running down the middle of me most of the time

stilettos steeped in puddle, hair, dripping, stuck in streaks across my face, tears, running, mating frenetically with the rain, tire folded on itself, car leaning into the beating sheets of rain while i stomp and shout: my early morning tantrum.

and he could care less, hubristically waxing in the back of her car, relishing his alpha maleness, making space in his repository for new images--later masturbatory fodder, since it's never enough, since fucking nightly doesn't solve it--he's still mounting me in his sleep, pressing firmly, forcefully into me as he dreams about something, someone i've never seen, he's never touched. it's not enough, enough, enough. he could care less.

selfishly, he's hanging up, ignoring. and she's calling me four, five, six times to check to make sure i'm ok, so maybe i need a female after all.

and i said, baby, it's a problem that these dirty, dumb mechanics offer more support than my damn husband. and, silent, he then said, well, what is there to do. they, at least, can rotate my tires. they, at least, know what they've been missing. they, at least, anticipated the storm and braced me against it, offering towels, coffee, discounted reassurance.

and he could care less. stop bitching if you don't know what you want me to do.

i know i need more than this, more than you. i know i need somebody who isn't constantly distracted by every xx who passes by. i know i need someone whose emotion can effuse close to mine. he can't be a mindreader, but i can't spell out the obvious all the time. time to stop identifying. time to do.

baby, i love you; that's why i'm leaving. i can't hover in constant competition with your more immediate needs.

harder to be friends than lovers

i love him.
i do not like him.
i wrote out of great distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to grieve him but to let him know the depth of my love for him.

last night's lie and its discovery penetrated me to the core. we are on all the wrong pages. he is sabotaging. i am shutting down.

analyzing him until 2 in the morning, intermittently in bouts of tearful awakening throughout the night, again this morning when i found him where he'd retreated on the futon near the port of his addiction and i couldn't help touching his sleeping face, again this morning with his arms around me, arousing in me what hasn't been in months, passionately plying me, pleading with me: don't go--stay for this--this, this, at least, can be so good. kicking myself all the way from the station, and her words echoing: you looked so happy, so lucky.

but my finger is bare. and it won't be adorned until this shit gets resolved. he might have to leave for it to happen. but he won't. because he knows if he accepts the offer, the door will remain closed, and i will not invite his return. so happy. so lucky.

too late for annulment. so lucky.

analyze this: me: so happy, so angry, so eager to be finished, out. as much as i read the koran with him yesterday and used the tool of his own clanging obsession to straighten out his thoughts, to instill images he'd previously ignored, i cannot apply it to myself, perhaps because i cannot chant the ayahs as they deserve--perhaps because the energy he felt with his mis-diagnosed hands hovering over my back, telling me my hair should be covered, we should not be so close, second wife, second wife, was not the energy i needed to connect the words to my soul, properly internalize. you are not a dictator over them. you are a reminder.

so, the e-mail: my reminder. but, still, my ultimatum. how do you balance tyranny? at what point does one become not just the reminder, not just the self-advocate she could never be but a shatan of a controlling, fiery-eyed, suspicious bitch? and how much does it matter that his very activity incites this reaction? i am still responsible. i am still cognitively capable (if not otherwise) of controlling my emotional katrina.

he is selfish. i am selfish. i am wanting, wanting, wanting, tired of giving. but this is an evaluation of myself. his taking: immaterial. i am selfishly wanting him to be a better man, to intuit, to know, to seek to understand me; i am selfishly wanting him to invest emotionally in me, to open himself to me, to explore his motivations and inclinations with me, to connect, interlace, weld. i am selfishly wanting more of him. but i am also selfishly wanting more of me. back.

i am wanting to control. i am tired of the powerlessness of this place. fatigued by my failures, i am forcing myself harder, louder, considering the big D if i can't get control. but i can't control. i can't change the things i want to change. i can't even touch them. o, god, grant me some fucking serenity to accept the things i cannot change. i cannot change him.

i am emotionally withdrawn. my arms ache from the constant shit-shoveling to get back to the spark he asked me about after the exam today. i told him i couldn't find it. and that i was starting not to care. it was too much work to keep the bellows pumping. by myself. i have let go of the reins, but not wholly yet. i sobbed into the flattened pillow (not my princesa poufs) in the grey hours wishing there were hope, feeling a failure for having shoved him away. i still want to connect. so badly.

i am insensitive to how he is feeling. i am curt, sarcastic, snide and unwilling to hear anything he has to say--i am too involved in my own indignation about marrying a 14 year-old to understand his perspective. he called me on this. and i shoved him away. i beg empathy, but i don't provide it in return.

i am unrealistic in my expectations of him. i want him to read my mind. i want him to be less of a man, more of a curvaceous, sensual woman who will envelop me in her soft flesh, emanate understanding from her miniscule but multitudinous pores. i want him to understand and effuse, despite the fact that i know he cannot realistically do either.

i am apparently failing to meet his needs, but he does not share such matters with me, preferring instead to hide his routes to self-service from me.

i am sarcastic. o, i am sarcastic. i am cutting. i am abrupt. i am cruel. i have very little patience for his personal explanations.

i jump to conclusions incredibly rapidly, not letting him finish, assigning his motives, emotions, and refusing to hear his own self-analysis, dismissing it as disingenuous rationalization, the product of an immature man out of touch with himself.

i am becoming inflexible. i am expecting him to conform to my ideals. i am trying to force things, feeling so long overlooked, so seriously trampled.

i am rude: i want to punch your fucking face. he's right. i wouldn't stand for it from him.

i am nagging. she detected this cycle. i am also unheard. so i scream. again and again and again, further infuriated with each incantation.

i need to develop an unconditional commitment to him. i am not there. i am preparing for him to move out. i am hoping, in many ways, he will. my own port: my own escape. if he leaves, i mustn't struggle through this shit. if he leaves, in some ways, i have triumphed.

why did we fuck this morning? why like that? suddenly. we were both so hateful. and then more passionate and loving than we have been in weeks. and all i wanted was a kiss. a reminder. but that...

i need to cultivate my humility. he is aggravatingly imperfect, but i am not a diety myself. i have failings, massive ones, and there are things that are intolerable about me. i need to step outside myself and objectively inventory my shit. you're the reason for the word bitch, bitch.

and, now, for her wisdom. we can manage the lovers. maybe she can direct back to a time when we were friends. or maybe it's better to make lovers of extant friends.

mommy dearest

motherless me, compensatorily caring. i have mamaed my entire life, providing maternity and love for everyone who lacks it, from them just years my juniors to he whose mother threw him to the wolves to her whose body i produced to he whose mother couldn't put down the pipe long enough to help him walk, later watch him, in cap and gown, walk, to he whose laundry i now dutifully fold.
and i mothered him, who was ostensibly my parent. and her, because she couldn't do the same for me.
and him, who i handed over to his rightful mother.

he described my personality perfectly this morning, and i sat wondering if it pricked their ears as it did mine, knowing they'd be diagnosing themselves behind me, each of us pathological in our own right.

she exclaimed to me this morning that i must be the world's best mother. and all i can do is laugh. my own would have me thrown in jail for my lacking maternal behavior.

but she of all people sent me a card on mother's day, telling me that she thought i was a fabulous mother; for all her disdain of what i represent, for all her sorrow at her son's having selected me over the harvard-educated neurotic, she stills wishes she had done some of what i'd do.

still, mass-sitting skills aside, there is so much for her to disapprove. and so much for him to dismiss.

i wonder what fatherlessness did to him.

and how the two of them mesh, having complementary losses.

no damsel in distress

drunk last night and unable to turn steadily enough in my red heels to find my way to the waiting car. drunk last night, braided childishly, the way he exclaims he loves me, getting hard, and passed out, heels propped on the dash, praying he wouldn't return. but he did, to rescue me. to prop me on his shoulder, make more regular my gait, prevent me from dancing freely, insanely on the lawn, from falling when the pirouette was too much into the pond.

drunk last night and still i noticed his eyes lingering too long on her chest, slurring, repeatedly the same, the perpetual something's gotta change. he can't rescue this relationship from where it's fallen. he can't even see the bruises on its knees. he doesn't know the holes in which it's trapped.

he says it's because he can't intuit and asks that i do so for him, as though my enabling his shortcomings will somehow fill my void, as though it will do anything but make me wish i could more easily access the sidedish.

and still, sans intuition, he thinks he can, must rescue me.

he wrote me lovingly, maybe drunkenly, last night and he provided much of what i wish i got daily from my intimate interactions. maybe i need to seek more from those who would refuse to fuck me if i begged. maybe i should seek more from those whose identification is forever keen and limit my expectations of him. after all, if he's just the dick i live with, there'd be a finite number of holes i'd want him to fill.

fear stagnancy

her soft brown eyes, ponderous lips and harvard diploma discarded aimlessly behind volumes of yellowed architectural digests promised me something. she saw through it all. and she knew she needed to separate the two of us for things to even begin to work. she knew we wouldn't progress with both of us objecting in the same room. she's expensive, but maybe it'll be worth it. maybe she'll help us salvage what there once was.

and he stands in the doorway, points at his cock and thinks that's connecting. maybe she'll direct him inward.

across the grounds today, i imagined a camera poised to show him that i could at least feign the sophistication he so lauded, steep heels, flowy-legged, ass-tight black pants, hugging silk spaghetti-strapped top, and beads lapping my almost-cleavage. and my professional spiel blew them all away. shortly, i will become the biggest, brightest fish in their slowly expanding pond. and some of them hate me for it, this sophistication. still, the part he didn't touch long, the part i have to squelch to pretend i give a damn about the financial aspect of the health care model he presented in his foolish semi-eloquence this morning is the part that wants instead to kick the heels from her heavy hooves and feel the grass, too long untrimmed prickly against her calves, bare from having shed the cloak of sophistication slowly as she moved, watching her chirp loudly and pluck curvy, lustrous radishes i nourished with my hands and perfectly cultivated soil from their green burrows, watching him, ears flapping wildly, streams of saliva glistening in his jowls, running towards me, completely smitten. because i'd rather win over a 120 lb dog than rigid, brooks brothersed him and his poorly chosen necktie. because i'd rather express than impress.

and he, distraught this afternoon because he wasn't chosen first, because he was passed over for someone else, in his mind someone lesser, and this monumental bruise to his ego i cannot begin to touch because i am not who he strives so frantically to astound. and this is 7/8 of our problem. a solution would require he first discover his own ego. he, downtrodden, forgetting that grass exists, annoyed by the dirt flying from the radishes she swings, hollering about the drool drops, brushing, brushing, brushing the smudges of affection from the neat creases of his grey suit. bare and languid, i look on. beyond. i can't touch where he is.

his words: raw, shocking, emotional, little weird, flattering.

and moi, just hoping it won't stale.