October 29, 2003 What's Your Encore?

These are the possibilities as I see them. (A) They are married either for "love" or for immigration / insurance purposes. (B) He lied that they are married for immigration / insurance purposes. These possibilities equally horrify me, honestly. (A) is clearly horrifying. (B) is no less horrifying, because the honest, ethical S. whom I knew is not the kind of person who would do such a thing. But then, who am I say what kind of person he is? CLEARLY I DO NOT KNOW THIS. I think somehow I should be more upset than I am, but it's just like it's par for the course. Like there's nothing he can do that can hurt me more than he already has. Even this. I suppose that there are ways I could find out whether he is actually married. I could find out through friends of friends, check the marriage records of the parish (aren't those public?), or ask him my own damn self. But I really would just rather not. I would rather not involve myself emotionally any more than I already have. I would rather just drop kick it far away from myself and my psyche and my heart like I've tried to do with everything else related to this whole debacle. So I'm not going to say anything else about it to anyone, I'm not going to spread it through the grapevine, I'm just going to leave whatever mess he has gotten himself into to him. A small part of me worries that one or both of them really was hurt in the accident, and I cannot help but feel pain when thinking that, but I remind myself that even their being hurt or his car being totaled does not excuse him for his behavior towards me or his behavior in either marrying or not marrying this woman and lying about it for whatever his fucked up reasons. And that I have a right to be angry even if at the same time I cannot help but also be concerned as I have a heart beating in my chest. I come back to that line in Clerks, "What's your encore? Do you, like, anally rape my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank?" Which is just to say that EVEN THIS is no more wretched than what has already happened. It is not a shock that ultimately he is a morally bankrupt asshole who is devoid of both a backbone and a conscience, it just cements his assholery even further. Which brings less pain, somehow, than a strange satisfaction. So he's either (A) married to this woman or (B) not married and committing fraud on behalf of this woman, both of which lead only to one place, which is to (C), which is the place where exist the facts that I obviously never knew him and that there is unfathomably being revealed yet another layer of icing on the cake of despair and salvation, despair because my heart got broken and salvation because the universe or God or something saved me from marrying him myself. So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers, all false. The truth is that I'm a bad person, but that's going to change, I'm going to change. This is the last of this sort of thing. I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. get notified. journal archives © Copyright 2003 elb

In the dream I keep having about Jordan Catalano, I'm trying to catch up with him. But it's hard, because there's something wrong with the floor. Sometimes my father is there. Sometimes my great-aunt Gertrude's funeral kinda gets mixed in with it. The end of the dream is always the same -- I catch up with him. I yell and scream, how he hurt and betrayed me. How I can never forgive him. He just stands there, like someone caught in a storm who stopped caring how what he gets. Then I wake up. The storm of words still pounds through my body. Hatred can become, like, food. It gives you this energy. You can, like, live off it. My So-Called Life (Can you tell what DVDs I'm making my way through?)