The Blessing Room

I Thought I Was No Fun, Then I Received A Surprising Text

Hello Beyonders!

What a time we’re having in Michigan: over the weekend, I was in flip flops and a dress; yesterday: hat, scarf, and my winter coat. I had bees living in my basement for a few days because it was too cold to install them. But today the temperatures rose to the fifties, the sun came out, and the bees are happily buzzing about their hive. Watching and listening to them provides tremendous contentment; every cell in my body relaxes. My back garden always feels a little empty until they’re here. But now we’re ready for summer!

Today’s essay is written by me. From when I was nineteen until thirty-three I was dating then living with then married to the love of my life. I thought our divorce would be more than I could bear. Luckily, that wasn’t true, but it did wall off a piece of my heart—and leave me with a skewed sense of myself that I carried for decades. But as it turns out, healing can stretch over years and years and miles and miles. Self-perceptions can change in an instant. And we can get to know ourselves anew.

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The Blessing Room

I have a strict rule with myself: when walking Delilah and Cookie, no phone. This May afternoon though, deep in the woods, in what I call my blessing room because of the way myriad trees weave arched limbs into a temple roof and the gentle communion with stillness, the draw was irresistible.

            There, in a grey bubble, was a message from my ex-husband. We’d been divorced over two decades; hadn’t been in touch for years.

            You and me did great things.

            Sorry for the end bit.

            I sank onto a log; my heart both bright and damp with lost grief.

            We met as teenagers in the early eighties on the Detroit club scene; he an aspiring musician and I an aspiring photographer. He ran the video room at Todd’s where he created hypnotic montages of Klaus Nomi, Captain Beefheart, and William Burroughs as Dr. Benway—and sold pills from the pouches of his beat-up, leather Army belt slung low on his narrow hips. His dyed-black hair lingered over what I would later discover were swimming-pool blue eyes. When he wasn’t running videos, he was singing in the hallowed local band. All the girls wanted him. He, inexplicably, wanted me.

            I say inexplicably because whilst I, too, lived at the clubs, danced until my shins vibrated, drank and did drugs, and drove home squinting into the rising sun, I was straight compared to the crowd he moved with. For one thing, I was in college. For another, I didn’t own a gun or shoot up anything or steal my friend’s grandmother’s silver tea set.            

            And yet: We couldn’t get enough of one another. He liked that I was smart and thumbed through the piles of books dense along my bed. I liked that his voice sounded like sandpaper and sweet cream—and that he, too, was smart, though he did his best to keep it hidden. We both loved cats. And road trips. And rooted for the underdog. And we both wanted to live in New York City.

            After a while I dropped out of school to pursue my dreams and found a tiny studio with a fireplace in The Village. He soon followed. Our only furniture was a futon and his drum kit. We ate buckets of ice cream and watched The Honeymooners and howled with laughter—to the moon, Alice—and on hot nights we perched on the fire escape and tossed eggs at the incessantly honking cars below. Our first Valentine’s Day we were broke, so he ripped tiny paper hearts and inscribed each with something he cherished about me and put them in a paper bag so I could pull them out one by one.

            We were in that precarious territory between like and love.

            “I loke you,” one of us said to the other, our fingers intertwined as the sun soaked in through the window.

            “I loke you, too.”

            Then came love, a four-room apartment on Great Jones, a record deal, two kitties, and marriage. Our love deepened as we made joint friends, learned to cook, spent weekends exploring the Catskills. I finished school, took a job managing an upscale clothing store in Soho, and did photo shoots on the side. The band took off; their first show was Wembley Arena opening for Metallica. Walking from the tour bus to the stadium, fans hung from the tall iron fences calling his name, like in Beatles’ documentaries. He threw his arm around my shoulder; I felt whole.

            But as he grew more enmeshed in the rock world, I became involved in the burgeoning raw foods movement on the Lower East Side and wiled away hours reading up on the Dalai Lama’s take on suffering and compassion. By my mid-twenties, clubs, drinking, and drugs didn’t appeal to me. Suddenly, I was in bed by midnight; he was just getting ready to go out.

            “It’s not healthy, baby,” I would say. “Let’s get some sleep.”

            “You used to be fun,” he would counter, flipping his cascade of now gloriously long blonde hair over his shoulder.

            The cats would work their way between our legs, back and forth, as if sewing us back together.

            I couldn’t help it, I took his staying out late personally, and over time tried every response to his eventual return: yelling, sobbing, ignoring, once even taking the cats and checking into the Washington Square Hotel so I wouldn’t be there when he got home—but he didn’t get in until eight in the morning and by then I was already back and cooking oatmeal.

            We began to argue over who did the dishes more, who vacuumed more, as if by controlling the household chores I could by extension control his drinking.

            But even in the throes of our worst fights, we’d burst into laughter over a word one of us used or the silly way we moved our hands; “Oh, baby,” he’d say, “I could never love anyone but you. Let’s never be apart.” We’d tumble into our iron bed beneath the skylight where he'd read aloud a line of Burroughs then I'd read a line of Faulkner. Back and forth. Together, we created our own story. 

            Yet, in our thirties, we entered marriage counseling. We perched on our therapist’s couch while she listened to what one of us said, then repeated it back. This was surprisingly helpful. When she repeated my words, it was as if I heard my soul speaking; and when they were my husband’s words I heard them soft and plush and lost the need to be defensive. The sessions were often painful, followed by silent elevator rides back down to 8th Street, yet we found compromise.

            A few nights a week, I’d go out with him but rather than coming home with the sun, we’d leave at two. The rest of the nights, he’d stay home. We’d zip the sleeping bags together the way we had all those years ago, and lay on the floor, watching James Bond marathons or making love or both.

            And then: One hot summer night we went to a loft party in Brooklyn. We shared plastic cups of bourbon, laughed at silly things, gazed out the window at the vastness of the world, kissed in the corner, and held hands as we slid into the cab at one a.m. alongside our good friends. But when the cab stopped in front of our building and I climbed out, my ex dropped my hand.

            “I’m just going to get one more with the boys,” he said, his words sweet but slurred.

            When he called in the morning, I’d been awake all night. “I can’t do this anymore. You need to stop drinking.”

            “I know,” he said. He sounded broken.

            For a stretch, we continued to see the therapist individually. He moved in with a friend as we weighed our next step and one day he came by, the key in the lock igniting my cells one final time.

            “I saw Joan today,” he said, his voice higher than his usual rasp.

            “Yes.”

            “I decided I want to drink. I like it.”  

            My body thudded right through to my toes. I knew in its essence this prioritizing of Jack Daniels had nothing to do with his love for me. And yet I blamed myself for not being prettier, cooler, for turning away from the fun; for complaining about the dishes and going to bed too early. After all, he was right: I was the one who’d changed.

            Through the dividing of belongings and hiring of lawyers and seemingly endless tears, we swore we’d be best friends forever: whoever comes next will just have to understand.

            Yet shortly after signing the divorce papers, he disappeared. For two years, not even his parents knew where he was. I felt hollowed with betrayal. I took up boxing, writing, spent the winter in Vietnam, dated a series of inconsequential men—yet a chunk of my heart, messy and yearning, was locked off from myself. While I understood why my marriage had come apart, some part of me longed for the old Jane: drinking, out at the clubs, adored by my ex; the Jane who hadn’t become a buzzkill.

            When my ex resurfaced via a phone call, the rasp of his voice lit up my blood stream; we’d once been a unified energy field. I later learned, he’d been in London living an often hard and dark life. The talk was light, airy; there was laughter. But there was an undertow of awkwardness and uncertainty. Toward the end, I apologized for my controlling ways. He thanked me but offered no counter apology. After that we were lightly in touch for over a decade, letting the other know when a parent or mutual friend died, or a beloved author was doing a reading. From what I could glean, he was still drinking. We fell out of contact for many years. And then the text.

            Delilah nudged her nose against my knee; resting on walks was not part of our protocol.

             “One moment, D,” I said.

            I wondered if the text had been difficult for my ex to write. Where he’d been when he sent it. What had prompted him.

            A friend later commented, eighth step. And a ribbon of hope coursed through me.

            I slid my finger over the text. Such simple words to convey so much. But I felt them! After our divorce, I’d worked with a new therapist. No matter how many ways we examined it, I could never shake the feeling that I’d stopped being fun and by doing so had brought my marriage to its knees. I’d carried this weight for decades; it had helped form how I saw myself: uptight and controlling. A self-view that had sometimes held me back from things that I wanted. Now, at last, this acknowledgement from my once beloved ex-partner: It hadn’t been me, after all. It hadn’t been him, either. It was the addiction.

            And there on the log, in my blessing room, deep in my chest, something shifted. A loosening. An unscrewing of a clamp that I’d long forgotten was there. And my breath came fat and buoyant.

            I rose, the afternoon sun gentle on my face; the dogs and I stepped forward.

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Tell me, have you ever lost a relationship to addiction?

Or have you ever been made to feel un-fun or uncool?

I'd love to hear your stories in the comments, please join me there! 

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