my careless contagion

You were not the first, sir, and you certainly were not the last. But you were certainly one of the worst.  Her love affair with you was not brief. I don't know when it started, but she did tell me she was in love with you. I told her love is just a choice we make every day. These are things a man should not have to tell his wife. Who knows what she told you, what evils she relayed to you about our relationship. I'm sure I was a bad man and she deserved better, but you only got part of the story, sir. Yes, she deserved better, but so did I. She cheated on me incessantly, and my small attempts to equalize the balance of power were seen as devilish, I'm sure. But who was the bigger devil? I did lash out in anger, but mostly undetectable anger. I meant to hurt her, but in other, less-obvious ways than she did. Maybe you missed all that backstory. Maybe you didn't care. True, I was not a saint. But you two put me to shame. You spent a lot of time at my house, and o...

It comes as no surprise to anyone, but I've been a little angry. And not just lately. Yes, I have reason to be angry. But how helpful is anger, especially as time goes on? How long should I be angry?  My anger stems from my childhood. It was drilled into me to be frustrated and angry (mostly by my brothers) by the physical abuse from my father, and also general neglect (which is just a form of abuse). They not only put anger in me, but they made sure I was constantly defeated, ensuring the pattern of defeat would continue long after they were done traumatizing me. I embodied defeat. I still do. Some of the angriest people I have known — and sometimes they don't even know why they are angry — are those who have endured childhood trauma in the form of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Of course, there are those who hide those things, too, under a veneer of tranquility and kindness. Well, I've made no bones about my anger. This whole dynamic is portrayed pretty flaw...

  December 16, 2016, was the day she came back into my life. In the following two years, I've seen a whirlwind of changes. I was so happy she was back in my life. As of this writing, she is not in my life anymore. Of all the changes I've seen in the last two years, this is the saddest. I thought once we started talking she would never be out of my life. It's okay, though. My life has taught me to live with the lack of things. And it was too good to be true anyway.   There was a change that took place in me on a recent Sunday. I sat alone in my apartment and something broke in me. It was a giving up. It was a letting go. Whatever you want to call it. I realized something that I should have seen before but didn't.  Stepping back and looking at the carnage from two divorces is sobering. If I could have done anything to help any of those in pain, I would have. What I didn't see was that I was perhaps the one most affected, the most destroyed, the most hurt by t...

Mud Hill is a breakup song by the band Samiam. I think we've all been there before. If we haven't, then we haven't lived. Right now I'm assessing my life and taking stock of my 41 years' worth of experiences. What strikes me is how many times I've broken up with girls when we weren't even dating. What's more surprising is how many times it messed me up. Maybe it was the fact that we weren't even dating that made it worse.  Samiam is a band better listened to than watched. Maybe this is why they never made it big, or perhaps because they didn't take themselves seriously enough. The band is (mostly) defunct, or at least off and on defunct. And who cares about Samiam when Ariana Grande just released another shitty track? She wouldn't know poetry if it bit her in the ass, but then again, neither would her fans. I digress.  There really isn't a point to this post besides the fact that I'm going over my list of failed relationships...

What you did to her I don't know you. I don't know what you did to her. I just know what she used to be like. You took a virtuous young woman and took and took and took. She would have kept giving, even though you took all. She told me she would have endured any amount of "pain and humiliation" to keep you, to keep you happy, to keep you coming home to her.  I don't know what you did to her, but I see the end result of it, how she's done with life, done with men, just ... done. She'll never trust again the way she trusted you, and never will she lay herself bare and vulnerable in a man's arms again. Whatever you did to her, I don't know, but she'll never be the same. She's always going to have that awareness in the back of her head that she's been done wrong, that she's going to find out any day just how wrong she's been done. You made her a detective when you should have been making her smile. You made her question ever...

Why am I afraid of you?  I've tried to get over you, tried to move on. But there's too much of you in me. There's more you in me than me. I can't move on because you're a part of me. I don't understand it, but it's true.  The capacity to understand what's happening in me isn't there. I have a rudimentary soul, and what's happened in me is extraordinary. It's you, little girl. You happened to me. You found the right place to sit in my heart, and you've made yourself at home. That hole in my heart feels like it was made for you, like it's a perfect fit.  Yes, I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid of how I feel about you. My fingers tremble when I text you. My heart lurches toward you, straining against my ribs. I have to take deep breaths to calm myself. I have to close my eyes hard and tell myself she won't say those words that I dread.  Yes, she could destroy me. And she has, twice now. Who gets to break my heart...

    I've said so many things about your cruelness toward me. Unfortunately, all of those things are true. You do not deny them. You have an exoskeleton on you that's as tough as nails. It's hard to get to you admit anything; you resist like no other woman I've ever seen. Your stubborn streak is famous. I can speak endlessly of our Great Disappointment, our lives together. But for me to continue in truth and to say goodbye in peace, I must say goodbye to both the good and the bad. You were so good for me in so many ways. We were so good for each other. You were the little girl lost, and I was the one who found you. You quit smoking pot soon after we started talking because that was the effect I had on you. You accepted Jesus as your Savior because I led you in that direction (not so gently, I might add; I was apt to rush things in those days).  You taught me that 11:11 meant make a wish, and I wished I was there with you. All of our conversations were leadin...

My brothers and I dressed in our Sunday finest. Family get-togethers can be hard for me. As someone I once knew would say, "Going home reminds of why you left." And, for me, there were so many reasons. Why did I move more than 1,000 miles away from my parents and hours away from my brothers? Even though they were a day's drive away, I still didn't visit them unless I was rolling through on my way to some other place. Even then, I often wouldn't stop. At first glance, it would seem that I'm a bad son and brother. I can't really deny that, but there's more to the story. I have two brothers; the oldest is seven years older. The other is three and a half years older. I was never unaware of my status as the youngest, the smallest, the runt. It was constantly reinforced. When my brothers got BMX bikes, I got a retro girly-looking thing. With training wheels. Hot Liner. All the kids wanted one, right? Perpetually tagging along and r...

My parents in 1984 surveying the house they were having built. I have this memory, but not because I actually remember it. I was too young to remember it, but the story was retold often enough by my mother that it seems like I actually have the memory.  I was very young. It was the mid-1980s. My parents had a house built (which went wildly over budget) in 1984 on Happy Hollow Street in a little town in the Southern Black Hills in South Dakota. Parents raised their kids a little differently then than they do now. There was also the matter of finances, which meant that a babysitter wasn't always possible. My parents had a colleague leave their company and start up a competing business across the street. In order to compete, they were putting in 100 hour weeks, both of them. This continued for years.  My mom didn't want to work, but my dad was the boss and women were working a lot in those days, so he said she should too. She started out as the bookkeeper, setting ty...