March 24, 2012
***
It’s now 4PM on Sunday afternoon. My camp site is all packed up. It’s a glorious day, perfect for going to the river. Sadly, everyone is heading out. Last night I took a nap until 4:30AM. When I awoke, the campsite was desolate, but I could hear the sound of C.’s fiddle. I followed it over to the jam tent and made some new friends who wanted to share a liter and a half of Jameson. By 5:30, the power had gone out due to a bus on fire or something equivalently weird. Naturally, everyone chose to climb aboard a golf cart and drive the crazy train down to the drum circle. The circle was in such a remote field I never would have stumbled upon it alone. The vibe there was crazed and jubilant. I could see so many more stars in the sky than usual. I watched the sun rise and somehow made it back to my tent.
Today I relaxed in a hammock down by the amphitheater, enjoying the cool breeze.
I can’t wait to see you. I wish you were here.
***
It has been almost a year since I discovered the truth about M. I still go through phases where I am reeling in pain or I just shut down completely. He keeps finding new ways to put himself in front of my eyes. The latest is that he’s playing with his band at an art show that my best friend regularly participates in. He has taken to attending the music festivals I regularly attend (though it was hard to ever convince him to go to them with me when we were still hanging out). I’ve asked him repeatedly to stay out of my space but he feels this request is unreasonable and that he should be able to do what he wants, regardless of how it effects me emotionally. It boggles my mind that I went three years as his acquaintance and only saw him out publicly twice, but now that I wish to avoid him, I see him twice a month. I have not changed my social activities in any way so obviously he has changed his. I wonder if this is yet another manifestation of his mirroring as he took one of my favorite social activities and is now participating in it with his new lady friend. It also strikes me as a bit of triangulation between me and this other girl as well. Not only is he hanging out with her publicly in front of me, but he is doing it in a social setting that I oftentimes tried to get him to participate in, but he would almost always turn me down.
It becomes bizarre as I see him pull the same stunts that he used to pull on me when we went out socially together. They show up together and then he will just wander off for an hour at a time to chat up other women (one time it was me he ignored her for…here I was thinking he actually wanted to patch things up, but really he was just trying to create drama and jealousy since she could see us conversing from across the bar). One time I even happened to catch him sitting inside the bar all alone, staring at the wall while she was out in the courtyard where all the music was happening. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was just hiding out so she would wonder what he was up to and get jealous. It kills me to think that after spending the last four years cultivating connections and friendships through the local music scene that I’d have to abandon all of that to avoid running into M. but I don’t see any viable work around at the moment. I feel that this constant fear of running into him does not give me the space I need to heal and move on. I feel re-traumatized every time I see the name of his band pop up on my Facebook news feed. Again, the only reason I see it pop up is because of my ties to the local music scene. I want to know what shows are going on around town so I get updates. I could truly go no contact and shut off my Facebook profile and discontinue attending music events, but this would effectively downsize my social interactions to three people outside of school and work.
One of the more interesting aspects of the fallout from this huge betrayal is how paranoid my thinking has become. Once I discovered that M. had the ability to be in a secret long term relationship with another woman while professing his desire to have babies with me, anything seemed possible. One part of me thinks I must be crazy to think that he only speaks to me now to make other women jealous but he went out of his way to tell me how his “friend” was so upset about him talking to me for an hour that they actually left the bar. He told me this as proof of his dedication to healing our friendship and making things right, but in all honesty, he spent much of that hour talking to other people while I sat at the table with them, crying. It ends up being just one layer of bullshit on top of another. How could my thinking NOT become paranoid?
It’s so weird to revisit these old letters that were written in those first few weeks of falling in love. I believed I had finally met the sweet, gentle, open-minded, adventurous, loving, empathetic, expressive, beautiful, elven, musically inclined, long-haired hippy man of my dreams. It never once occurred to me that he could be lying to my face from the get-go, and I certainly never believed he would be capable of living a double life or desire to live that way. I have never so completely misread a person before in my life. The great catch 22 of narcissistic betrayal is that my trust in my instincts was completely shattered as a result of learning the truth, yet it is my instincts I need to trust in order to make a clean break and not allow this cruel person back into my life. Every time I open myself back up to doubt and start to listen to his pathetic excuses for his behavior I feel myself getting sucked right back in to his dysfunctional world. The reality is, there is NO EXCUSE for treating another human being with absolute disregard for their personhood, to use them as a pawn in a game of triangulation and mind-fuckery, and as a way of sexually acting out against a girlfriend that they claim to resent, all while reassuring the victim that they are with them because of their “special connection.”
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