Stale Realizations

Today I realized I’m still grasping at straws.  I’ve got shit in my mouth that I just can’t wash out and the only way I can think of to deal with it is to just keep eating more.  I’ve no chance at anything normal with the girl I want to love, and everything with my wife really has been to far gone, too destroyed for a long time.  I was looking through my external hard drive.  Found pictures of us from high school and caught myself thinking “there’s no way she ever really looked that fat, there’s no way I ever looked that bald.”

I tried to delete all the things I backed up from her computer and couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I stumbled across the list of baby names we’d started and now I am completely numb.  Micah would’ve been a strong young boy, and Aiden would’ve liked soccer.  Noah would’ve been teased in school because he was too smart for his classmates and I would’ve known how to help, because I was just like him.  Issac would’ve been too proud to ever ask his dad for help, and athletic in ways I could never keep up with.  Izabella would have been rebellious and I would have had to terrify so many boyfriends to help her weed through the useless ones to find a decent man.  Aurora would’ve loved camping and hiking and dancing on my feet, and Jacob would’ve been a painfully late bloomer.  Anya would have been smart and pretty and to busy trying to be the best at everything to really have any friends, just like her mom.  Nikolas would’ve been a little bastard and tested me his whole life.  Alana would’ve been sweet and serene and mothered everyone she met, and Izaiah would have been the baby of the family.  I would have called Dorian JD and made him watch scrubs so he’d understand why, just like my mom showed me pictures of the Steve I was named after.  Alijah would’ve been a wonderful son, calm and measured, spending his whole life doing the right thing, and Cullen would’ve been the prodigal son.  Ada would’ve been an insufferable bitch when her hormones kicked in and Keira would’ve walked around with my sister’s smug assurance that she was better than everyone else and my belief that the world revolves entirely around her.  Adrianna would’ve spent her entire life giving up halfway into things because she just plain didn’t feel good enough.

Her preoccupation with being a mother is really the only thing we still had in common after the summer I told her I’d been lying and drinking.  The threesome we’d had when we were both destroyed had been eating us both alive and we’d been dead in the water since before we’d even gotten married.  It’s amazing that you don’t notice just how disgusting stagnant water smells until you realize you’ve got a big mouthful of it.  She wrote last January that it was over and I knew it then too, but we just kept pushing forward because all she could think about was the moment she would get to be a mom.  She kept fighting to make it work because of those little red hands and soft fingernails.  Those tiny clutching fingers flailing away when she said “Hello, I am your mommy and I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you.”  I know that I still love her and care about her, but it isn’t the way you love and cherish a wife, I don’t know if it really ever was.

It tears me apart that we ripped the best part of each other out.  She could see that I was distant because I was so hurt and afraid and depressed.  She could see it plain as day and I just couldn’t find a way to care enough to get help, to admit that I needed it, and because she was in over her head and kept telling me she couldn’t fix it I took that as her not caring enough to try.  I won’t ever be her husband, not that I ever really was.  I want be the father to her children.  I won’t be her children’s grandfather.  It doesn’t matter how many times I see those words or say them, I just can’t make them make sense in my head.  It’s like I’ve been washed in the river of souls in the underworld.  There’s a faint tinge somewhere that those words all mean something catastrophic, but I can’t figure out, for the life of me, how they could possibly relate to me.  Their in some alien tongue and I can tell by the inflection that it means some pretty soul crushing, dream shattering shit, but I just can’t wrap my head around how it relates and what it means for my future.

My future is a joke.  I can’t even stay motivated enough to graduate college.  I don’t care enough to show up for classes.  I just want to move back in with my parents, find a minimum wage job and drink until I’m to far gone for any of this to stir me at all.  I don’t even want that faint tinge of recognition when I say those words.  I don’t want the hair on the back of my neck to stand up, or the loud heavy pulse in my head.  I don’t want the world to slow and the air to start feeling like Jello.  I want to cut it all out of me.  I’ve come to terms with so much of the rest of this.  I’ve forgiven her for her part in all this and I’m starting to forgive myself.  I can see what I did wrong and I want to find a way to not do it again next time.  I’ve forgiven anyone else I blamed for this turning to shit so fast.  I’ve come to terms with the fact that we are getting a divorce and that it is a good thing.  I’m happy with the fact that she is with someone else.  I’m excited about the possibilities I have coming up in terms of who I can date and sleep with and getting to actually live life and make mistakes instead of being to terrified to fuck up what I had to try anything.  I just can’t come to terms with the fact that I am not going to be a dad any time soon.  I don’t have a family to take care of.  There’s no real reason for me to get a degree or a career immediately because nothing is waiting on it to happen.  If it takes me a month or ten years, all that matters in the end is that I eventually finished college.

It’s such a melancholy place to be, to go from having everything planned, even though it wasn’t really my plan to being completely free and completely empty with it.  I’m worried I am going to spend the next sixth months rushing to be a dad and end up with someone even worse or end up as someone even worse.  I need to learn how to not turn every conversation back to me, to actually listen when someone needs support and just be there instead of intentionally or unintentionally making it about me.  I need to learn that I am self pity doesn’t balance out a constant need to be the center of attention, and that pity parties just lead to people writing you off.  I didn’t peak in high school.  I still have a lot of potential.  It is just going to be an uphill battle to keep striving to reach my potential and pushing my limits instead of just settling for something slightly better than my parents attained.