A personal and delicate posting from a 21st Century Bronte novel about a thinly disguised Brussels town being a place where hearts being broken are that city's strange life blood - Villette - or Bruxelles la Morte. This on remember Experiencing Belgium back in the day, once upon a time.
.....I like the sweet things you say about our quasi post- relationship family but mostly what I read makes the bottom of my already delicate and tender heart these days fall out and I cave into a painful form of sadness and despair: I cannot drive here anywhere in central Ohio without this happening to some degree and most people I see here know you and remember you and are curious to want to hear more about you. (to such a degree that I see that they would rather see you than me) - But I have very little information about you to give because I just don't know anything anymore. Then they see how that affects me and say that I must get to the point where you and I never happened and all of that is forgotten - then and only then I will be free to live my life again. But my answer to that is how do you throw 15 years - the best years - of your life away. Neither do I want to - nor do I intend to. Instead this sadness will eventually claim my life and that is really ok and perhaps as it should be. My sadness and disillusion will remain a cornerstone of your life post me - wether you choose to know it is entirely up to you - better you not think about it in the long the run. But it is a truth to our lives now.
My grandmother and grandfather talked about getting back together up until my grandfather died of a heart attack. Then my grandmother lived on in loneliness and despair for years and years after even after her sister and my mom and dad died - long after her second man committed suicide - she lived long so long after that always speaking of the man she loved whom she divorced, until her drawn out end. I will not repeat that history. Neither should you. I am not sure how but I will pack up this house and end this real estate game. I will move - because I cannot co-exist in this place with the ghosts of my family and now you and the dogs; my unique and bohemian chosen family haunting me and ripping my heart out daily and nightly.
I go to bed thinking about you - get up in the middle of the night groaning that you are still there back home tormenting me and wake up in the morning much the same way. I don't want to take on a new partner or lover to replace you and fill that void. I want to evolve into a sort of independence that doesn't need a replacement part in the form of another person whose problems I have to acquire to make my life work. I do not have poetic nostalgic palliatives for my shredded heart. And I have only myself and my depressive confused brain to blame. My heart will not mend - nor do I want it to. I want to live as the corpse I am - as a carcass - as an empty vessel until my time to go arrives. I wish that time were sooner rather than later. Last winter after the hospital I was the most suicidally minded that I have ever known. I do not want to go back to that place again.
It is my goal to leave this house and location before then. I still get bills left and right about that hospital stay that don't make sense to me in their logic or possibility and they eat away at my substantially above average credit rating because I don't know what to do with them or how to contest them. Without you I am a double amputee. Most of my life is spent stumbling around. I have considered marrying for convenience a decent Muslim woman who is modern enough to grasp my life up until now and who is still desiring like me to be not living alone. Umers ex, Kristoff, is doing this with much success - as are many metrosexualist post gay men in other places (with or without religious communities). It requires honesty and consolation and compromise but is a new trend in the rainbow movement going full circle.
Otherwise, one just gets stuck in the party boy who refuses, like peter pan to grow up and thus lives out their numbered days on crystal meth, coccain, weed, heroin and pharmaceutical sleeping pills all with the implications that go with being seropositive. It is a passive form of a cowards suicide.
Of course in the back of my mind I hear you calling me back to some modernist construct of a life and family in some as we used to call it "choose your own bohemian adventure" way. It is a dream like voice of a siren call - for the destruction of the lives of good hearted Sailors - for I see no truth in it. ...and I sincerely doubt it - though it feels very sweet in print to read - I find it is a phantom memory based on wishful thinking and not grounded on any reality at your end. Your emails suggest a glimpse of hope that make my heart leap back to life and make me ready to board a plane - but mostly that feels like a very small carrot at the very end of an incredibly long stick. In reality you are saddled with your new man and his friends in a world now extremely foreign and undefined, without room for me. I mostly try not to think about it or imagine it. What memories I have are a demonic persistance of memory day dream of people and places that once were. I go to bed either on the verge of crying or actually doing so - I wake up the same way - and mostly in the middle of the night the single bed is cold and empy and frightfully full of a gaggle of demons who harrass me about a long an remarkable and unique marriage that should be celebrated not forgotton - not buried in the back of some cemetery for broken marriages.
So I will either marry a woman - or find some way to carry out my life elsewhere without a partner of any sex. What I don't like about this place in my life now is that all I can see is that I am at variable 'Y' location, and 'Z', being death and the end is next - it is just not clear when I look to the distant horizon how far Z is. And how do I sustain myself and provide for myself until then in dignity and hope and accomplishment. Mostly at this point there is only religion to occupy my mind. I have nothing else at present - and ironically I am trying to steer clear of religion and now that I can and want to, there really is no point in doing so or not doing so. Until Z there is just whatever busy work I choose to apply myself to. I feel like an old man sitting on the beach in God's Waiting room in Florida on its Gulf side West coast - watching the sun set once again and once again waiting for my time to come.
The promise of death is what is next. I want to go running towards it and embrace it. I have done all I have come here to do. Rumi has the best esoteric explanations for all this - which is why it is no surprise that organized Islam doesn't approve of him or his writing.
"...I don't know who brought me here to this place and left me nor do I know when they are coming for me..." - To loosely quote Coleman Barks translations of the Sufi philosophical master Rumi from the book no library should be without - The Essential Rumi.
Books quoted in this essay posting.
If you don't know them "you can Google it" to quote the Vampiric character Edward Cullins from Stephenie Meyers "Twilight" and movie books.
"Villette" by Charlotte Bronte
"Bruges La Morte" by Georges Rodenbach
"The Essential Rumi" by Coleman Barks
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