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



email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more