If this were a movie, maybe a French movie where people act in implausible ways and say trite things like as if they meant something more meaningful, it might almost be believeable. It might almost make some sort of sense.

How did it start. It started with an email. It started when I got tired of traveling. It started when I found myself in Tucson in December 2000.

I had been wandering around the US for a few years. It was good. Seeing things, doing things I could never have imagined and I got exhausted doing it. All I wanted by the end was to have a place to put my stuff. A place where I could sleep until 1 PM and not have to worry about getting kicked out. I wanted a home.

The first time through Tucson I met them. John had read the old travelogue website and told me he’d buy me dinner if showed up. I did and he and his wife Natalie bought me dinner. (The plot thinkens like a roux left on the stove. It’s a cliche wrapped up in cooking terms!) I hung out with them a few times during the next few months of exploring southern Arizona. Then it was time to go and I left.

Fast forward to the next year. It’s December and I’m tired of moving. It’s warm in Tucson and I need a home. I stop.

I rekindled the connection to John and Natalie. You make your connections to the human race where you can. They both got the jokes and that’s enough to make anyone sing their praises.

Here’s where it starts to go wacky.

He was sick. They had been having marriage problems for years but neither wanted to destroy what they had so they maintained their status quo. I was hanging at their house chatting about the wilds of the US with some of their friends and I noticed I was getting a look from her. A look, long and penetrating. A few days later I was setting up house and home in Tucson for my own reasons and she came along to keep company while I shopped for stuff.

Now, I will admit that I’m not wildly experienced with the ways of the world and definitely wasn’t at that moment in time. I was wrapped up in my own little thoughts. I was enraptured with my own silly mind. (I guess I still am as I’ve just spent two weeks writing my thoughts as if they mattered.)

So she comes to my new abode and we start to talk. Or more precisely, she talks and tells me how she wants me and how she talked it over with John and how they agreed that it would be a good thing in the long run because he’s ill and he wants her to be happy.

Huh? In my head I could hear that cliche movie sound, the record scratch.

Right. That’s what I thought too. This was just plain crazy. My staid sane simple life was suddenly torn asunder and it was crazy…and yet, I have to admit, kind of cool. When a woman so desperately wants you that she’ll toss away years of a marriage it is fucking flattering beyond compare.

The next day the deal was done and their lives exploded. They underestimated the turmoil that happens no matter the rationality people pretend to. Standard emotions and biological imperatives rule the day when romance is in the air.

Why did I get involved? That’s a good question. I got involved at first because I was in a state of mind where I was going to try anything that came my way. This was something so incredibly new, so damn weird and baffling to me, there was no way in the heavens or on earth that I could pass up the opportunity.

I’d get laid, destroy a marriage and get to move on in a few months when I get bored with Tucson. How fucking cool is that?

So I got involved and it was great. It was turmoil I never ever could imagine and I felt alive. She was wonderful, intense, and we had amazing sometimes spiritual sex.

Despite the hurt I caused and the drama it was a whole lot of fun.

Soon enough we were in a relationship as these things tend to happen. She, I think, loved instantly although we never talked about it so this is conjecture. This frightened me to no end. I had no notion of how to cope with such intense feelings from another human being.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, in my life, whenever anyone got close, 100 or 200 feet kind of close, I panicked and ran. Thus, I had been untouched by emotions and, thus, I was ignorant of all that it entailed.

We grew closer as we did couple things. Movies, dinner, sex, travel to Oregon, visiting my father, shopping for food, cooking dinner. The first year was great for the most part. There was the neverending drama between her and John. He did not cope with it well and why should he? I respected him and had nothing against him and I had no reason to doubt her so I supported her and her friendship with John. I didn’t want to lose him as a friend either.

We all hung out in a group bonding kind of way with mutual friends. We went to concerts and bars and everybody proved they were better than normal people who would have raged and railed.

Then my money ran out. I was building up debt and I couldn’t get anyone to hire me. For anything. I had lost all my contacts in New York City by being an uncommunicative asshole. I had no contacts here in Tucson. I had Natalie, John and a very few others and they could offer no suggestion or help. I was alone in this respect and I needed to get something going fast.

This is where the previously described “self-destruct” mechanism came into play.

While I was traveling I was writing about it and getting a lot of buzz. Enough that I could delude myself into thinking I could turn my peculiar writing talent into a money making gig. I was sure of it. I even took a lot of time, months, to completely rewrite the website as a book. It became Driveabout.

I shopped it to a few agents and publishers. The process demands persistance and emotional stamina. I did not have that. I had nothing resembling those qualities and each time the rejection I knew would come came I spent a half hour in the fetal position. Each time I sent out a query I dithered and panicked feeling like I was turning inside out.

That shopping stopped real soon. My illusions of efficacy were at the breaking point and I was becoming poor. Desperately poor.

I started to spiral outward in a job search trying to latch onto something that would not be soul destroying while my debt exploded and my prospects were becoming slimmer.

I thought about going back to school and had the application in my hand when the self-destruct neurosis shut that thought down. I thought about making movies. I thought about writing. I thought about cooking. I thought about what to do and started playing computer games to keep me occupied long enough that circumstances would force my hand and I wouldn’t have to do anything. It would just happen and I wouldn’t be responsible for making it happen. Self-destruct carry me away!

That was where it started going bad. When your self-image comes up against the world either the world bends to you or you bend to the world. I kowtowed to it. Desperate to do something interesting terrified to try to make anything happen I shut down. I wallowed in self-pity and depression. Once that started nothing flowed anymore. Days with Natalie stopped being as much fun. She sensed this and reacted to me. I reacted to her reaction and our pattern developed.

I was blind with rage at myself and the injustice of the conflict between my self-image and reality.

I reacted to her reacting to me and she reacted to me reacting to her. I asked what’s wrong she wouldn’t tell me. I get pissed off she gets pissed off. Ridiculous really.

Anyway, I ran with that worthlessness notion. Nothing she said touched me. Nothing seemed doable anymore. My world crumbled and in absolute desperation I applied for a job doing support at an AOL call center. This always was my final option. I always figured that whatever happened I could work there and save some money so I could do something else.

They didn’t hire me. I was a computer god at one time, not that long before the rejection, making $100/hr and people were happy to pay that, and I couldn’t get hired by A-fucking-OL. It is probably impossible to fully describe how crushing that was. It was like having 20 hot girls point and laugh at your penis. It was having every bit of power and usefullness you imagine yourself to have, shown to be nothing more than a whimsical illusion.

I felt completely worthless and Natalie was there by my side. I couldn’t see it though. I ran with the worthlessness since that’s what that self-destruct mechanism is all about. A deep, unabiding sense of worthlessness.

Then I had to declare bankruptcy. Weird how efficacious and confident I had become when I was running the IT department for an ad agency in Manhattan, and how utterly and completely worthless I became convinced I was when the only job I could get was at a sandwich place/catering company doing deliveries. Towards the end it felt as if I had been rejected by every business in Tucson. In my previous life in New York, once I decided I needed a new job I always found something better in less than three weeks.

Two years of rejection. That took a toll on my already fragile psyche.

I rejected her love and it tore us apart and what bothers me most is that I had to do that to get to this point. I had to destroy something beautiful to break through my illusions. I had to destroy it all the set myself free.

Not to say that it our situation wasn’t a bit more complicated than your average romance. She cares deeply for John and his illnesses wore heavily upon her. I didn’t cope with that well in my self-destruct state. I didn’t want John to die since in lots of way we are kindred spirits. I was jealous of that relationship and that poisoned Natalie and mine.

If I mentioned anything at all, even small honest feelings of being uneasy around the man she took again to calling her husband, she would exploded in a quiet rage. Nothing could penetrate that silence and I reacted badly to that since there is nothing more annoying than someone giving you the silent treatment.

Add to this crazy mix the fact that I couldn’t understand my feelings, I had no perspective to be able to do so much less to be able to express them, there was no hope. I felt this constantly for the past year and a half. When John moved back to the house after spending the previous few years as a vagabond amongst friends Natalie and I had no time alone. It was awkward to say the least.

But I loved her and I supported that decision because I knew how much she cared for John and I cared for John too. He’s one of the better people I’ve met. Why shouldn’t he be comfortable while ill?

She reached out. I rejected her. I tried to explain. She rejected my explanations. She closed up. I closed up.

Then she developed an email relationship with a guy who had worked on the equipment at her job. Months later she stopped mentioning him. I suspected something was up and then, at that exact moment in time, she told me I should date. That she wanted to be with me but The Situation(tm) as the Natalie-John-Scott triangle had come to be known was waying down on her.

This is not what I wanted to hear. It infuriated me after all that time we’d been together. And she had that guy in Montreal she stopped mentioning. And was a fucking loser who put up with this crap in has failed pointless life!

I tried to walk away in January. I couldn’t take it anymore. We never talked about anything substantial in the real world. In the email world nothing seemed to flow, everything became acrimonious and stilted.

She pulled me back, though. Why? I don’t know. Was she that crazy in love? Or just desperate to hold onto a safe pattern? I guess I’ll never know.

Whatever it was she pulled me back. She convinced me that at least we should be friends and I couldn’t quite get my head around anything happening. I didn’t understand a fucking thing. It was frustrating, maddening, infuriating, nice, warm, comfortable.

I was stuck though. Stuck, confused, impotent in my reaction to the separation growing between us that I did not want to happen. She couldn’t reach out anymore. She was still reacting to me reacting to me reacting to her reacting to me reacting to The Situation(tm) reacting to everything crappy in my stuck life.

Is it any wonder that neither of us moved that Saturday night a few weeks ago?

I hate to use “destined” to fail but that’s what we were. There was too much crap in the way and I for sure (and she I think too) was not able to clear it away and just be. To be in the moment with each other and be happy. Too much shit in the way.

A tragedy in some respects as we were something of kindred spirits. We grew up with eerily similar fucked up family situations. We were both sick all the time with asthma. We were both noncommunicative at the wrong times. We had similar minds, tastes, and interests. When we were together I used to have avague happy thought that at some moment as children we were both sick and at home watching the same daytime tv show. That out there at that moment was a kind of mystical connection where we were like misplaced halves that had to meet again.

I guess I was wrong about that but it’s still a happy thought.

Granted this is all my perspective since now that she’s moved on there is no idle chatting about where it all went wrong. There is just my understanding of loss and my new understanding of how twisted up I had been.

Hmmm…yeah…I think I might be done with this now.