Yesterday I wanted to "fall off the wagon"...

So yesterday I almost fell off “the wagon”…The Him wagon of sobriety. I wanted a “drink” of The Him so bad.

I wanted to ask him why he’d said the things he said.. Things like, asking me to consider moving out there in the fall, asking me how I’d become so powerful to him, like an addiction. Saying that talking to me was what he imagined a “hit of heroin would feel like to an addict”. So powerful was his need to hear my thoughts.. my words..my opinions

All this he said to me just hours before going on his second “outing” with her. See, it wasn’t a date. He was just going to accompany her to her 30 year reunion of their mutual high school cause she’d invited him… oh, and because his mother wanted him to. His mother used to be the woman’s basketball coach in high school, and they’d become cyberly inseparable since the woman had declared her undying love for him….

Speaking of his mother, the woman who, over the last 10 months has repeatedly called me “an angel” for “saving” him (long story), saying I’d done SO much for their family. His mother, who told The Him that, while she hadn’t been crazy about us getting married so young 22 yrs ago, she realized that he’d never loved anyone in his life the way he loved me then and now (including the two wives and countless girlfriends in between). She also told him that she didn’t know if he’d ever live with, or marry, anyone again but if she had to “pick” someone for him it would be me… That must have been right up until she realized that in “picking” me he’d most likely be moving 1500 miles away with her grand-kids, and so changed her mind and picked someone closer…Telling that person that I was nothing to The Him… just a friend… told her that she should “go for it”…go for him.

How do I know what’s going on between them now? Well… social networking sites, of course. How do any of us know anything these days?

See, no one “rubs my nose in this.” I do it to myself. I go there. I try not to, and…. sometimes I even succeed….. for days at a time.

Some of my friends think it’s SOOO hilarious, the things she says there…Everything that happens between “the lovebirds” is described in GREAT and nauseating detail by her on this site. Which is completely galling to me as I was perpetually censured by him not to “live my life” on there if I posted anything remotely personal. Now, it appears she not only lives there, but can't refrain from spewing every detail of her life on there, right down to the detail of every bite she eats, including the genus of corn, and how he's rearranging her sleep patterns in the nicest way....excuse my while I throw up.

She also uses the site for her business contacts, and has over 650 “friends”. To read it you’d think she was in 4th grade not a 50 yr old PHD in something or other…It should be embarrassing to someone so supposedly intelligent to be so publicly over-romantic, sappy, and schmaltzy over someone she just barely met. Someone she’s only been in the physical presence of for a month. Okay, so she's known him for six weeks if you count the time they began flirting online while he was here in MY presence… Oh, and that’s described in great detail by her too.

She friended me so I would be sure and see it all… I just didn’t believe her at the time.. I thought she was just crazy.. or lying. I didn’t want to believe.. sometimes still don’t want to believe.. that THEY were the liars instead.. The Him and his mother…

I have friends who think this is all so entertaining.. I mean after all, can’t I “see the humor in it all, now that I’m not in the picture” they ask? Can’t I see how crazy he is and just be relieved that I didn’t get hurt any worse than I did.. Be thankful that I didn’t move in with him, or let him move in with me, before finding out who he really is?.. Come on they say… it’s FUNNY! Right?

No… It’s not. It hurts like I imagine surgery without anesthesia would hurt.

Intellectually, I can see that they really are perfect for each other. He needs a blow up doll with voice box programed to tell him how perfect he is. Someone to have no expectations of him, and make no demands. And she seems only to need someone she can gush over online, post pics of them together, and take on occasional public outings to prove he exists… In my head I see the perfection, and am thankful I escaped with as little damage as I did, but in my heart… in my heart it’s a whole other story.

This is how I try to explain it to those friends… I tell them it’s the way I imagine an alcoholic might feel stepping into their longtime favorite bar… the low lights… the noise… the glisten of the beautiful amber liquid, the feel of the glass as you press it to your lips… the smoothness as it slides over your tongue.. the exquisite warming as it travels down your throat… burning your chest…settling, like a fire warming you from the inside out.

It’s one thing to “hear about” what’s going on in there.. in that “bar.” My friends can come out of the bar and tell me verbatim.. line by line.. what is said and done there and it doesn’t knock me for a loop.

Their telling me doesn’t make me crave the drink so badly that I can’t breathe….most of the time. But, occasionally… like yesterday.. they tell me something that makes me run down the block and throw open the door.... I have to see for myself this woman in the life that was mine such a short time ago. Pictures they say! Him taking her where he took ME!!!!! Doing with her the things he did with me!!!

I HAVE THE SAME PICTURES OF US!!! Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the urge to post them at the bar with a date stamp showing how recently they were taken… sometimes… At those times I want to take a drink so bad…

At those times, as I’m gasping for air, I try with all my might to remind myself of what my “sponsor” friends would tell me… my other friends, the ones who remind me of how much it hurts to be “hung over.” How “beside myself” being in contact with him makes me. The friends who counsel me to take the long way home and avoid even going past the bar. Tell me not to look… so that I’m not then tempted to drink..

They say that someday I’ll be able to go in and enjoy the company without so desperately wanting the drink…..someday… but not today.. and not yesterday.

Yesterday I wanted a drink. I wanted to send a text to The Him that said,

"There is NO WAY I could have been, as you said, the “Only woman who’s been in my heart for the past 20 yrs and if I live another 30 the only woman who will be,” (just to name ONE, such thing.) To say that and then be with her so instantaneously… if you are as you say “not a liar,” then what are you?”…..

That is what I wanted to say. Even knowing that it would be as futile as asking a patient in an mental ward to explain why they’re eating with a rubber fork…

I didn’t take the drink.

I wish I could tell you that it was some sort of strength of will that kept me from doing it… sending the text.. initiating the contact… See, he would like to remain in contact.. I am second to none as a friend. Actually, as of last Thursday, I am still his BF&BLE (Best Friend & Best Lover Ever). But the real reason I did not take the drink was not any strength of my own it was… angels.

Angels work in mysterious ways if we let them. Yesterday they used an impromptu invitation from my littlest “spirit guides” to go hiking up the mountain near our house…

A 5 hour hike as it turned out…

After the first hour I felt so much better… My heart was pumping, the endorphins flowing… After the third hour I was stopped in my tracks by a memory… doubled over, and in tears, at the thought of The Him’s thumb on my jaw.. the exquisite warmth as it traveled down my throat…fingers behind my neck.. the amber liquid heat of his eyes.. the feel of his lips on mine….

RRRRrrrrrrriiiiiiiiieeeeetttttttttttt!!!!!!! That screeching sound is the record player needle being dragged across a moving record….

His lips….. The last time we were together he would not kiss me on the lips more than a peck.. do everything else under the sun, but no kissing on the lips.

It struck me as odd that he’d talked about kissing me long, and deep only days before he came, yet had been at my house a week and had not done it… So I asked him. He said that he wasn’t doing it because it would mean we were in a "real relationship”… He sounded like a moron who’d watched the movie Pretty Woman WAY too many times… I was dumbfounded… he was serious…At the time, I didn’t know he was in the process of starting things up with the new woman…makes more sense in hindsight.. but then most things do.

You gonna make it?

Yes, I'm gonna make it...So yesterday… hour three into the hike…I dried my eyes and kept walking.. for two more hours.

As I walked I reminded myself of my tumbleweed note yesterday. You do know that “we teach that which we most need to learn” don’t you? True story…

So I reminded myself of perseverance…. Defined by Webster as - steady and continued action or belief, usually over a long period and especially despite difficulties or setbacks… That thought had been the first thought that entered my head as my feet hit the floor yesterday… Before I’d heard of the events at the bar and ran down the street to see for myself…If we listen, sometimes the answers will come to us even before we ask the question.. Also a true story.

So as I walked yesterday, I looked around at all the perseverance surrounding me on that mountain… and I took pictures for you.

With only the tiniest amount of dirt.. a seed will persevere…

And even among great adversity… become a tree…

And if it doesn’t give up in the face of it’s challenges it can become THIS tree…

Or this one…

I hope you don't give up... I hope we both keep on putting one foot in front of the other..


Thank you for taking the time to catch this tumbleweed as it blew past...




Angels on your body..
Prairie Girl... And her Spirit Guides..