Changing Man

[Gardener]

I'll tell you, at times lately I feel like venting or journaling and think that what I put down is going to seem so,,,I don't know.

Been reading Antlers' posts on Coach's Detachment Thread and I feel his pain. It sounds like mine today. At one point this afternoon, I actually said out loud, "I can't believe she's gone!" And then I think it's 11 months since the bomb, 10 months since she moved out, 5 months since she asked for D and despite changes and improvements and progress in other areas, my heart is still exactly where it was 11 months ago.

A month ago at the mediator's, I thanked her for 16 great years, for entrusting me to help her raise her two wonderful kids - my wonderful kids, and one or two other things that I don't remember. Now, I'm a romantic. I'm sentimental. I get misty-eyed easily like she does/did/used to. I'm misty-eyeing right into those cold dead eyes of hers. The stone face. And I'm thinking: she used to admire my sentimentality and now I can see she probably sees it now, talking briefly but from my heart, as weakness.

And I know - I know - I still miss (achingly) and still pine for a person who truly no longer exists. That person left, checked out. "Elvis-has-left-the-building."

And there's still so much I don't know. Will never know (we haven't had one R Talk since February). So many things that I don't even want to go through listing them here.

You are the other part of me
I am the other part of you.
We'll work through
With never a thought of walking out

Ruth Harms Calkin

That was us. We would always do - could not not do - whatever it took.
So how, how, how can the very first time she talks to me about not being happy, fulfilled, feels us growing distant, whatever it was with four words: "I'm getting an apartment."?

I don't know. I just don't know. Bad day.