A small, small man with a massive temper. The bigger the anger, the smaller the man seems. Over and over he said let's not let ego get in the way, which I took to mean we both have to bend. But ego isn't my issue and it never was. Now I clearly see it's his. What derailed it all was my depression, the antithesis of ego, the atomic bomb aimed against the self. We were collateral. Now, he sits in the dark like Gollum and harbors an unwarranted hatred against someone else's disability as if anything bad ever happened to him. Stubborn and angry and vile, like a jagged creature, this anger sits and seems to grow and all I can do is laugh at its existence. If depression is a thief by nature, anger is pathetic because of its misplacement.
I went to sit in the sunshine and learned to forgive in between the massive waves that rolled my body. The long, slow months of torment, the tormenter being my own mind of course, where every second I spent dissecting and stitching back up every moment where I could have done or been better, those months they ended and those tortuous and insidious thoughts just washed away. Mostly, I forgave myself. Incidentally, I forgave him.
Then, finally, a response and finally, some closure. A small man with a mighty temper. An angry man with no reason to feel wronged. A pathetic thing calling others names. A big love turned sour, turned putrid, turned rancid, but not in my mouth. And in my stomach, in the sweat on my brow? Nothing but pity for this sad, small thing that I used to call lover. Once you see past the bravado and the masculine rage, once you know that there was nothing truly done against them, once you see in your hands the medical reports and the MRI scans that searched to see if the breakdown caused you any brain damage, and then see some sad small man asking for a pittance for a trip you never should have been on, then you see why ego is their problem and not yours. And then you forgive. Like the waves washing away marks on the sand. And you pity, because they choose to sit in such a transient state like anger.
I used to think he was the one that got away, but now I know he's the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. It sounds resentful, maybe even bitter. But it's not. Hurt people hurt people, but hurt people also cannot be understood by people who have never been hurt. Else, we end up here. He is small because he's never been cowed by big feelings. So when they happen to others, he takes it as a personal affront. Ego, he said. Ego, I now understand.
I was supposed to have spend the summer in New York. The love I feel for that place is something he never could get. Instead I spent my precious place between semesters schlepping around in a country I disliked with a man I didn't understand. It was fine. It was a time. I wish it never happened.
The first time I saw him, my thought was "That'll do." Then for months he hounded me like a bat out of hell and I honestly thought he was a pest. I disliked him. I thought he was shallow and stupid. I won't get into it again how I fell into that honey trap, but let's get back to how I crawled my way out of it.
Entitled, small, angry men.
Bali was good for me. Sounds corny as fuck, but it was. For a while, a long while, there was this creeping feeling that I got where I worried that I would never be able to feel joy again. I imagined it like a massive centipede, its synchronous legs moving in waves up from my ankles, to my tailbone, then up my spine until it wrapped like a scared critter around my neck. That was the fear. What if the psychosis took away my ability to feel joy? MRI shows no brain damage from the episode. Okay, then why am I still without this key emotion?
Then I took a trip. Paid for by a friend, better than a friend. A person that I should have stuck with instead of letting this insidious man into my house in April. And joy crept back in. Wind and sun and sand and surf and joy. The breath I took when I finally realized that I was still capable, oh god I still hear the sound in my throat.
I get back, I get blue, I bounce back, I get better. Then I forgive and get told I'm a fly with no life by an angry and small man. I get blue. It's a crying shame, truly, that I can't even process this depressive bout without having to think back to him. I deeply resent that this hurt of mine, this illness, has been linked to this man, both in memory and in medical records. Something so personal, so mine, has to be shared with another.
His anger made me feel sorry for him. Months later, he seems to be operating under the impression that I want him still. No, what I want is my illness to be just mine again. I don't want to share it anymore. I want to pry apart July and segregate it so I can find the pieces of myself I lost. I want to delete him and his horrors and take back my life. How difficult it has been to recover from this horrible low when I have him as a weight around my throat? I want it gone but it's been impossible to dissect the whole mess.
The ego thing, let's get back to that. Months later and hearing someone say their eyes are so special, that they're owed your silence. The curtain pushed back and I saw the pedestal he put himself on and it made me laugh. He was so angry and I was just laughing and laughing. I'm not going to read this, blah blah, so much anger. I imagined him as a red-faced baby with a huge head filled with hot air and ego and I laughed. All that indignance, that entitlement, that ego. I feel bad for him. How sad to be so small, so easily affronted, so convinced of one's victimhood.
Now though, I realize I owe him nothing. The axe he tries to hold over my head means nothing. His anger means nothing. He has taken way more than he ever deserves. Charge by the hour and he'll be neck deep in debt to me. But I forgive. I'll always forgive. He will always choose to be angry. But he is so small he will never realize he has no right to be angry. I wish we never met, but I still wish him the best. He needs that, since he's the fucking worst.
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