BDE

So I try to say goodbye, my friend
I’d like to leave you with something warm
But never have I been a blue calm sea
I have always been a storm

Fleetwood Mac,
Storms

My daughter had her first stalker in high school. This seems to be an unfortunate rite of passage for girls. We’re taught to be sweet, to be kind, and to prioritize other people’s comfort over our own. She befriended the loner that everyone else was shunning. We all hate to be excluded, and she wasn’t going to be mean to someone just because they were socially awkward. And then he started showing up at our house uninvited. 

I was used to being a single mom because the division of labor in my marriage had been that he earned most of the income, and I was responsible for everything else, unless he enjoyed it and was in the mood to do it at that moment. I thought it would be the same work when I moved out of his house, but without someone there to undermine me at random. Mostly, I found parenting much easier when I stopped living with him. 

I thought being a single mom was just being a mom with no one to tag into the ring. I’d always had the dad jokes. I figured I was rocking my double duty. Then this boy started coming to my house at odd times. They were just kids. Neither my daughter nor I wanted to hurt him. We just wanted him to stop showing up. So I’d greet him like a mom, full of– oh honey, no, you can’t do this. And he’d continue to do the thing that I had so gently told him he couldn’t do. The third time he showed up was predawn. He was standing in front of my house in the dark.

I went out there with my usual soft concern for his well-being. He said he needed to see my daughter. I told him he could not. I told him he needed to call home and get a ride. He told me he could not. He said he didn’t bring his phone and asked to come in. I told him he could not. People were sleeping. I had been sleeping. So, I left him on the other side of a locked door when I went in to get my phone, so he could call home. I came back out and gave him my phone. He said he couldn’t call his mom because he didn’t have the number memorized. He didn’t have any numbers memorized.

Something clicked in me. This was not a situation that called for mom energy. This was a situation that called for dad energy. A dad would not have been sympathetic to any of this child’s unwanted visits. I was not responsible for his well-being. That boy needed to turn his ass around and go. He didn’t have to go home, but he couldn’t be on my property without an invitation. I think I had to believe that before he could believe me. That was the last time he tried to visit us.

I used to be fierce before my marriage. It was time to bring back that part of me. It had been eight nights with little sleep. I had reclaimed the bed, but my anger at it made for an ineffective lullaby. I tossed. I turned. I nodded off. I woke up. I walked around the campus. I sat with the black widows. I went back to my room. I showered, again. I wrote poetry. I nodded off. I rinsed. I lathered. I repeated. Morning always came eventually. 

I drank too much coffee. I ate too little food. My insides felt raw, like a sunburn pressed against stucco. I didn’t want to be there. Not on our Mojave Desert in August without AC campus, and especially not in this timeline where he became my whole world and then dumped me. I wanted to go home. He was the only place that felt like home. It’s over.

I cursed the rooms we’d made love in, laughed in, or talked in, the trees we had pruned together, and anything else either of us had had a hand in building, improving, or maintaining. Seven acres that used to be my safe place before him, and I couldn’t find peace anywhere.

During the day, I nodded off when I wanted to be awake. At night I woke up when I wanted to be asleep. I couldn’t be in either state fully or for very long anymore. Desperate for rest, I asked him to come back a night early to lie in bed with me. He was still the only thing I knew could soothe me. I didn’t sleep much that night either, but I was still. Inside and out, I could finally be still once he snored beside me. 

At one point, in the blur of days that we were breaking up, but not exactly broken up, but definitely not a couple anymore, he asked me if I’d seen, like romantically, anyone in Portugal. Of course, I hadn’t. I told him I would never do that to him. As much as I was trying to be reassuring, it felt like he was pulling further from me. I was being too heavy, too much.

So, I started joking, saying how I totally would have hooked up with someone in Portugal, but you know, Monkeypox. I neglected to mention my understanding that it was mostly being passed by sexual contact between men, partly because that wasn’t the exclusive means of transmission and largely because I was hoping light absurdity would somehow fix everything between us. 

Saturday of our second weekend, we plastered with the group, we made small talk, and I cried less. When the work was done for the day, we went to the park to finally have that talk. It was the cliche cheater script. He’d met someone else at his other job. They hadn’t meant for this to happen. He answered my questions, even the ones I should have known better than to ask. She was young and lived with her parents in San Diego. Her parents are still together. They own a house. He found someone without baggage, with a great support system, and chose her. 

I cried. He held me. The birds gathered around, watching us. Even the animal kingdom thinks I’m a telenovela. I cycled through denial, bargaining, anger, all the stages of grief, trying to get the spinner to land on nevermind, we’re not breaking up. It didn’t have a space for that. We talked in circles, always coming back to the same unacceptable conclusion. Eventually, we were done and headed back to campus. He tried to open the truck door for me. I wouldn’t let him. No more treating me like a girl. We’re just buddies now. 

He left me for a princess. There was a neighborhood gay couple who used to give me princess lessons when I was little. They found me with skinned knees and mud under my nails in their front yard garden, always turning over rocks looking for cool new bugs. They went about teaching me to be ladylike, legs crossed at the ankle, pinky up when I sipped (not slurped), that sort of thing. I loved them and their inside jokes about two queens teaching me to be a princess. I was never a princess. I’m a warrior.

When bedtime rolled around, I still could not sleep. The Work Bestie had promised to spend another night in the bed with me and again was socializing with the group. I wanted to go into my open brick dome and sit with the black widows, but it was so close to the firepit, and I could hear their voices over there. When I could no longer stand being in my room that used to be ours but still couldn’t go to the brick dome, I began to walk laps around the campus perimeter. 

This was my ninth night without prolonged sleep, only nodding off, waking, and nodding off again. I had forgotten how to feel rest. I had been rejected by my best friend, my love, my peace, my home. My own skin felt foreign to me. Putting one foot in front of the other was the only thing left that made sense, like maybe I could physically get away from all of this if I just walked far enough.

Also though, wandering through an open desert full of coyotes and tweakers didn’t seem like a great plan either, so I settled for laps just inside the perimeter fence. On one of my laps, I saw him by the back door to our bedroom. He saw me and talked me into joining the group on top of the vaulted building by the firepit. I didn’t want to be social, but I wanted even less to argue about it. 

He tried to give me a hand climbing up onto the top of the building, but I refused. He wasn’t allowed to treat me like a girl anymore. I pulled myself up, and I sat only half willingly and watched for the Perseids, which had been so elusive these moonlit August nights. The group took turns answering questions, getting to know each other better. I declined. Playful small talk with light icebreakers really didn’t match my mood. After years of having to pretend we weren’t a couple at work, now I had to pretend he hadn’t just broken my heart.

Two men showed up at the fence and spoke to us. We held still and silent and hoped they would leave. They didn’t leave. I responded to their questions with brief, annoyed answers. There isn’t enough money in the world to get me to do customer service scripts at two in the morning in the middle of a breakup. I thought they were tweakers. They walked away from our fence line to a security company car and drove away. Probably not tweakers. I’d guess they were working for the new construction that had all of their building materials stacked on the adjacent property and were wondering why we were sitting on the roof of a weird vaulted building staring at their stuff in the middle of the night. I still don’t care. 

Eventually, the decision was made to get down off of the vault. There were so many times my uncle had to rescue me from my grandmother’s backhouse roof as a kid. I couldn’t resist going up trees but down still scares me. Going down the way we climbed up wasn’t going to work. Not now that I wouldn’t let the Work Bestie help me. I remembered a better way down and took that instead of following the crowd I had never asked to be part of. It was a relief to be free of the social niceties again, and I went into my open brick dome with the black widows.

I heard him calling for me. I didn’t want to speak, but I couldn’t think of a legitimate reason not to, so I answered. Everyone came into my dome where I had been enjoying being alone. Where there had been silence, they talked and told stories.

It had been more than a week since I’d slept solidly. It was August in the Mojave Desert. The AC had seized from over use before I had even arrived. The heat lingered day and night. Just like the breakup had been lingering day and night, neither confirmed nor denied, until that afternoon. I was overheated, hurt and confused. I was exhausted, but not sleepy. I began to hallucinate sober. Or maybe I was just having a stroke. I didn’t care anymore. 

In the peripheral of my left eye, there was something like light, like stained glass panes, or prisms, or dragonfly wings, lit from within. There was a beauty to it, like an angel in a kaleidoscope. It moved like it was trying to communicate but was never there if I turned towards it, only in the very edges of my left eye’s vision, sitting next to me in the dome where I had wanted to be alone. I wanted to tell it to fuck off and go elsewhere. I wanted to tell everyone to fuck off and go elsewhere. I wanted to sleep again. I wanted to wake up in a different reality where I wasn’t being dumped. It doesn’t matter what I want.

Finally, they were done talking, and it was time to go to bed. The Work Bestie had agreed to spend the night in the same bed with me. I needed to sleep so desperately. I sleep better when he is next to me. We headed toward the house where we were all sleeping that night. They paused to say goodnight. I tried to mask my annoyance at the prolonged social contact. I just wanted to sleep. 

We were finally alone in our room, which was now my room, but for one last night was ours. I squatted down low to wrestle the cement block which was the only way to keep the French doors closed since termites damaged the door jamb. The Work Bestie was asking about what was going on with me, saying he didn’t want to be crude, but, and it took him a while to find his words before he noted that, if adjusted for gender, I had some Tight Pussy Energy going on. There is a limit to how far eyes can roll and he was determined to find mine. 

When I was done wrestling the door back into place we went to bed together, as friends. I was becoming the only man in my own life again. All that gentle, sweet nonsense was only getting me screwed over. Again he asked me about my energy.

I don’t know what was so confusing to him about me being less soft. Earlier that afternoon he had confirmed my worst fears. Now I knew it as fact, he had cheated on me. This was the official day of our breakup, of him dumping me for another woman. Nobody in their right mind is going to respond to that with the warm fuzzies.

I had a lot of information to process, but not yet. Not at work, surrounded by people I need to be professional with. Not deliriously tired. This was my ninth night without real sleep. I was done with all of it. This place. This man. This life. I truly had no fucks left to give. 

Throw me in a landfill
Don’t think about the consequences
Throw me in the dirt pit
Don’t think about the choices that you make

Daughter
Landfill