Letters from Springfest #2

March 24, 2012

***

Now it is 3AM on Saturday morning. 

I recently returned from a Tornado Rider show.

*** 

      Scratch that.  Apparently, after my consciousness-bending experience of being completely and utterly lost in the dark in a swarm of sleeping hippies in the woods, my mind was suddenly too exhausted to come up with five sentences to jot down.

     At the moment, it is 11:30 AM on Saturday.  I made a pot of oatmeal with fresh blueberries for breakfast which I paired with a banana.  I even waited in line for the bathroom this morning so I could at least wash my face.  It was a pretty responsible morning as far as hippy camp goes.  I ate my breakfast in the rain, proud of my success at eating well and self-reliantly.  I feel as if I can hold my own in this world.  I see the families here with their young children and I’m thinking to myself I CAN DO THIS.  So often these days I find myself contemplating the meaning of my life.  Not the meaning of life in general, but in the very specific and personal sense.  Why do I do what I do and what is my ultimate goal?  What is it that I truly want from my meager span of time here on Earth?

     I think I want this.  I want my job to enable me to take time off so I can go gallivanting in the woods, communing with nature and with myself, challenging all the social morals that are rampant in this country.  I want to make random new friends who are just as jazzed to be alive as I am.  Because we are all here together.  Everyone here is so REAL!  Almost all of the pretension from the outside world seems to have been left at the entrance gate.  I feel myself attuning to the vibe of the place as I slowly allow my defenses to fade away.

    I keep losing track of my thoughts as the rain pattering against my tent leads to daydreams about making love to you in this sacred place.  On a drizzly afternoon, it’s easy to see you lying here next to me, smiling into each other’s eyes, sharing this world.

     I can see how this could be the meaning of my life.  I would have a sense of community, something I struggle with out in the real world.  This makes me excited about someday starting a family.  Having a child doesn’t mean you have to give up everything.  You would think that this isn’t the best place for kids, but with so many adults sharing the watch, the kids would be hard pressed to find too much trouble.

     I’m not sure of how much of a hopeless romantic you are, but I suspect you have a hint of it.  When I envision this life with you, the image becomes crystal clear.  If you could have been here with me this weekend, my body would be overloaded.  Mixing my love of this place with the thrill of a new love just beginning is an overwhelming thought.  You would fit so perfectly here.  A weekend like that would cement a bond so firmly it may never fade.  It gladdens me when I realize that you wanted to share all of this with me.  I long to share all of it with you someday.

     You truly came out of nowhere and completely swept me off my feet.  At a time when I was feeling so numb, you reawoke my senses, giving me cause to believe in rapturous love again.  I hope you feel even an inkling of this. 

     I hate to get so far ahead of myself but we have such an intense connection that it is difficult to not get swept up in things.  I have always been attracted to you but I was unprepared for the psychological connection.  Your mind thrills me!  Our physical postures fall into unison.  In just the two days we have spent together, I have fallen completely for you.  I’m in a campsite full of beautiful people but they all pale in comparison to you.

     I keep wondering if this is real.  My first instinct is to trust you completely.  I want you to be as excited about meeting me as you seem to be.  I hope this isn’t a short-lived phase.  I can only pray that I have made as big an impression on you as you have on me.

***

     Oh my.  Where to begin?  In this letter, I basically point out ALL OF THE WARNING SIGNS and promptly disregard them.  Mind you, I wrote this letter after hanging out with this guy TWICE.  There were many moments in our early conversations where I got the feeling that he had somehow found my Livejournal online and read it in its entirety.  So many things he said to me sounded so familiar, I swear I had written them.  My Livejournal however, had been long abandoned and to my knowledge, is not connected to my name in any way.  Therefore, I dismissed this thought as paranoia and slowly settled into the thought that this guy was actually just my perfect match.  Unfortunately, if someone who is seemingly perfect turns out not to be, the truth of how they accomplished that deception is a terrifying thing to discover.  It’s interesting to me that I express so much doubt at the end of this letter.  It’s as if I knew in the back of my mind that it was all too good to be true.  Even still, I wrote that my first instinct was complete trust.  I’m generally a very instinctual and intuitive person and rarely has this led me astray.  My run in with a narcissist was the first time my bullshit meter completely failed me.

     The most simple and easily accessible tool of deception is the basic lie.  At this point in the game (TWO DATES IN), quite a few lies had already occurred.  The first lie was that he was a high school English teacher.  The reality was that he was a substitute teacher that had a long-term (6 week) sub position in a high school English class.  This lie was uncovered very soon after its original telling, and I dismissed it as “close enough” to the truth to be acceptable.  A far more insidious lie was that he had been single for three months.  In reality, he was still in an open relationship when we met.  It did not formally end until he and I had been dating for about a month and a half, when his girlfriend decided to leave him to be in a monogamous relationship with another man.  This lie I did not discover until nine months later when I finally got the balls to ask his ex girlfriend for the information directly.  When I was upset by her response, she tried to reassure me with “But we were in an open relationship.”  This just pissed me off more since everyone was in the loop except for me.  I knew I was not in a monogamous relationship with M. but the one thing I always asked for was openness and honesty.  The idea of having an “open relationship” where the point is to lie to all of your partners to make it seem like you are being exclusive with them seems like a hypocritical mess to me.

     I guess the point here is, had I seen that first lie about his job for what it was: A LIE, than perhaps I would not have been surprised at all the other lies that followed.  As it were, I swallowed that first one whole and kept myself blind to the obvious for many months after.

     So here I am at a hippy music festival, daydreaming about starting a family with this guy, while he is back at home, still in a relationship with this other girl.  He had told me before I left on this trip that he would love to come with me but he was unable to on such short notice.  Interestingly enough, he made plans to go to Bonnaroo shortly after, which is a similar, yet much larger, music festival and did not bother to even invite me.  He claimed that he had only been there with his ex girlfriend and that it would be too emotionally hard to have a different girl go with him.  Upon his return, he told me that while he was on copious amounts of LSD, ecstasy and goodness knows what else, that he began to meditate on the meaning of love and came to the conclusion that he did not actually love me.  I wonder if this realization came before or after he woke up in a port-o-potty and spent half the day thinking that he finally had done so many drugs that he caused irreparable brain damage to himself (his words, not mine).  The words he wrote to me on the subject were:

“I reflected a lot on my past relationship and had some forgotten memories triggered by having been there the year before

it was obvious to me when looking back that she had fallen out of love for me at least a year ago based on how she treated me, and our personal dynamic

I tried to look the other way, or I interpreted in ways that weren't accurate

but at the end of it all, a year later I thought, Wow, I wish she would have had the courage or knowledge to cut it off with me then when she realized the fire had gone out

it would have been so much easier for me then

I feel now that I have to build my self esteem from scratch

After that trip I couldn't help but start taking other people's emotions more seriously and I feel I've gained some new insight about love

I don't think I have the same romantic feelings for you that you have for me

And I don't want to go any farther in hurting you”

 

     Curiously enough, his way of remedying this situation was to start dating a new girl WITHIN ONE WEEK, and then slowly begin the process of reeling me back in so that in 3 months time he was in a relationship with her and sleeping with me on the side.  Neither she nor I knew about the other.  It was a funny interpretation of going “any farther in hurting you.”  Now this was the SECOND time he had put me in the role of “the other woman” without my knowledge. 

     In summary, I found myself with a man that was projecting this image of peace, love and harmony, freedom of expression, understanding, openness, and all of the things that I value, while in reality he is living a clandestine life of deception, two-facedness, hypocrisy, and complete and utter disregard for those people in his life that he claims to care about the most.  And somehow, I had no suspicion.