A Fine Harumph

Okay, I know I've posted about this before, but it's a recurring subject for me, and one that came up again last night. About eight years ago, I got into a very intense relationship with a guy I'd met through the world of tattooing. I was apprenticing (sort of) at a tattoo shop here in South Florida and he walked in with another girl (who he later split from-nothing serious) and I was smitten almost immediately. He was completely clean and sober but still kind of crazy and I was attracted to him wholeheartedly, in a way I hadn't been attracted to another person in a very long time. (For some reason, the lyrics for Foreigner's "Dirty White Boy" are going through my head right now, but I'll push them aside for now...) I was so screwed up back then, mentally, emotionally, even physically (I wasn't taking the best care of myself back in those days and was in the middle of a self destructive streak) but he saw something good in me and soon after our first meeting we got together. We were inseparable for almost five years. This man really helped to put me on the right path. No, he PUT me on the right path, although I was willing to go there, being tired of feeling miserable and drowning my life away in a sea of Tequila and Samuel Adams. We had good times and bad times but, through it all, I remained madly in love. It was as though we'd been together in another life; I just couldn't get him out of my system, even when the relationship took a downward turn and things started to go very bad. He was a biker, heavily involved in a motorcycle club and I grew up around bikers and loved them, but with him it happened almost overnight. He bought a Harley and then suddenly he was hanging out with bikers, and then, BOOM, he was involved in a club, and then he started getting this macho edge (even worse than the one he'd already possessed) and I was okay with that to a point, except for the fact that my life was beginning to be swallowed up in his. It was choking the life out of me; he didn't want to make any compromises toward the things I wanted but expected me to give up everything for him. I've just never been the kind of person who can be stifled like that indefinitely. I was and am a free spirited soul; I don't do well with too many restrictions. I need to feel like my own person because, well, I am! Anyway, in the end game, he got involved with a chick like half my age. This girl is in recovery but I don't think she was even of drinking age when she came into the rooms. Word had it that he was running around with her for about a year before we split up. Big ouch. I'd been weighing the pros and cons of the relationship myself, and had developed a crush on a guy friend (who is now living in Denver and knows who he is), but I never stepped over the line of faithfulness, regardless of how unhappy I was becoming in my existing relationship and how attracted I was to this other person. I was devastated when J made the decision to end our relationship and devastated even further when I found out about the cute, young chickie he decided to move into our apartment about two weeks after I moved out. Adding to my dismay was the fact that he'd threatened every guy with whom we had mutual contact, so that everyone was afraid to ask me out for fear of receiving a head pounding or worse. Oy. Anyway, my whole point to this diatribe was that since he and I still travel in some of the same circles, I have occasion to see J and chickie together now and then. They have a beautiful son and seem to be happy and I'm happy for them. I'm very happy in my own life and glad for the way life turned out. I love my husband truly, madly, deeply. Still, when I see them together, or even when I see just her alone, I get this feeling of discomfort in my belly. I don't know what it is or why it comes, but it was there when I saw her at a birthday party I took Bebe to for the son of a mutual friend of ours, and it was there last night when they both attended a talk that I also went to. It's not a wretched, violent feeling (that wouldn't really be in my nature anyway), but just a feeling of not wanting to be around to watch them. Maybe it's the feeling of having been wronged in a very intense way. Maybe it's just mistrust (when people do things to you that are slightly underhanded, sometimes the reaction is to avoid having further contact for fear of being hurt again). I can't pinpoint the exact reason for my distaste, I only know that I wish it to leave me. I suppose, over time, the feeling will fade. Anyway, there's no law that says I have to want to hang out with either of these two people. Maybe, eventually, I'll get my lifelong dream of being an artist in California and N and Bebe and I can get out of here and start someplace with no old memories of exes and past lives. Until then, it's one day at a time, conquering my inner demons and pressing on with love.