come what may.

I haven't written a lot because I guess I haven’t seen the point.

But in the past few weeks, I stumbled across a book series that I've read over and over and over and over. it's one of those books you keep going back to because you're hoping that the author wrote a whole new book while you were sleeping. Sometimes this book hits a little too close to home; there are some parts that I can barely rest my eyes on, so I have to stop. The author is Suann Laqueur, and that (first) book is The Man I Love. I wasn't so sold on the title at first, it sounded too overly precious for me-but once I started reading, I realized where it fit in the grand scheme of things. I hungrily gobbled up the rest, even finding the author's notes book filled with deleted scenes. I swallowed them greedily and looked around for more.

And then, some internal sinkhole filled with anhedonia suddenly dissolved under my feet, and I started writing. Thirty pages in one day. Laptop in the bed, thunderstorm sounds on Alexa, Jack by my side, I pounded at my keyboard like it owed me money. It felt like taking a knife to a boil. I didn't even need to hang with Jack Daniels for the words to come, they just rained down and drenched me and I sat there and bathed in them.

So, I suppose there is a point to words.

After I wrote Reaction here, I was trapped in this shit-storm of rage. Rage at myself, rage at others, rage at God, rage at whomever. I thought maybe it was chemical in origin and tried to do better on my Armour, since that can produce a lot of frustration if I'm not up to date. But no, this anger goes deeper than a lack of hormone. This anger is toxic sludge in my heart, and all I want to do is QUIT FEELING IT. But as I learned in my new favorite book, you don't get to cherry pick the emotions you want to feel. Your limbic switchboard is primitive-on or off. If you mute one feeling, they are all silent. If you let one tiptoe past, the rest of them hear it, and wake up. And holy shit- they’re awake and howling at the moon.

So I took a break from writing in here, and started to write something else besides stupid journal entries and comfort porn. I actually submitted two of my works to an online website, and they were accepted. One of them has been shared 168 times. That one is about my beef with God, and after I reread it, I sat back in bed in horrified fascination and thought to myself, "This is not good, man. Holy shit. You can't go through life like this."

I wanted to go find this deeply resentful, incredibly scared, and self destructive version of the person I used to call Rae and put my arms around her.

"You're not well. You need help. Dude, you really need to get some fucking help."

Which speaks to how toxic it really was-my general attitude towards myself is "Fucking shut the fuck up and do what you have to do." It worried me so much that I started sailing with Captain Klonopin again. But that didn't make the anger dissolve. It was just muffled and stuffed it in a corner, where it sat there like a malevolent teddy bear, glaring at me dully. I'll be back, don't you worry. I'm not done with you yet.

This is not the first time I've been angry at God for not giving me what I wanted. When Tyler and I broke up in high school, and about four consecutive times after that, my entire life (all sixteen years of it) disintegrated down to one small heap of despair. That was first love and I never thought I'd feel something that rivaled it. After everything was said and done, well, you know how that ended up. I soon realized that God had known what he was doing. But you?

You and I had grown up problems, grown up cares. We lived together. We started from the bottom, you and I. You were not my first love but I always thought you would be my last. So losing you slowly and then all at once made losing Tyler look like a skinned knee in retrospect. I can forgive God for not giving me Tyler; I was too young to know any better, and he and I work much better as friends. But forgiving God for this? Maybe I still don't know much, but I do know I know more than a love sick sixteen year old. You and I were so blindingly easy in the beginning-I held out my hands and you filled them, you were a bowl and I tipped into you. Why did God fuck with that? Was he bored one day? Wake up in a bad mood? Decided not to spend any time saving starving children? What? Maybe it wasn't him, a small voice whispers, before I go to sleep. Someone close to me told me a few weeks ago that God gave us the gift of free choice, and therefore we get what we pay for. Yeah, but did we ever fucking ask? And if we did, why the fuck did he listen? Look how fucking stupid we are, can be, have been. I deal with people who can’t read a fucking calendar; you wrangle crack addicts. Giving us free will? And you see why it’s hard to trust him.

My actions a few weeks ago, the ones that spurred Reaction, they come from a place of deep bitterness and paralyzing fear. A part of me can't fathom why there's any point to getting up on that horse and trying again. My love may not be perfect, but it's real. We may have handled things shitty and shittier over the past few years, but that never stopped the fact that I loved. He loved. We loved. And I tried. He tried. We tried. All the things we used to do, our Saturday runs around town, our little trips to Biloxi, my getting breakfast while he was still sleeping, waking up with his hand on my leg, driving home with that giddy feeling on a Friday, getting tipsy and watching movies and falling into each other, waking up and going to the pool at Elmwood, they all seem like memories under cloudy glass now, and one day it'll be like going into a museum and reading about someone else's life. At the end I took these things for granted while looking at them through a prism of resentment. The thought gives me nausea. It just seems like such a waste. Why does God want to make it irrelevant? Why? It's like being gifted a Lamborghini and wrecking it out of spite.

But what can we do? The universe has spoken. I know there's supposed to be a reason to the madness, why forever suddenly ends up being just for a time, but His Royal God-ness seems like more a sadist than a wise and kindly father, a kid with a magnifying glass, roasting an ant because why the hell not? They make all this joyful noise about Him having his reasons, even if it fucking kills you, but he never stops to think that he can hurt you enough to where you don't ever trust his reasons again. The mere idea of giving ten more years to someone else when it all may just disappear for no good fucking reason is enough to make me want to hide under my bed and never come out. All of the courage I have left to scrape at the bottom of the barrel is for me. Courage, hell- not even that. Survival. Survival and self sabotage, the only currency I have left. I cannot overdraft the account-I am negative twelve thousand times when it comes to love. I have to pay so many overdraft fees, it's not even worth it. By the time I get through learning all of these lessons God wants me to learn, I'll be too old to do anything with them.

So, I'm furious with Him. God, that is. I'm pissed at other people too, but he's El Numero Uno on my shit list right now. And after I wrote that thing, it scared the hell out of me, because it seems to be coming from this lake of hatred inside of me, and I don't know where to find the leak to seal it up before it drips all over something else, something vital. I'm pissed at God and I want to be, but I don't want to hate him. My instinct is to fight the whole world, but I'm tired, and giving up just seems like giving the universe permission to do it over, and over, and over. So, où cela me laisse? Where does that leave me?

In "The Man I Love", the two main characters find each other in college, fall in love, yadda yadda yadda, everything is awesome, beautiful, lovely. Until a man comes into a theater with a gun. He shoots to kill. Others die. She gets hurt. They both live. But not really. The world is divided in Before & After. The night before the gun fired off, they were being savagely intimate (this sounds familiar) with each other, and right before it happened, they were talking about doing it again, desperately in love with one another and safe enough in that love to explore it fully. When that bullet left the chamber, it subconsciously linked sex with trauma.

They stay together because they're in it for the long haul, but they can't connect 'in that way' anymore. There are moments of sweetness, but these are tea lights in a sewer. Pretty soon the only time they can connect is when they're fucked up or high, and then they only want to hurt each other, because that's the only way to feel something. One night, they go too far. He tells her no, I refuse to do this, I can't hurt you anymore. They stop connecting completely. The wolves come scratching at the door, she gets fucked up, and she sleeps with someone else. He, of course, finds out.

He cuts her off. Totally, completely. Leaves town, hangs up the phone on her every time she calls. Pretends she died in that shooting, because in his head, if she breaks one window, he has to tear the entire cathedral down. She owns her mistake, but he takes it and bathes in it, breathes new life into it every time his heart tries to tell him that it's time to forgive. His dad left when he was eight without a word, so it's the same way with him-he either has it all, or he leaves. Either the whole castle is perfect, or it's useless. "You only like it when people act the way you need them to.” She tells him.

She hobbles on through her life, goes straight down into the dark. Starts cutting. Another man drags her out of it, gets her some help, but no matter how she tries to love him, someone else is always on her mind.

He goes about his own, sleeps with other people, keeps her and all feelings related to her shut firmly behind a door. He gets married, but they can't have kids because his plumbing's all fucked up, so that dies on the vine. He realizes at the end that he had never found that connection with anyone else, and he's tired of pretending otherwise.

One of his friends tells him he has to start living his truth. Another tells him that regret will be a poison he will taste all his life. Unbearable longing handles the rest.

So he picks up the phone, twelve years later, and he calls her.

That's my favorite part; I open the book to read it about three times a day. Screw you; I didn't ask to born with a vagina. I can't help it. Every romantic dreams of that call.

It sounds like a sappy love story, but I know sappy love stories, and this isn't one of them. It's one of the most raw and honest things I've ever read. The overtones of PTSD and the inability to connect resonate deep inside of me, and those twelve years ache like I've lived them myself. Like an infected tooth.

After they get back together, the guy she cheated on him with sends her a letter. Not a letter like that, but just a general catch up. She reads it right in front of him, no secrets in this house now- and suddenly it's twelve years ago and he's seeing them in bed together. He tells her, "This is old anger. I want to go for a run and work through it. I'll be back." They never dealt with it then, so it's making an appearance now. She makes him leave his house keys on the piano so she knows he's coming back. It’s their thing. Though, as the author says, not everything has to be a thing.

He goes running and starts torturing himself with all the things he couldn't bear to think about back then. How many times? What did they do? Did he touch her there? Did she blow him? Why? Why? Why?

And his brain says, "Well, she'll probably tell you. As long as it's a conversation."

As long as it's a conversation.

We didn't have conversations. We had sullen, reluctant arguments. Admittedly, it wasn't the easiest subject to have a conversation about, and when we did try to talk about it in an open-minded and loving manner, we were talking about a dead horse. The dead horse wasn't going anywhere and no amount of talking would revive it, so we pushed the dead horse into a corner and challenged each other and ourselves to pretend it wasn't there.

But then, that dead horse started to stink.

After reading this book, I started to think about all the ways I never have a conversation with myself, and how it limits me from having them with others in a productive manner. I shoot from the hip when it comes to emotions, I always have. It's embedded in my genetic makeup, and while wonky hormones and being a writer can intensify it , it's just a part of who I am, a part I loathe. Being young and dumb doesn't help. Instead of having conversations, I bully. I heckle. I yell at myself after I act in haste and fuck things up. I'm fucking livid with the idiot inside of me who doesn't think before she speaks, and that sixteen year old dumbass has no choice but to sigh dramatically and batten down the hatches. Fine. I won't make that mistake anymore. I'll self sabotage so you won't ever have to worry about it. I'll destroy the whole fucking castle and salt the Earth. Just don't fucking yell at me anymore. I was stupid. I was an idiot. I was scared. I’m hurting. What else can I do? What do you want? I can't turn back time.

Maybe I'm just in the second stage of that bitch Elizabeth Kubler Ross's grief cycle. Maybe I'm screaming to nothing and no one, and nothing up there cares whether or not I try again. Maybe it'll just be awhile before I can even entertain the thought without wanting to move to darkest Africa, but as of right now, I'm just trying to find a way to have a conversation with myself instead of screaming. I cut God out of the equation entirely, and maybe that's my problem. I'm not quite ready to forgive him. In my head, forgiveness feels like permission. Anger may be corrosive, but sadness can kill. And maybe I'm just hurting myself in the end, but survival. Survival is the name of the game. God doesn't care if my bills are paid, so I gotta do what I have to do. And if I'm going to do that, I have to have a hand at my back. And that hand is called Anger. I never said it was the healthiest option, but fuck it, anger works.

The long and short of it is-I have to stop self sabotaging. Being angry is one thing, but cutting something off before it has a chance to cut me off is not going to get me anywhere but ass up in a forest full of butt fucking regret monsters. But then-ten years. What am I supposed to do? Just let it go and say 'Oh well, there's a reason for everything. I’ll just go over here and wait for you to completely fuck me over again. While you’re doing that, I’ll praise your name and tell you to keep it coming. I’ve got all the time in the world!”

Fuck. that. Those were MY ten years, our ten years. We don't get those back. Just accepting it was a stupid whim of an unforgiving universe won't ever sit well in my stomach. What lesson was it supposed to teach me? That you can go through the utter shit with someone and lose them anyway? What good does that serve?

So what do you do while you wait until you're ready to have a conversation?

You settle debts. You go to V Day dinner at the Brick Oven, (of all fucking places) you pay your bills. You go to work. You write. You read. You keep your TV turned off because yeah well, fuck that. You try to remember that you are all you have, and if you keep screaming at yourself for being human, you will terrify yourself so much that you'll never get around to doing anything. You keep it simple, stupid. You don’t give the universe any reason to look over at you and say “Hey, what’s that in your hands?” You keep your head down. You hoard your little happinesses.

In the last book of the Man I Love Series, Erik (he of the self-imposed twelve years) says (and I'm paraphrasing here):

"It's not even what she did that hurts the worst. The worst part is that I lost twelve years of us because she made a mistake and I tore the whole cathedral down. That's my worst regret."

And as for god and his all knowing self righteous power tripping interfering bullshit:

You tore my fucking cathedral down over nothing. You will not take any more years from me.

You will get out of my way

and you will leave me the fuck alone.

-Rae