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Ani knows that I love her. I’ve explained it to her, calmly, many times; we are practically the same person; I can sometimes predict her thoughts; the way she reacts to her trauma is identical to mine: shyness, passivity, guilt, and an overwhelming sense of obligation. She finds it difficult to resist a man. She has stayed in relationships so as not to be hurtful. She would hate to make him feel rejected. I understand that thinking. That was how I ended up married to the wrong woman. I just didn’t want to hurt her.
I see you, Ani. I know you are reading. I know your eyes are tearing up. I know that I scare you and you don’t know why, or that you know why and you hate that it’s so. I know you are afraid I will ask something of you, and you won’t know how to say no—because you respect, because you admire, because you understand me so well.
But I want to tell you that I would never do that to you. I am not that type of man. Sometimes I think I’m not a real man at all, thank goodness.
I’m not trying to take anything from you, sweetheart. I’m just happy I know you. I’m happy you feel safe in my home. I’m happy that each time you hug me, it takes a few seconds longer for you to have to let go.
I promise I’ll never try to hold you longer than you can handle, and I’ll write you pretty words that make you cry. I’ll love you, from a distance, just to watch you fly—such a beautiful Butterfly.
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Jul 23, 2009 – 2:44 AM
Dear Ani:
Do you want my truth? My truth is that I am just tired. I am worn out with feeling like a burden to everyone. I try to be invisible, I do. I try to stay out of everyone’s way. Please believe me when I tell you, I try with all I have. I want to be useful, useful and quiet and no trouble at all. I really don’t want trouble, it scares me.
I do well a lot of the time. I’ve floated in and out of countless lives. I am entertaining for a while, sometimes for a long time, actually, but all entertainment gets tired eventually. I become the reltionship of the season, the summer fling, the time so and so fucked this guy she really shouldn’t have. Or I become the friend you can’t believe you were ever friends with. I’ve been that guy to a lot of people.
I don’t like it. It makes me feel unimportant. It makes me feel like a tool, an appliance, a machine designed to always keep the peace…never let anything get ruffled. Keep the peace. When anger comes up, push it back down, when feelings are bruised, when even the tiniest tear drop falls, just shut up before you get something to cry about. I keep the peace… must be kept, so be quiet, be quiet before his fists crush my cheek. The peace will be kept, by any all means.
The problem is, I also do not do well a lot of the time. I push so much down that things start to pop out. Anger slips out. I criticize, I badger, I’m condescending and stubborn. That’s why everyone has left me. I know that now, but that’s not the worse part. The worse part is that I am still trying to undo a mistake, one bad choice.
Karma is an equal opportubity bitch. She knows no racial or ethnic bounderies. Karmic retribution strikes us all: fat and tall, skinny and small, lady Karma will have you. She will give you whatever situation you create with your choices. She even gets the children.
I know this because of my one childhood choice. The choice that seemed so obvious, so clear. When dad changes the TV channel, shut your mouth! It’s the logical choice. But I, being nine, spoke up instead. I was watching that. Those four words led to the most violent downward spiral of my life.
My father erupted on me. I knew he would. I sometimes wonder if I wanted him to. My mother came to my aid. My younger siblings hid and cried. I remember seeing them through my daze, huddled with old blankets over their heads. They looked like plushy blue ghosts. I wanted to laugh, until I saw his foot on her throat. He was going to kill her. He really was this time. He wasn’t stopping. The point when he would pull away in sudden horror, that moment hadn’t come this time. He was going all the way. He was killing her. I did this. I made this. I broke the rules. I spoke up. And I can never let that happen again. So shut up, and keep the peace. Keep it quietly, always guard up.
That’s the emotion. That’s the memory. That’s the nine year old still dazed and bruised inside me. As for memories, a lot gets drowned out by the feedback loop, my child voice chanting: He’s going to kill her. I did this. She is going to die. I made this. But my intellect knows better. My intellect is logical, analytical and sharp. My intellect knows I was a little boy, that I was helpless to stop a military trained, construction work hardened, grown ass man. My intellect reminds me of teaching my brother to read. My intellect tells me that all of this trauma is my entrance fee to art. My intellect wins a lot.
Ten years ago my intellect got pummeled everytime. I was raw emotion at fifteen. I was rarefied rage at twenty-five. At thirty-seven, I get cranky and bitchy, I get downright assholey, but my intellect still wins out finally. Someday, I hope, my intellect will reign. Until then, I’m sorry. I am trying.
Love,
Tommy
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Ani read one of my posts about her. She read them in front of me. She just started sobbing. Something I wrote broke her down. I was in awe. I can’t describe how it felt. I just stared at her. I was literally astonished.
Her breathing changed as she read, and then she was crying. She was crying and reading and looking at me with tears in her big brown eyes, and the she was crying and reading again. She just let go, slowly, as she read my work. She was gorgeous.
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Ani pops up and says:
The smallest things trigger my sadness. I’m in hyper sensitive mode.
I understand. I’m like that, too. I tell her. Yesterday, I dropped a jar of peanut butter and started crying. It was ridiculous. I knew it was. I just couldn’t stop it.
Wow. She replied.
She thought it was only her. Sometimes, so do I. We are so good for each other, me and Ani and Lara.
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Dear Ani:
It’s been so long since I’ve seen the ocean. So this afternoon I left my hotel and walked to the beach. And there was the ocean, just as I’d left it.
I know that seems weird of me, calling it my ocean. The idea was put in my head by an old poet named Robert Bly. Bly studies male psychology. He’s been working to heal men for decades. You’re probably wondering what men need to be healed of, or not. You could also be realizing that every man you’ve ever known has seemed sick or dis-eased in some unsayable way. Bly’s entire poetic career has been about speaking that unsayable wound. Wounded is the term Bly would use, not sickness. Modern men have been wounded by neglect. There are no cultural guideposts for male children. There are sports teams and clubs, sure, but these things don’t teach manhood. These things teach group cohesion, teamwork, rule of order, all good things, but not the lessons that will produce the next Washington, or Einstein, or countless others who stood their ground despite peer chastisement.
In other words, who is teaching our boys to be strong, focused, passionately determined men? Fathers have failed, but only because fathers were never meant to shoulder the whole burden. Making a boy into a man was a task for the community of men. They would take the boys away from the women’s world, into the woods, to ritualistically fight for their lives. Many of these rituals involved a symbolic death. The boy must die, for the man to be born.
Bly thinks these rituals are absent in this world, and that this absence has created the epidemic of the forty-year-old boy. He may be right.
But to be honest, I just love him for trying to heal men with poetry and stories. In fact, one story in particular stayed in me. It was about a young man who had worn his hair very long as a teenager. His parents hated it so much that they eventually pinned him down and forcibly shaved his head. As the boy was weeping into fistsful of his lost hair, the grandfather walked in. Without a word, the elder took the wounded boy immediately to the the ocean. Once there, he told his grandson:
“This ocean is yours. This ocean will be here for you with short or long hair. No one can take this away.”
I remember being overwhelmed with sadness watching this. I never had a grandfather. And when the man telling the story continued, when he told the audience of men that his grandpa was correct, that everytime he needed the ocean it was there for him, that it was as if his grandfather had given it to him, I just sobbed. I felt such loss.
So within a week I took myself to the ocean, and I gave it to myself.
And today was our first visit in two years.
I stood ankle deep as the tide pulled the sand from under me, and the gentle current licked the tops of my feet. I was slowly sinking. In time, I would be swallowed by the sea. And the ocean had unimaginable patience. The ocean had all the time left on Earth. Eventually, I would belong to it and it to me. We would be one. In a way, we already are. And in that moment I knew that truth. So, standing there in the sun, caressed by the tide, I closed my eyes and listened to the ocean speak. Then finally, I whispered back.
“I am not afraid. I know who I am. I am ready to speak my thoughts.”
The ocean just sighed.
Love,
Tommy
July 2009
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Lara wanted a woman we could share. I told her all about Ani.
…and that’s how I met her. I wanted to save up money. I wanted to survive the summer. I agreed to teach a single course at a small local college. All of my choices and all of hers perfectly came together. So in the first class, on the first day, with her eyes that met mine in depression, a pinched stare I knew so well, I found her, almost shaking in her seat: beautiful, smart, and shy Ani. She was an actress, she told me. She was gorgeous.
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Metanarrative