In any divorce, be it of marriage, work or friendship, when it comes time to part ways you always have to divide up the stuff, or make claims to some stuff that the other person has been “holding” for you. Often neither party really cares about the stuff, they just use them as tools to try and hurt the other by telling them what an ungrateful prick they are.
“The stapler always jammed and on the rare occasions it did work, usually only one side of the staple penetrated the paper, leaving you in that precarious limbo where you think it may just be good enough to hold but you’re never quite certain. So I brought in my own personal stapler for the whole office to use. Fuck you—I’m taking it back!”
What’s worse is when kids are involved. One or both members of the couple usually make a power play for custody of the child that is not with the child’s best interest in mind but as a stake to plunge through your former beloved’s heart whose sperm or uterus you foolishly used to produce the little darling. “What’s that, honey? You still want to see your mother once in awhile? Well, I’m sorry, if I get my way you will never see her again.” I personally know of two cases, one involving a relative and the other a good friend, where their partner was attempting to deny them either total or adequate access to build a proper relationship with the child. How quickly love can turn noxious and poison anyone who is unfortunate enough to inhale in your vicinity.
When Ninja and my relationship took a nosedive like the airline shot down on 9/11 over that field in Pennsylvania, I gathered together her stuff and wanted to get it out of my apartment ASAP. My place was a mess and a part of me was kidding myself that by removing her few items that I’d be really making a dent in my pigsty. But more so, I wanted to be done with her altogether and anytime you hold onto possessions of another, be it the first condom he filled at your pump or her nasty stained period panties that she wore every time of the month, you are keeping an energetic cord still linking the two of you and this, at the least, will drain some of your energy and at worst can be used in manipulative ways by an energy vampire. Sounds horror movie, I know, but I have been psychicly attacked before, not always intentionally, and the effect is real.
Without getting majorly into it, the best defense is a strong offense. I don’t mean you try to zap out the other person first so that they don’t have the power supply to zap you. I mean you boost your own self up through whatever helps to keep you feeling strong—fun music, good friends, prayer, enough sleep, etc.
Anywho… When I moved into the new apartment, I didn’t have electricity for the first three days. Coming from a humble background, read that as “brokeback” struggling, Ninja had dealt with several bouts of no electricity when her mother couldn’t find enough men to blow to pay the Con Ed bill. So the second day in my apartment, she came by with a bunch of battery-powered lights, lamps and lanterns that really lit up the place nicely, as if I had captured a couple of hundred fireflies and let them go wild in my house and then the cockroaches, feeling that their turf was being invaded, attacked them and in killing them their lights remained stuck on. In packing up her stuff, I almost wanted to keep the awesome crank-powered flashlight! But I wanted to get rid of everything and so I put all her lighting equipment in a bag.
She would always leave a drink container here and tell me that she’d get it next time but next time would never come. I had two of hers. In the bag, and by “bag” I don’t mean her haggard mother’s vagina. She also left her yoga mat and bag here (nope, still not her mom’s vagina), which she used at my yoga meet-up group, the second and final in three months that we were dating. I couldn’t blame her for her lack of attendance; I knew she was much more interested in sucking down unfiltered cancer sticks than supporting what I do. While we were still dating I kept bugging her to pick up the yoga mat and she told me, “Just give it away.” I held onto it forever and occasionally used it when I took or guided a yoga class.
Finally I had a meet-up yoga session and only Neato showed up. At the end of her private yoga session, she admired a yoga bag I had and said, “I don’t have one. I could really use one to keep my mat from getting dirty.” I told her to close her eyes and when she did I squeezed her boobs and ran away. I also gave her Ninja’s yoga bag. She was very grateful and I was just glad to get rid of it.
After the first and last phone conversation after break-up day, where I realized that no amount of vaginal benefits was worth putting up with this psycho for, I sent an email to her telling her that I gave her yoga mat to Neeto, a woman she had met a couple of times and talked to and really liked.
“You have a lot of balls doing that,” she said.
I was like, “What the fu—? You said to give it away!” But it was clear to me that there was no use in having a debate on logic with a sociopath and that her, “Just give it away” was only playing it “cool.” I also guessed that she didn’t really care too much about the yoga mat which, like the dozens of bags that I haven’t unpacked for 2 ½ months, she doesn’t use all that much nor need. And her “You have a lot of balls” was not a comment on my genetic anomaly of being born with three testicles but her trying to one-up me in some sort of power play once again, in essence saying, “I don’t care either way but what you did was wrong.” If I gave a shit at this point it might have worked. But I didn’t.
But I did call Neato up and told her that I made a mistake giving Ninja’s bag to her—despite Ninja directly telling me that I should give it away—and that I would give her another bag. And I did. I also apologized for the boob squeeze but found out that that was the first action she’s gotten in a couple of decades and she wanted to know if this meant we were going steady. I let her down easy by sleeping with her and not calling or writing or emailing or texting or Morse Code-ing or smoke signaling her thereafter.
My last phone call with Ninja turned brutal and after hanging up on her, I immediately deleted her phone number from my cel phone and deleted all of our text messages (her favorite way to “communicate”) so I didn’t have a fallback to go to when I was drunk dialing; I still had her mother’s number if I was desperate to get laid. Later, I wrote her an email somewhat apologizing as, regardless of her being a complete psycho, that was not the way I want to behave.
Among other things, I shared how when she said, “Good luck finding other young girls around thirty,” what she was really saying was “I am special and you took me for granted and I wish you hadn’t and I wish you could see the special girl behind the reactive ways–and fuck you for that!” But because we are all so afraid of expressing our true feelings and being vulnerable and getting hurt, we all tend to put on the bravado of toughness so that even if we do get hurt, it will only cut the surface story—as we have locked away our ability to feel and express ourselves authentically—and then we can call it a war wound and boast how we stood strong.
A guy will talk about nonsense with a girl at a bar because he doesn’t have the guts to say, “I just want to sleep with you and so I will put up with some of your tired-ass stories in which I have no interest.” A girl will listen to a guy bore her to tears about his work and his adventures drinking cocktails on a streamliner with Donald Trump just because she doesn’t have the cajones to say, “I’m so scared of being alone that even a loser schlep like you is starting to be considered acceptable.” A friend will tell his or her friend how nice her new outfit looks when all he or she is thinking is, “You look like a pig in a dress,” or “What was she thinking wearing those shoes with that?” or “I hate her—I just come over for the free punch and pie!”
"How much longer do I have to listen to your bullshit to get a blowjob?"
After awhile we have built up such a strong fortress of surface story that we don’t even know what the true story locked in the tower and waiting for her fair knight to come and save her is anymore. This is directly related to us wearing so many masks in order to seek approval that we’ve forgotten what our face looks like underneath the layer upon layer of masks. I once removed all my masks and looked like Guy Fawkes in whiteface and it freaked me the fuck out so I put those suckers right the hell back on!
Ninja and I are at different places in the game of life, not just meaning that I am old and decrepit and she is young and immature, but that I have realized that the ego that I’ve walked around with all these years is not me and I’m trying to drop it and she is at a point before ego destruction takes place, where one reinforces it to the hilt before setting off the nukes. I realize that when I get stirred up by something she says or does it is just an attachment to an old pattern of thought and she convinces herself that when she acts selfishly and inconsiderately that this is just her asserting her autonomy and uniqueness.
I am growing tired of fighting and desire in a partner someone who will boost me up rather than put me down. I want to be with someone who will help me to drop my bullshit and not revel when I make more piles of it as she rubs my face in it. I want someone who thinks about me and my needs and feelings at least as much as her own. And this is not Ninja.
It’s almost like on a spiritual level we are speaking two different languages and neither one knows what the fuck the other needs or wants. Where the simile falls short is that I know what I want and Ninja is not capable of providing it for me, for even if she called more than once a week or didn’t repel me every time I moved closer for affection, or gave up smoking, her actions would be coming from her mind, “Because this is what he wants,” and not from her heart, “Because this is what I want.”
And I know that what she wants is something that I can’t give her either. For she has to find her sense of self-worth on her own and it seems that I am only getting in the way of her self-discovery.
There is an over-quoted line of the Persian mystic and poet, Rumi, and I will only add to the overuse by quoting it again:
“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.”
The field is where our Authentic Selves sit and enjoy the smell of the grass, and the feel of the wind, and the colors of the sunset. Outside the field is where our surface stories sit in the stands of a self-contained stadium; with synthetic Astroturf underfoot and artificial lights overhead; with walls that completely block out the wind and sun and people next to us who we don’t really care to know; where we either watch as spectators other people playing endless games, or participate in a game which has way too many rules to remember, let alone enjoy. All the time forgetting that our real life resides outside of this container.
Hilarious….but so, so true!!! Some residue of past memories cleared by seeing the ridculousness of it all and being able to laugh at myself!!!
Was your residue cleared from reading this piece or from cleaning out your pot pipe?