where I wasn’t gross. It took me a week or so of seeing my own real reflection until I finally accepted it. I could finally see myself the way the rest of the world saw me. That was because of her. Even though she was gone, the effect she had on me was still here.
      So I decided to hold onto as much of that as I could. I started to get my life in order. I was eating healthier, getting out and riding my bike and playing golf. I was really figuring it all out, even contemplating sleeping in my bed again.
     Then, about four months later, she returned.
     What followed was about two and a half years of sheer hell. I was determined not to give up on her, I wanted so badly to save her, but I didn't stand a chance. The woman I loved, who loved me, wasn't there anymore. It was paranoid schizophrenia, and some of those personalities really wanted to make me pay for all the hurt anyone had ever caused her. She was hearing voices and hallucinating. She told me that she knew I was telekinetic and was moving things around behind her back, and that I had a giant magnet hidden under the bed to control her and mess up her cell phone.
     There were fights and drugs and arrests and psychologists and more horrible things that I can't even write down to this day. It's too hard and it's too painful. Finally, she was so far gone and became so dangerous and abusive that I had to walk away. There was nothing else I could do, I had tried everything.
     So back to the bed and the couch.
     At several points during the two and a half years, she would move in with me. It would only last a month or two before she would leave, living in her car or on the street, or in some flophouse apartment. At one point when she was living with me though, I came home from work to find that her friend had come over, and they rearranged my bedroom. She had finally done it.
     It looked ridiculous. If you've ever had an apartment with a corner bedroom with two windows, a full bedroom set, and electric baseboard heat, you know that there is really only one optimal way of positioning everything. She had things all over the place. Nothing made sense, you couldn't get around, but if it made her feel better, I would go along with it.
      We didn't sleep in the bed anyway. If you've had any experience with bipolar people, you have probably seen them stay up for days. It's like they're afraid to sleep. Then they sleep for 20 hour stretches. I would sleep on the couch, what little sleep I got, while she would pace around the apartment, or spend hours on her phone messing with the settings because she was sure someone was spying on her or tracking her.
     The terrible thing about damaged and broken people is that they damage and break the things around them as well. You don’t even notice it while it is happening. She had been so haunted by ghosts of the past that she could never be free. I watched them torment her for years. I saw them appear out of nowhere. I saw them trailing behind her. I saw them touch her so lightly at times, whispering in her ear like a faint breeze. I saw them swirl around her, beating her down and screaming like banshees.
     All that time, I could do nothing. I tried, but it's not easy to grapple with a spectre. There's no real form to make out half the time, and no way to drag it off someone and banish it to the shadows. I'm not an exorcist or necromancer, I cannot command the dead. I could only watch them torment her, and see the anguish and terror they caused. My pale words and reassurances meant very little. The people she needed to hear apologize or explain, or even just admit to what they'd done, would never give her that peace and satisfaction.
     That's why denying your victims the simple act of confessing to your crimes is almost as bad as the crime itself. They are doomed to a half life, never getting any resolution. Never getting any confirmation that they didn't deserve whatever was done to them. There will always be people around them wondering if they are telling the truth, doubting their stories and looking to blame them. They live never getting an answer that only the perpetrator of something so terrible can give them. So they look to you, and hate you because you can't give them solace or satisfaction. You are just one more person who can never understand, who can never make it stop, who can never drive the ghosts away once and for all.
     When she was finally gone for good, I discovered all the ghosts she had left behind for me. There was the pain, obviously. It was more than just losing her and the light she had brought me. It was the same thing that she was dealing with in some ways.
      I had no answers, and she wasn't going to give me any. She couldn't. She wasn't even capable of seeing how hurt I was. She was sick, and she couldn't even help herself. The jagged pieces of her mind no longer fit together, so there would never be resolution for me. The woman I loved, the one I held so tightly while we slept, the one who finally somehow left me feel as if the world made sense… she didn't exist anymore.
      It’s a cruel trick life plays on you when you want so badly to help someone you love, but helping them only enables them and makes it worse. It is a test with no right answers. In some cases, you can let them hit bottom, and that might make them see what they are doing, to themselves and to the people around them. Sadly, most people don’t hit bottom, or when they do, they can’t even recognize it. When you try to help them and it slows their descent, it has the effect of making it a gradual transition that takes away the big moment of clarity. If you fall fast and hit hard, and awake one day to find that your life is unbearable, it is a great motivator. If you fall softly, and your life has been deteriorating slowly due to the fact that people have been cushioning that fall all along, you barely even notice. You think to yourself well, it could always get a little worse, it has before and it hasn’t killed me, and on you go, sinking slowly. Kind of the same way it wound up seeming perfectly fine for me to sleep on my couch for 15 years. I had to accept that there was nothing I could do, and that was something that I had to try to convince myself of every single day.
       She was good looking enough and manipulative enough to find other people willing to enable her when I wasn’t there to do it. I watched as she lost more and more, but it still didn’t shock her into seeing just how bad things had gotten. She lost her job, she lost her car. She lost family, she lost pets. She lost her self respect. She would actually sit with me and lament about how bad her life was and how much she hated being the way she was, and then turn around and tell me how she could actually sink deeper, so it wasn’t all that bad! She would cry about the things she lost, and then just make up her mind that she could still go on. So when she finally lost me, that didn’t matter either. Nothing I said or did made any difference, other than to be enable her more. You can’t win a fight with delusion.
     I couldn't even have the petty satisfaction of being angry or hating her. It wasn't her fault. Brain chemistry and genetics made her susceptible, and predators and abusers and addiction did the rest.
     Even as I understood all that, while friends and family assured me I had done all that I could, I still felt like I failed her. I still knew she was out there, afraid and traumatized, hearing voices and sinking lower. It was like someone else was now inhabiting her skin, a ghost in the machine, destroying her from within. I had to remind myself all the time that it wasn’t my fault, and tell myself that in the end, I had to preserve myself. I wasn’t helping her at all, I was just enabling her and helping to destroy us both.
     That’s hard to do. There is a difference between knowing something and feeling something. There is a difference between forcing yourself to live with something that eats away at you every day and actually accepting it. Most of the time, we never truly accept things or let them go, we just put a band-aid on it, and self medicate or otherwise distract ourselves from the pain. Meanwhile, we find ourselves prodding it, poking at it, and giving it attention anyway.
     That’s where I found myself; accepting it, but not accepting it at all. I was broken and scared and raging inside, but I had to keep it together on the outside. I had too many other responsibilities; to work and family and other people, to give up and collapse. That was okay, I would tell myself, that’s what I did. I was the person people go to with their problems. I was the together one, who helped everyone else. I would be fine.
     Life is full of weird bullshit instances where your brain shoehorns you into some stupid box as it constantly tries to make sense of a nonsensical world. One of those bullshit things is that if you're a person who helps others with their problems, if you're a giver… well, your brain assigns you a fucked up set of rules and parameters to guide you along. You're given a role, and your brain tries to make you play it like some crazed and power-mad community theater director who thinks he's on Broadway. Unfortunately, those rules mess up other huge aspects of your life, because we are complex, and need committees and debate and nuance to navigate life, not one dictatorial brain with a hammer.
     One of the biggest bullshit rules your brain gives you is that if you're a helper and a giver, it stands to reason that you cannot ask for help or be a taker. You need to stay within the bounds of your rigidly defined role. What that means is you wind up feeling guilty or a failure or a burden if you have a problem. In your head, you have failed at your prime directive.
     I’m a helper and a giver, so I have to constantly remind myself that my brain is full of shit, and its rules are too simplistic and rigid. So I do try to talk to my friends about my problems on occasion. You’ll find that people want to help, even if they don’t see themselves as helpers. Takers aren’t monsters, they might just be a little more self absorbed or needy or melodramatic than helpers. So they try their best, but their own brains are not really comfortable with the role reversal, and to be honest, neither is mine. You see them as needing comfort, so it seems like you are burdening an already fragile person with your issues. That’s not even a fair view of them, but your brain doesn’t care, the roles demand it. Even when I do talk to them about my problems, I hold back, and I keep it simple, and I’m very conscious about how much I’m whining.
     “Whining.”
     That’s my brain with its bullshit again. It is invalidating my problems and pain, even as I look for help and guidance. While I have truly spent a good portion of my life listening to some people whine about really trivial shit, even then I don’t tell them that they are whining. I don’t make them feel like they are wasting my time, because even the drama queens have legitimate pain and misery at the core of their drama. You have to listen to the whining to get to the root. Still, my brain tries to make me feel like I’m a loser and a mess for talking about my problems.
     I do have helpers in my life as well, but again, when you ask a helper for help but they identify you as another helper, their brain won’t let it all line up properly. You are still out of your role, and helpers are programmed to help takers, not givers. It is all very complex and ridiculous, but human beings excel at making their lives needlessly hard and dysfunctional.
     So I wind up downplaying my own stuff, and even when I do talk about it to someone, I soon make myself stop because I think I am boring them or making them feel uncomfortable out of their roles. As a result, I internalize a lot of stuff.
     I ended up with ptsd myself. I would panic if I thought I saw her on the street, and everyone looked like her from a distance. I would see a car that looked like her car, a car that she hadn’t even owned for over a year, and my mind would instantly flood with apprehension. Even though I knew she no longer drove that car, it would still be a trigger. It seemed familiar though, because she would see her past abusers everywhere, even when it wasn’t possible. They were nowhere around; two were in jail, and one died about a year and a half after I had first started seeing her. Still, every couple of days I had to hear about how she was sure she saw one of them, or heard their voices outside her window. We would be driving down the street and she would panic and point out one of them, only to get closer and find that it was not them at all. Sometimes it wasn’t even close. It was a woman, or elderly person, or a bush. I would marvel about how she could be so wrong all the time, how she could be so irrational, yet here I was freaking out just the same because I thought I saw a car that she once owned. I was sent into a panic when the phone rang, afraid it would be her raving and screaming at me, or texting me hateful and nasty screeds that made little sense. I would sit in my living room, and jump at every noise in the hallway, thinking it might be her back at my door.
     It never was.
     I had blocked her number, and told her never to come back, and it worked. Still, I lived in fear for so long that she would. Not because she would do something violent or dangerous, although I knew she was capable of that. She had told me so herself, that she had fantasies about killing me. She had already tried to hurt me, hitting me or throwing heavy and sharp objects at my head.
     She used to hide anything with a point or a sharp edge in the house. I would find all kinds of things squirreled away in the linen closet or the back of a drawer, sometimes wrapped in a sock or washcloth. I used to think that she did that because she was afraid that one day I would snap and try to kill her, but it slowly dawned on me that she didn't trust herself not to hurt me. One night, she sat here in my living room, and told me that, in a voice I barely recognized, with a look in her eyes of cold, calculated hate. Schizophrenia is a very scary thing to witness.
     I was just afraid to have to face her again. To open up all the old wounds again, to try to reason with an unreasonable person. It would hurt me so much, and I would have nothing to gain. I feared that I would wind up taking her back, and open myself up to more months of abuse and misery. I really felt like it would kill me if I ever went back there again.
     So here I was, damaged and broken and terrified. Instead of helping her, I was inflicted with some of the very things I tried to help her overcome. That's the danger of trying to deal with things you don't understand. That's why you need professionals. That’s why there needs to be separation and professional detachment. If you're not a psychologist or psychiatrist, you're just going to fuck up your life and theirs. The things you think are helping are actually hurting. While you may think you're strong and holding onto your sanity, it might be slipping away and you don't even see it.
     Crazy people don't think that they're crazy, right?

3

     So now, here I was, broken hearted, confused, estranged, completely shattered. I felt like a failure in many ways. I had a whole bunch of conflicting emotions raging inside me. The rest of my life was stressful and crazy as well. In trying to help her and keep her out of jail and the poor house, I had really screwed myself up financially.
     I built a ton of credit card debt, wiped out any savings I had, and really put myself in a tough spot. I started the long climb back to solvency and good credit, and I'm still not there yet. It’s been a rough couple of years, but rough in a completely different way than the three years that preceded them. It’s amazing the multitude of ways that life can knock you down, from small things that feel like a thousand little cuts each day; to huge, overlapping arcs that play out and set the tone over years or decades or a lifetime.
     I haven't really thought about dating or moving on. Who would want to date me right now? I'm sort of broke, I'm damaged, and I sleep each night on an old, ratty couch. I certainly couldn't bring a woman home to my ridiculous bedroom! I hate it at this point. I am surrounded by reminders of how badly I failed and how monumentally I fucked up nearly every aspect of my life for a time. The biggest reminder, the one that seems to encompass everything bad, is my bedroom, and that goddamn bed sitting in the middle of it.
     So for about two years now, I have hardly even gone in my bedroom. I kept meaning to put everything back in its correct place, but just like the way she would put off changing it, I have been putting off changing it back. I even got new sheets and a bedspread a year ago, and never took them out of the packaging. It's hilarious, actually. I pay for a two bedroom apartment, and don't use either bedroom.
      My couch isn't comfortable anymore either. It's old and lumpy, and should have been replaced years ago. I was starting to stall before she came along, and even though I really made some strides when I was with her that first year, I've fallen even further back in many ways. Sure, my mirror image isn’t as horrible as it once was, but I still don’t have much motivation or drive. I don’t think in terms of a bright and shining future, I don’t feel anticipation, I feel dread. Inertia has completely engulfed me, and I'm not sure how to get moving again. It's killing me, but I just can't seem to do anything about it.
     That’s not to say that I don’t do anything. Other parts of my life are busy and stressed, but most of them are not fulfilling in the least. I have responsibilities to friends and family and work, and I take care of those. Some are even kind of gargantuan. Then I find I myself at home, with no motivation, no real purpose, and nobody, and just taking the trash out seems like an insurmountable thing.
     Still, I’m not miserable. Most of the time, I laugh and joke around. I’m fairly pleasant to be around, at least I think I am. I think life is absurd, and I am definitely nihilistic, but I try to remain optimistic, even if my idea of optimism and best case outcomes is probably vastly different than yours.
     It’s not that I can’t imagine a better future, it’s just that I don’t really know if it’s worth the effort to try to get there. I’m 55 years old, and I’m tired. I’ve seen most of these movies before, I know how they turn out. Still, I have not given up. Everyday, I look around me and see success stories. Everyday I see things that inspire me. I just have a really bad habit of stubbornly waiting for the world to meet me halfway, and that’s not something the world really has any interest in doing.
     I’m not depressed, not in any clinical sense. I don’t get melancholy out of the blue, and I don’t get sad when I’m doing something happy. I know people with depression, and it can be debilitating. I’m not saying that I don’t have any issues, I just spent a bunch of time illustrating most of them right here. More than anything, I am just worn down. I have a bunch of reasons why I’m kind of spinning my wheels, but at least half of them are valid. I recognize that I am at a transitional point in my life, I have been there for awhile now, but I’m just not sure how to move forward yet.
     And so I wait; for inspiration, for someone to walk into my life and make it better, for some opportunity to present itself. Like I said, though, the world has no interest in doing any of that for me. Perhaps I will never find the spark I need to start getting my life back together again.
     Then, for no reason at all, I walked into my bedroom yesterday, took my bed apart, and moved everything back to the way it used to be. I stood there afterward, kind of in shock that I did it. I hadn’t even been thinking about it, I was just watching TV and being bored. It was like something snapped, and I suddenly had a purpose, no matter how small. Now, here I was, staring at my room with everything back in its original position, and marveling at how I hadn’t done it sooner. Then it seemed kind of overwhelming, and I was suddenly very aware of the room and myself, and I instantly decided that was enough for one day. Back to the couch!
     Today, I went back into the room, and I went through piles of clothes that had been there for years. I vacuumed and cleaned everything, the first time in ages. I got rid of a bunch of junk that served no purpose other than to remind me of her and what I had lost, what we both had lost. I got the new sheets and bedspread, and I made the bed. I stood in the doorway, and just looked at my room, clean, organized, and reclaimed.
     It felt good.
     It felt weird.
     Uh oh. Back to the couch again!
     A few hours later, I thought about how I haven't laid in a bed in so long, even my own, and I realized that I didn't even remember what it felt like. My bed was there, in the next room, freshly made, where it was supposed to be. It was my goddamn bed!
     So I went in, and I flopped down on it, and it was so comfortable. It was my bed, the one I remembered from so long ago. I didn't think about how big it was, or how empty it seemed. I didn’t focus on who wasn’t there with me, and wonder if anyone ever would be again. I just thought about how good it felt to actually lie on my bed. It felt like progress. It felt like closing a chapter.
     It also felt like opening a cage door; or maybe the door was never closed, but I was trapped in there just the same. As I lay there, I thought about a lot of things, and the pain that usually accompanies those thoughts wasn't really there anymore. The memory of it was, and it was a little frightening, but it was controllable.
     It dawned on me that maybe I had turned a corner. I knew that I still wasn't going to sleep in my bed tonight. I may have turned a corner, but that's still farther down the road from where I am presently. I can see it, though, and that's enough for now.
     Now, I'm back sitting on my couch, but I am writing this down, and that's the real accomplishment. That's acceptance, and that's growth and bravery and time. I’m making lists and plans to reclaim other parts of my apartment and life as well. Soon the time will come when I can sleep in my own bed, by myself. I used to feel so lonely, and think that I was bereft and unlovable, and deserved to be there with no one beside me. That was me fooling myself again. It was never just me. I always had company with me under those sheets, but no more! The ghosts and demons will have all disappeared, and I'll be glad to be alone once more.
     Maybe we have to be our own exorcists…