My road living death

 There is a lot of editing going on.

So what does a dead person do with life?  I was not unlike those zombies in the movies.  Whoever I touched and whoever I was around shivered with me, feeling the death that I carried with me.  With her, my youth had come back to me.  I was very much young and alive.  My color was good, I swam 10,000 yards a week and lifted weights, preparing myself to reenter the world of tennis and kayaking, rock climbing and running.  Then she left and for a very short time I went through the motions, but any real, living person would have immediately seen that I was merely going through the motions.  The future activities were gone from the agenda, the distances swam dropped rapidly and then became sporadic.  In short, I had been dead before, for a short time i was more alive than i had ever been in my life and now I began to sink deeper than ever before into an animated lifelessness.  Is it better to have loved and lost?  Really Shakespeare, did you really know?

Let me explain something about how this happened. 

I had been living a strained and estranged relationship for years before we started dating.  I had also had a long series of very short affairs since there was no sex in our relationship.  I was not interested in leaving at the time, you see.  I was dead, just going through the motions of life, one of which was to go through the motions of sex.  Some of the sex was gratifying, but I made sure that there was emotional distance.  I had, after all, fallen in love with the right girl many, many years before and I was, as a result of being spurned, ready for what I had signed on for, a lifetime of death.

When the collapse came, I was certain that my economic situation was going to force me to separate.  What I mean by this is that I thought that my family would be better off if I went away until my creditors tired of me, probably forever, so they could go on without having me as some sort of economic drag on their lives.

It was in this state that I began to realize what was important in life and by coincidence or design it was the when I realized true love.

Then, as I ‘defeated’ one economic dragon after another, this economic final solution became less of a necessity and more of a choice although I was far from the choice standpoint at this time.

By this point in time, my wife wanted me to leave then as much as I wanted to.  Not because she didn’t want me around, but because she knew there was something wrong with me.  She knew and had known for some time that she could never be happy with me.  But for all her courage, she also was willing to reconcile herself to a life of mediocrity. 

As my economic situation recovered, I presented a confusing picture to her I’m sure.  On the one hand, it would be a lifetime of conflicting emotional types.  Our relationship had been, from the beginning a war.  Truces were declared for the sake of expediency, but the two sides never stopped arming themselves and never reconciled.  However, she was nothing if not committed.  During the worst of the economic woes, she basically turned her back on me emotionally, much as she had already done sexually.  Now, however, things had changed.  While I was sad, I was also at a creative fever pitch.  Economically, it appeared that I was poised to recover if not my wealth, than at least my ability to obtain wealth again.  Later it would become obvious that if I could keep my wits about me and continue to work despite my blindness that I might recover my wealth.

She had long sense been willing to accept a sexless marriage, in fact, it was something she accepted with relief, one less chore to get out of the way.  In the beginning she had used sex as a tool and was now content to leave it in its metaphorical toolshed gathering dust while my reproductive system went to ruin in its absence.

There was no cheating now, good conduct was forced on me.  I could have slept with any number of women.  They still made themselves available, often times for old times sake; but I no longer cared for them.  When I though of sleeping with them, I knew that in bed I would try to picture her and it was too painful and too ridiculous.

Things were not all a series of curative economic outcomes.  It was a situation, teasing me, as if it were possible to avoid the inevitable.  Matching these teasing economic successes would be matching or over matching withdrawls.  Nevertheless, there was hope now.

Remember what I said, a blind man who has given up is free, but a blind man who has hope seeks reassurance.  Instead of reassurance, every time I reached out for a deeper relationship, she had pulled back.  And each time she came back, I had taken another reckless step into the abyss that was love.

My lumbago acted up.  In days gone by, a bad back would be the subject of bedrest and drugs to numb the pain.  Modern medicine had determined that walking, and lots of it, were the best cures and I would walk for hours, talking to her on the phone.  But after she was gone, the walks were empty. Talking to her, the steps took no energy, I walked fast, upright, effortlessly.  Afterwards, I did not have the energy to walk, each step was an effort, I was bent with the pain of carrying the loss.  Even listening to music was painful, where before I had sang while I walked.

I did not need coffee with her, I greeted each day eager to hear her voice, see a text from her, read an e-mail that would tell me what she was thinking about, who she had spoken to, what she had seen, what she envisioned us doing together when we met next.  Now I couldn’t wake even with caffeine.  I drank to numb the pain. 

I had nothing that I looked forward to but the oblivion of sleep.