Going our separate ways. Oct. 23, 1985

 

 

She finally said it.

She’s going down toe Maryland with her husband, something we both knew was inevitable from the start, but we somehow deluded ourselves into believing – if temporarily – otherwise.

It’s easy to forget such details when you get wrapped up in emotions, and so the Summer of 1985 turns out to be the Summer of Safire.

I’m not unhappy about any of it, the good, the bad (and to quote that old western) and the ugly.

I’m mostly relieved.

A bit sad over the good times lost, but also not at all sad at having escaped something I knew neither of us really wanted but needed to go through the motions of pretending like we did.

Safire is a great person, but someone so caught up in the pursuit of the American Dream, she would never have found contentment with someone like me.

She is used to a kind of life I could never give her. I’ll always likely struggle with finances and balancing the art against the need to survive. She wants – and deserves – better than that.

I have grown used to being alone; used to the freedom that comes with it.

It is hard to compromise that, to give time to something I never felt would work in the first place and to a dream that is not my dream.

Back with Fran I always struggled to find time to write and time to make her happy. With Safire, this would have been worse.

And yet, I do not look forward to the empty bed, and the loss of companionship, needing to fill both spaces with something when she is gone and at a loss as to what to fill them with.

The zine won’t be enough. You can’t make love to a literary magazine or wrap your arms around it on a cold night (not that there were many cold nights over the last summer, but I project this into the winter when I most would have needed to feel her warmth beside me.)

I anticipate regret I do not yet feel, the intense loneliness, and the questioning as to whether I did something stupid – again.

But these are also the same conditions that motivate me, things that bring out the artist, and cause me to create.

It’s not that I want or like to be alone, it’s just out of these conditions I find my muse.

Scary thought.

I have always been a solitary animal, even when I’m with other people, with one particular person, keeping secrets inside my head that I tell no one, sometimes not even myself.

And yet, I’m also always in search of the perfect relationship, a point in which all the pieces come together, when I can have intense passion with a woman and intensity with my art as well.

Michael mentioned this a couple of days ago.

“You need someone who is self-sufficient, someone who meets you on the same level, needs what you need,” he said, meaning another artist or poet or musician with the same secret other person inside she won’t want to give up even for love, and won’t need me to give undying attention to, nor I need her for the same reasons.

I suspect there will be temporary arrangements coming to fill the basic needs we all have, the warmth in bed, the arms around me, the kisses and hugs. But these things will be temporary peace treaties with the desperate need to create.

No, I’m not upset at Safire leaving, not in emotional way I thought I might be, but I will miss her tenderness and her company, but it is better we part now as friends, then come to hate each other later when we come to realize how trapped we’d become.


 1985 Menu



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