Pet Your Confusion
You set bowls of milk out as offering.
It eats, then curls up in your chest.
Every moment I spent in Chile was stolen. Stolen from a life I was trying to hold onto at home. A non-life, really, as the only thing that was missing from it was my self. David, my boyfriend at the time, basically forbade me from going. His jealousy, fully manifesting itself in our relationship at that point, punctured any happiness I had once felt and kept him in a state of suspicion. He had abandoned himself to his suspicion, actually. Our evening phone calls (they were really interrogations) while I was in Chile left me crumpled, wet, and ruined.
Ruined, but free. There's something liberating about being in a different hemisphere from the source of your pain and self-loathing. Especially when you've been swept from the throws of Winter into beautiful, Chilean Spring. Those ten short days abroad were some of the best of my life. I was mopey and alone. I separated myself from the group every chance I got. I picked flowers and prompted a spontaneous daisy picnic. I was so alienated that any openness or happiness I experienced, was an unexpected gift. Was an experience of Grace. Chile was indescribably beautiful and our cello choir concerts, intense.
There was the concert in the rose garden in Santiago, with white banners streaming. The concert in the ruins of Mora(?) Island, where I had those amazing cherry pastries (there were cherry orchards on the island), saw the school-house and its flowers, and got rained on. The stray mutt I left on the banks whose fate was mine, the black volcanic sand of the beach, and our 18 cellos bobbing up and down in dingy boats across the water - some bizarre procession. Eighteen casualties - our instruments in their black caskets.
There was also the concert in the Catholic church in Valdivia, which was magical. We made sacred music there. Music that was careful not to break the silence too completely. And then there was the unforgettable bus ride along the shores of Valparaiso. Window open, knees wedged between my seat and the one in front of me, hair flying, blue skies, water that stretched from rock to horizon.
Moments like those make you beg whatever higher power exists to kill you, right then and there, because it doesn't get better.
I've experienced other moments of joy like that, and gratitude, when my heart asked to lift itself clear of my chest and join itself with whatever lies beyond.
You set bowls of milk out as offering.
It eats, then curls up in your chest.
Every moment I spent in Chile was stolen. Stolen from a life I was trying to hold onto at home. A non-life, really, as the only thing that was missing from it was my self. David, my boyfriend at the time, basically forbade me from going. His jealousy, fully manifesting itself in our relationship at that point, punctured any happiness I had once felt and kept him in a state of suspicion. He had abandoned himself to his suspicion, actually. Our evening phone calls (they were really interrogations) while I was in Chile left me crumpled, wet, and ruined.
Ruined, but free. There's something liberating about being in a different hemisphere from the source of your pain and self-loathing. Especially when you've been swept from the throws of Winter into beautiful, Chilean Spring. Those ten short days abroad were some of the best of my life. I was mopey and alone. I separated myself from the group every chance I got. I picked flowers and prompted a spontaneous daisy picnic. I was so alienated that any openness or happiness I experienced, was an unexpected gift. Was an experience of Grace. Chile was indescribably beautiful and our cello choir concerts, intense.
There was the concert in the rose garden in Santiago, with white banners streaming. The concert in the ruins of Mora(?) Island, where I had those amazing cherry pastries (there were cherry orchards on the island), saw the school-house and its flowers, and got rained on. The stray mutt I left on the banks whose fate was mine, the black volcanic sand of the beach, and our 18 cellos bobbing up and down in dingy boats across the water - some bizarre procession. Eighteen casualties - our instruments in their black caskets.
There was also the concert in the Catholic church in Valdivia, which was magical. We made sacred music there. Music that was careful not to break the silence too completely. And then there was the unforgettable bus ride along the shores of Valparaiso. Window open, knees wedged between my seat and the one in front of me, hair flying, blue skies, water that stretched from rock to horizon.
Moments like those make you beg whatever higher power exists to kill you, right then and there, because it doesn't get better.
I've experienced other moments of joy like that, and gratitude, when my heart asked to lift itself clear of my chest and join itself with whatever lies beyond.
2 comments:
This comment was left on my original post in LiveJournal. Out of all the comments I've ever received, this has, perhaps, meant the most.
Forgive me for reading your journal.
I have been reading it for a long time. But I had to find you, I had to know if anything he was telling me about you was true. And it's not. It's just not. I understand now that the stories he would tell about his ex-girlfriends - and there were many more than I cared to ever hear - were skewed and distorted to make him sound like a victim.
I was with him for a year and a half. I was a student in the music school, a freshman. He was twice my age. I should have known from the very beginning, but I was too caught up with the dumb notion of wanting an 'experience.' That experience turned into a relationship and then into a nightmare.
He interrogated me, too. He would question me for hours on end about any interaction I had with my peers, my family, and random people (men, especially) on the street. I couldn't have any new friends my own age and he forbade me to speak with many of the friends I had grown up with. I was brainwashed in a way; I finally stopped thinking and tried to avoid any contact with people that would make him angry and jealous.
After a year and a half of life with him, I finally began to build up the courage to do what had to be done and, one night, I told him that I was leaving for my home and would not be coming back. He tried to tell me that there were demons inside me and that they had won. I can't even begin to detail the nightmare that was our relationship. I'm assuming that you know it well enough. That drive back to my home felt like it was forever. I felt as though I had nothing inside of me. The adjustment period afterward was a nightmare of confusion, mistakes, and learning how to handle all of the new freedoms that I hadn't been allowed to have for the prior year and a half.
David constantly talked about you. All the time. He refused to call you by name, simply addressing you by a childish nickname - 'crazy ex-girlfriend.' He eventually let your proper name slip after I had said the word "wigger" one afternoon.
I know that this might be freakish of me, but I was so curious. You would come up into conversation at least three times a week... at the very least. He always talked about the past women in his life excessively, but it seemed that he was obsessed with lamenting over how you "tormented" him.
I would secretly read your journal while David and I were together. Then I didn't read it for a long time- during one evening he was interrogating me for no other reason than I had not offered up some piece of information to him. It was as if he craved deceit, thrived on it. I had nothing else to offer him but the fact that I had been reading your journal. He became so angry and after hours of going back and forth, he said he would allow me to stay in his house if I never looked at your journal again. I would later have to delete all of my online accounts so that I could stay. There are just so many things.
This November will mark two years since I left him. I had to transfer schools so that he couldn't keep track of me on the GSU system.
There is no one who would even remotely begin to understand why these memories continue to haunt me. I can't tell my parents much more than he was very bad for me or else they might try and go after his job at the music school- and that would entail having to see him again. My friends (save for a couple), after I finally repaired the relationships that I had broken with him while David and I were together, prefer not to acknowledge that it happened. For the most part, I try not to think about it either. But sometimes I just want to know that there is someone who, at the very least, kind of understands. I remember the feelings of being crumpled, wet, and ruined.
-j.e
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