It was my birthday yesterday. Only three people called me to wish me a day I no longer care about. Its a day. Sure, I won't mind someone else remembering this day for me by giving me a present I don't need or want. In other words, it is just another day. And it wasn't a pretty one either. It was dark and cloudy. I had to baby sit my niece and nephew since their parents were at work. My niece wasn't particularly well so everything I did for her was wrong and punctuated by a tantrum. I think of myself as a fairly calm person, especially around kids. But this belief was knocked over with a feather yesterday. I screamed louder than her in the hope she will realize who the boss is. But her voice chords are nothing to be trifled with. She was in full form. The combination of guttural screaming and big fat tears was too much for me. I caved. I brought my voice down a few decibels along while adding a new topic for distraction--an imagined cat that sneaks into the house and uses the computer upstairs! When the mother arrived from work, I was ready to scream or tear something to shreds. It was a moment of epiphany. I don't have kids because somewhere deep down I never really wanted them. I can handle them to a point--feed them, tell them to switch off the TV once the limit is reached, make pancakes or anything else their palate desires, play their crazy games, sketch, and even take an inadvertent punch to the gut. But beyond that the onerous task of building them into individuals and imagining their future through a set of mind-boggling tasks is beyond my pale. I haven't figured my own future trajectories, my own desires. To sublimate them for a child's sake has to be jarring. I can see my sister-in-law struggle with the tension between her imaginations for herself versus those for her children. I can see how she is not trained to be a parent in every possible way. She didn't have a mother from whom she could have learned the practical side of nurturing. So she has been running through it wildly, bearing on books her weight of responsibility towards her children, one of whom has ADD. Her own desperation to want to be something else in this place and time given her college training figures in her antipathy towards her son's diagnosis. If she could, she could have found a way to enter his mind, set up shop, and guide him through his academic years. But she hasn't found such a way. So she shoots words at him--words that are a combination of advice, anger, projected desires, blackened desires, unrequited needs, helplessness as parent, confusion over destiny's unexpected and unwelcome trajectory, bafflement that the child is hers, guilt, surrealism, psychedelic realities. I despair about my chronic singleness but this mis-en-sean puts all into perspective. It still doesn't take away the despair of being alone. But I feel encouraged to take care of myself since I am all I have right now. I can certainly take care of me--the me I have neglected in all my relationships--putting others before me, my wants, desires, dignity. I can't neglect her anymore. Anymore and she will be no more. Like Joplin, I will not compromise on myself---I am all I have got. Every day I feel strength in my decision to end my last relationship. Without the muddy emotions, I can see the impracticality of us and the emotional tsunami I could have wrought on myself if I had stayed. Right now I can recover, rebuild, rejuvenate. Another year, I would still be despairing, destroyed, and lifeless. I am not that kind of weak. I will take my chances at being alone and maybe even happy, even though sometimes it will suck so much that I would want to die. But living right now is the only option and hell, I kind of like myself more and more. I would like to fall in love too---with me, too.

I sent him two texts after we broke up. One, "Does it get better?" and two, "OMG--I really miss you." His response was "Sorry, don't feel like communicating right now. I don't want to say anything that I might regret later." I finished the conversation with, "Sorry to check in. Be well."

My last text to him was "Happy Hanukkah" to which he replied "Thank you!"

On December 22nd, I became Alice, slipping down the rabbit hole into a burst of nostalgia about us. Now that the break up was final, I could only remember the good. The bad and the ugly needed serious regurgitation so these remained at the edges of memory, almost disappearing in the wake of all the possibilities of a love that he had spun around me with his unrelenting intimacy everyday we were together. I could only remember how consistently randomly he loved me. We would often lie in bed in the afternoon, listening to his scratchy sunday blues, kissing, groping, making out for endless time. I was a girl again, asking him, the boy, to just love me like I have never been loved before. He revered my brown skin, my bald pussy, my small tits, my black hair, my sex-drunk eyes, my fat lower lip like he had been waiting for this combination all his life. And he would make me come just with his mouth like every sinew in my body was going to burst like blood in a clotted vein. My body hummed from the remembrances and then I burst out crying. That was not a good day. My heart broke all over again. By night time my eyes had swelled like a broken finger. I still couldn't stop the tears. I had convinced myself that I would never ever find a man who could make me feel like the last woman standing. And what made the tears fall incessantly was how callously he took it all away, making us a farce, a dallying point from which there were many exits he could take and he did. He could go kiss a random girl in a bar during the time we were temporarily broken up yet make it seem like it was nothing. To me, it was still betrayal, playing out like a broken, scratchy record. But I remained desperate for his sex godliness. For in the time he ravished me with his tongue and his words, I could imagine a love of the newsworthy kind--you know the one where the significant other dies twenty minutes after the one, being together 40 years since the first time they saw each other. Maybe I am the tragic queen of movies that produced such everlasting love. I still believe that the one I am with is the one, not someone who doesn't exist primarily because he can't. There is no perfect man only one you consider as one because he rocks your world in so many small ways. He rocked mine in one big way--sex. Of course now I know that he has trained himself very well to be this good in bed. He once gave a girl in high school a 4 hour orgasm by the sheer magic of his tongue! I believed him. For he gave me one too. He is still that good 30 years late. The man is a sensual monster. And I was his ensnared addict. What made it even worse was that we could talk. We thought of courses to teach together. He encouraged me to finish my first romance novel and I did the same for his first graphic novel. I felt I could talk to him about anything. I hid nothing. I didn't pretend to make small talk. I talked about everything as if he was my therapist. And like a good therapist he listened good. He said he respected me for all the brave choices I made in life. He even edited my academic paper and took three hours to do so! He felt like gold. I wanted him to be the gold he shone like. And he was wasn't. So you try to move on. But the problem is  not that you will never be able to move on (or at least you think you might not), the problem is living the nightmare--for not being prepared for the knife in the back even as you are orgasming. How do I resolve the insurmountable angst of remembering his beautifully angled, semi-burred face, shaded by his choicest hat with the knowledge that he betrayed me every chance he got, knowingly or unknowingly doesn't matter. Looking at him looking at me with those puppy eyes you would think you were all he ever wanted. But knowing that the two loves of his life still crossed his mind while he was wooing me, that he betrayed me with random dates and bar kisses every chance he got, that he disrespected me and my family with his betrayal, that he never betrayed ones he loved (so he didn't love me), that he never pursued me after any of the three break-ups like he did the loves of his life (one for three years after the break up) made the pain worse. I can deal with indifference because the separation is there to see, acknowledge, and move on eventually. But desperate intimacy with dangerous callousness makes both unreal and therefore unbelievable. I still fail to understand how intimacy still manages to trump the callousness in memory--because I want to believe that I was loved? That I could finally imagine that my love story can be complete? Or is this simply about denial? That maybe my love story can never be. Maybe I am not meant to find that one in this life time. That this lifetime is laboring to get there in another.

I did it. I finally told my latest ex to go find himself! I cried but it was a cry where your heart is not breaking--it is just a manifestation of sadness that you ought to be feeling for a recurring death of a dead relationship. I then wiped away my tears and did some laundry. Relief is all I felt beneath the sad. That was good. If I didn't feel that I couldn't survive a third breakup. I just wouldn't. Now for the precursor: He bought me two tickets to Turkuaz, a Brooklyn band that he loved. They were playing at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on a Saturday night. Finally! We had no social outings since we started dating. I never asked and because I never did he didn't make the effort. I couldn't ask--it was not for me to ask anything of him. But it was incumbent on him to do without being asked. I knew he wouldn't because as per his admission he was cheap. Once he asked me for $5 as my portion of the grocery he was buying for us! I knew then that he wasn't the one. But he was sexually so persuasive that I was on instant forget every time his cheapness reared. So here we were at a concert that he finally paid for. It was glorious. It was painfully sad too. Every time I looked at him in the middle of a song, him tapping my left bum to the music, or petting my hair or kissing my forehead, I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I knew we were going to be done sooner than later. But I so desperately wanted my isle of romance, my frozen bit of desire, that I played along. It was my memory to hold and cherish long after he and I were gone, done, removed from each other's breaths. Like I said, there was happiness but no guttural joy in the moment. So bitter-sweet. I bought him a beer as if to pay my part in our performance. He asked me not to leave him. But he knew and I knew that leave each other we must. I could have lived with his friendship, his sexpertise was anyway to die for (definitely commitment worthy), his infinite gentleness, his child-like madness, his mad cooking skills, his patience to listen, learn, and pacify but for that betrayal. If only he had not betrayed me in January by going out on two dates without breaking off with me and while I was away soaking in his love. And the worst irony is me struggling to erase the betrayal so I could focus on his other qualities--knowing well that once trust is gone, it doesn't return. If I could have erased that moved by sheer intellectual exercise I would have. But my emotions were stuck on that moment. They couldn't eject, only to burn in the fire. Finally, the betrayal did us in. I couldn't believe him for anything he did after. He insisted that he loved me. I even wanted to believe him. I knew I didn't because my vagina refused to clench anymore. Every time he called me "baby" early on in our relationship, my vagina was a weeping tap. Now, nothing. And then he qualified--he loved me as one would a dear, dear friend, though he still felt "tugs" to his heart when he was around me. Tugs? Tugs? What the fuck, is what came to mind. I supported your unemployed ass by bringing you jaunts that paid! You stayed for free (no, he didn't even pay for groceries) at my brother's for nine days last December and your thank you was to betray his only sister after!
So my mind finally got my heart to shut down its pleadings and desperations and think of future--if I wanted to be with someone who had in just that one time shown me he couldn't be trusted. If he had never betrayed someone he loved before, then he didn't love me for he betrayed me. That was it. This is a fact. There is no post-modern analysis of this that will reveal something new, something to keep and feel protected by. I finally let go. I do love him. He showed me such incredible kindness as a man that no man in my life ever had. But he had shown me cruelty in the way he betrayed me and my family that no man every had. So I was at ground zero with him. A giant hole had gobbled us. We didn't exist anymore. I always knew that but now I came to terms with it. Maybe I am meant to be alone in my life. There is probably a plan for me that doesn't include having a man. Maybe I should just focus on making lots of money and drinking lots of good, young, red wine. Yes, that's the plan, for now.