Posted by Atticus on August 29, 2004, at 16:02:18
In reply to Re: poem...Contradiction » Atticus, posted by malthus on August 29, 2004, at 12:54:52
No offense taken at all, Malthus; it didn't even occur to me. I have to admit, there is a side of me that says, in my darkest hours, "If she really loved me as much as she said she did, she wouldn't have bailed when the mental and emotional going got rough." It's a bit like the conversation you described with Sean in his car; I was defective, so she was moving on. But I know that's a gross oversimplification of things. I don't know how well I would have handled the situation had our positions been reversed. I always had the sense that leaving me was a very difficult decision for her, but that she felt she was reliving the worst parts of her childhood -- when she was trapped in a relationship with a another mentally unstable person, her mom. I think "Cocoa Pebbles Madness" does give a sense of Alyssa's terrible, almost crippling insecurity at times. She was, under all her bravado, an incredibly delicate person, and ultimately unable to face day after day of my self-destructive behavior during my "Tyrannosaurus Meds" period, when I was mixing Xanax and Jack Daniels like they were going out of style due to my own frustration and sense of powerlessness to control what was happening to my mind. If she had stuck it out, she would have experienced six more years of a downward spiral culminating in a suicide attempt. Not much to look forward to for her. I do miss having her in my life, every day, but I don't know if she could have made it through the even darker times that lay ahead with her own sanity intact. It's all so difficult to figure out; relationships can be so wonderful, yet they're always so complex and messy at the same time. Nothing is ever clear cut. At any rate, writing this poem and thinking about the qualities that made me love her so much in the first place has turned out to be a good first step in suturing together my perception of my life -- a life that I have long considered split into Alyssa and post-Alyssa periods. :) Atticus
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