OUCH

I sliced my thumb on a can of beans I had just opened to go into the pot of soup I was making for dinner. It’s not bad, not a stitches situation, but when it happened I quietly said “Ouch! Fuck!” and then my thumb started bleeding. Michael took one look at the first drop of blood and said “Oh no…” and then he ran off in search of a bandaid, which once found he applied to my thumb with shaky hands. I almost asked him if he needed to sit down for a minute. A few hours later, I removed the bandaid only to put on a new bandaid five minutes later when my thumb started bleeding again. Thumbs tend to be workhorses of the hands and this particular wound is in a place that gets bumped around a lot. I feel every bump and it smarts.

January.

Every time, I think it will be easier. If anything, the passing of time makes it worse and when I tell myself that I just have to make it through January, there’s a voice that whispers “February is going to be just as bad.” I want to blame it all on the weather, the bitter cold that makes it impossible to move around on this planet. It wasn’t this cold back then when we first moved here. It wasn’t even this cold the year he left us. Passed away, whatever. Some days it’s “he died”, some days “he departed” and some days when I’m feeling really cranky it’s “he left us”. The goddamn nerve of that man and the choices I have made since have set me up for a lifetime of knowing my life was better in the before times. Maybe that’s the why of making those choices.

Sometimes, I get so mad that I am still writing about this. I will write paragraphs around my unhappiness and then I will delete it all. I will fill the empty space with forced joy while asking myself when was the last time I was truly happy. This question always arises during the coldest, darkest months of the year when I’ve been the most stagnant, when the air is the most painful. Every year I make a plan, a strategy for navigation around this time and every year that plan fails not just miserably but epically. With flames and destruction. It is quite possible that my plans have failed more epically this year than any other year, even though on the outside it all looks normal and happy. She smiles. She make an attempt at laughing. She pretends.

I pretend.

After Thanksgiving, I calmly told Michael that I was no longer putting any work into this relationship. In some ways this made my life easier. I have dropped any expectations I had of him being a true definition of the word ‘partner’. That means doing tasks that I’d have to do any way if I lived alone. Shoveling the driveway, clearing the snow from my car, making a meal plan, holding myself accountable. I’ve stopped expecting an equally emotional and intellectual relationship. I had been working and striving so hard for this to be that kind of relationship, that the more effort I made, the more I was reminded that I didn’t have to do this in my previous relationship. I thought for the longest time that I was compromising, but what I’ve really been doing is conceding and with each concession, giving up pieces of myself until I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

Mostly, I didn’t care about the loss of myself but how is that different from the days that followed Chris’s death? So now, in the darkest coldest months of the year I have more time and space for the past. Again with these choices I have made. I am not sure I ever really figured out who I am without Chris other than a bit pathetic. I’m tired of everything but mostly I am tired of being pathetic. When will I ever learn to lean into the stillness and the benefits of rest that come with these months? The truth is that if I stop being pathetic and less conceding, I will see that I am still the person I was with Chris. I had my own identity then and there’s no reason to believe that I don’t have my own singular identity now.

Knowing that doesn’t make this month feel any less poky. January will always be a cut on my thumb that’s deeper than a paper cut but not so deep that it requires needle and thread.