Sludge Utopia

by Catherine Fatima

  Walking across the street to our home, I finally shouted in frustration that I wanted to sob but couldn’t, because I wasn’t alone! I continued crying while we were in bed, with the lights off, when I faced away from him as he spoke. He brought up things I said I didn’t want to do before the death, volunteering the prospects again: will you do this for a grieving man? I look at the way he behaves sometimes and think I really would not, even given the circumstances. But I don’t know that! But, no: this is how Max is: the pushing, the not caring absolutely so much about what others prefer to do. It’s just a natural application of this tendency to the present situation. And I know that this is his time, but it makes me feel awful that I don’t even think he knows my parents’ names. Sometimes I volunteer things from my own family life to provide him context for how I experience loss or attachment, and rather than ask me further how I feel, he just makes some flippant comment about how I should consider bringing it up to my therapist, because: have I looked into that? As if it’s fucking possible that I hadn’t! As if his basic expectation of me is that I am not studying these things, exploring them, writing about them every fucking day with extreme care.

  * * *

  On Friday after work, while Max was still at his mother’s with his sister, I stopped by Maurice and Rebecca’s, with whom I hadn’t yet brought any of this up. And Maurice’s mother came in, and even just listening to me matter-of-factly tell her the content of my day, she could hardly believe it all: well, I live with a partner now. It’s very complicated. And his father just passed, yesterday. And I’ve just seen my own mother, who was married in Morocco two weeks ago. Oh, the last husband she moved away for? Well, that was years ago. The prospect of relocation isn’t so complicated now because she’s just been fired from her job. Well, it was a long time coming; she took this job in the throes of a deep depression… And her: “Oh, Catherine. You know you’re always welcome here.” (Which, I suppose, reminds me of whose death would make me flip my shit.)

  * * *

  Last night, I came home exhausted, unsure of when Max would return. I felt sad, tearful, trapped. Like I had no idea when this breakup could even happen. Like I have no idea how many more ways I’ll display commitment while just trying to be good to the person who needs me right now. How I have nowhere to go, short of Maurice’s house, to just sit in bed crying, because if Max were to get home and see me like this it would be so demonstrative, and I don’t have the heart to tell him before the funeral that the tears aren’t out of sympathy but out of a will to escape. And that any time I get close to hurting Max, I become suddenly aware of how fucking deep things are, how much he appears to believe in the certainty of this relationship. And suddenly I realize how mad he’ll be at me for simply saying that I saw a future, for telling him I would be with him. But how couldn’t I?! It just seemed like the thing to do to make the present bearable. It even seemed like a surprise to him when I described feeling like I was on a steady emotional decline since the day I flew back to Toronto. He suggested I go out because I appeared to be in such a bad mood last night, and I said, with whom? I reached out to Caroline, but she was busy. I had seen Maurice and Rebecca the evening prior. I asked: “Max, did you notice that I was out of Toronto for three months, and have since spent virtually every day with you? Who do you think I carry on a relationship with? Who do you think my friends are?” His suggestion was then that he should text Lori to ask her to include me in whatever her plans were, and I, of course: “What in the world are you thinking?!” Then he tries to get me to call him stupid, and I say, no, I’m not ever going to call you stupid, I’m not ever going to make you feel like your behaviour is the result of some permanent inability, considering this is exactly how you feel about yourself. This morning minor quibbles, too. Like, he goes, “I think a big fear of yours is that you’re not emotionally equipped to handle things,” and I go, “Yep! You got it!” and he goes, “See, even this response…” And I’m sure it’s very odd that any of these conversations are taking place, considering his father died three days ago, but conversational time seems at once infinite and bound to old favourites.

  It’s almost as though my mother, stealthy, had done something so perversely smart and quietly caring to start rejecting, neglecting, and lashing out at me after her divorce from my father. Until a certain time, I was her confidante—a tiny source of care—but sometime in adolescence, this ended. Was it carelessness? Was it, as I’d always thought, just a reaction to me as an emblem of my father, whom she so resented? Or was it being so scarred by dominance and beholdenness that she wouldn’t subject me to it—that she would never allow me, at a certain point, to be pressured into thinking she needed care? And did this involve stopping the faucet of extraneous care she could display to me, which I would otherwise feel the burden to repay?

  I do not know how a better-equipped person deals with the pain of others, but knowing this is not my lot in life.

  Whether they end it or I end it, my final pleas are always the same: “I just like laughter and touch!”

  It’s true that not a dick is a lithium pill. You learn this when someone else’s presence is so well normalized in your life that you can be completely despondent even when they’re near.

  * * *

  Max’s father’s funeral is today, and I’m not going. Just dawdling around campus, smoking cigarettes in the sun. This is something that angers him. Rightfully in his perspective, I’m sure. Rightfully with the understanding that I want to be with Max, that I want each of our lives to be the life of the other. The information he is crucially missing is that I’m certain I don’t want this.

  I spend so much time in bed, so much time tearful. Guilty about what I cannot give, or what I won’t. Guilty but with the knowledge that even in the wake of his father’s death, his behaviour isn’t exceptional. He will always see me as an extension of himself first, and a person of my own second. He has tricked himself into this, but I have helped him, without caution. It is both our faults.

  I cannot imagine what it is to lose a father, because I’ll never have to. Perhaps when I want to make my life with someone, I’ll see it possible to imagine for them. Or perhaps even then I’ll be unable. But we’ll see.

  This morning, leaving the house, I saw Freida leave hers. I called out to her, threw myself against her body in a move one would have to call a “hug,” and immediately started crying. I felt bad for having trapped her. She did not ask to run into me. We simply live near each other. I am more eager to share my troubles with her than she is to share her own with me.

  Even during his experience of grief, Max feels bad that he cannot help when he sees that I have spent all day crying in bed with aches of head and body. His days haven’t been the same, because they’ve been with his mother and sister, occupied. He thinks he cannot help me because of his duty to himself right now, or because of his duty to his family. This is not so. He cannot help because that is not how it works. He cannot help because only I can help myself, because I will not welcome intervention. I have never had helpful intervention. His will not be the first. Guilt and pressure where it regards him are chief among those things keeping me feeling sick. I’d be happier with a duty only to myself. I want autonomy. I want to be alone.

  He wants me to be a better person for relationships, but I do not share this desire. He sees in me more that is curable than I want cured. What does he want? He tells me his peers advised, after his relationship with Cybil, that his next girlfriend should be his own age, but he took up with me even before that relationship was over. And they’re right, perhaps. What do you think you’re getting from some cute twenty-five-year-old with a will toward freedom who asks little from you and seems to desire to give you not much in return? You’re getting exactly that. If you want someone with experience and confidence in providing a whole spectrum of care for others, be with them. He knows what I’m good for. Laughter and touch. Looking cute and saying cute things. If you want an older, ser
ious woman: find her. She will be so glad to settle down. She will be so glad for an emotionally committed person. (She will likely have different expectations than I do. What they say about cakes.)

  It is not necessary that either of us spend our lives like this, but when on earth is the right time to make this clear to him?

  But it’s absurd, though, right? That “privacy” just takes the root of privation and spins it to something quite good? I feel very sick, but I am smoking.

  There’s no mystery to being lovable. You have to demonstrate what looks like love according to whomever else’s standard, or they have to trick themselves into thinking that, in some other circumstance, you’d be able to.

  I think of the extreme verbal acuity that Max and I share as something that is a part of love, but I’m not being true to myself in thinking this. Hyperverbality is a characteristic of excitement. I want a love that gives me the comfort and security to shut the fuck up. I want a love that does not seek affirmation always. I want a love quiet at home making room for other things. I want a love that I don’t worry about: neither losing nor maintaining it. I want us both occupied, quietly, working, reading the news. Laughing and touching. When the time is right. I want a love for which the laughter and touch just come forth from two lives being handled well, separately. Codependence is not desirable to me. To Max it is. Kindly, he’s already warned me this week that I might think the worst has passed, but it hasn’t. Grief lasts a very long time. He will never return to a state before the death. He will always be, from now on, in a post-death state.

  * * *

  People love others in relationships. Women especially, I think. It makes you socially valuable and socially monitorable. It makes you a link, a way of knowing another. It makes you less threatening. It makes your partner less threatening, too. The two of you form an observable unit keeping each other on an even keel, disturbing little. You’re welcomed in a way you wouldn’t otherwise be. You’re cared for, because people will protect the loved ones of their friends. The more relationships, the more public familiality. It doesn’t move too much and people trust it. To be in a relationship is to have someone vouch for you. It is a way of maintaining public regulation, and it is safe.

  Terminology. When I last saw Caroline, she asked, as though it would be clarifying, “I know you love him, but are you in love with him?” In. Sure, yes, I’m in it every day. It’s a struggle to get out of. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try my best to.

  Trying to make clear to Max how much less I feel I ask of him than he does of me, I ask, “What does it seem like I need from you?” And he answers, “Touch, lots of physical touch.” So they do know some of how you feel, almost as if they’ve been eavesdropping. I can go without touch. I can handle myself.

  * * *

  I don’t want Max in my future. He would know he felt the same way if he weren’t so blinded by need right now. He knows I’m filling a need, and I know I’ll decline to do so any longer starting next year. The worst is over. Even if he won’t be “himself” for months or years, the worst that I’ll feel myself beholden to is over. He mentioned even going to New York in January again. I expected he’d be more certain about his will to move if his father weren’t here to care for any longer, and I was right. He asks in passing if I’ll still want to be with him long-distance, and I say yes, in passing, too. But when we speak of this more seriously and with greater focus, I’ll say no.

  It’s so funny, stupid, to think of staying “together” if he ends up spending months at a time in the US. For text messaging? So he would come home to someone guaranteed to fuck him? He’d just look to how checked out I seem and give himself permission to fuck someone else if he got the chance, and he’d leave me outright if someone nearer to him showed him care. I know these things. Just look at how he and I came to be. I shouldn’t “be with him” while he is elsewhere so he has a semblance of security while he’s actually, as he always is, open to better options. The time to pretend that my angel is innocent is over. He’s an adult. We can be honest with each other. And we don’t have to live our lives together, regardless of how unchallenging it is to cuddle.

  He is a man who will rationalize whatever behaviour if he doesn’t feel himself to be getting enough. And so we chose each other.

  * * *

  Big time for emotions. Feel settled today, as yesterday I sank incredibly low, weeping nude in a bathroom stall of the gym, thinking about: childhood; doom; attachment; grief; suffering; patience; and compassion for others and self. This was all slightly hungover following the previous day where, in the morning, I took a small amount of mushrooms and a medium dose of Dexedrine in order to write a paper, but instead was given the gift of extreme concentration to devote to dozens and dozens of advice columns, together with several articles on adult children of narcissists and/or adult children of alcoholics. Then, in the evening, coming down off speed slightly, I accompanied Max to a bar with his friends. It was delightful, a lovely time, a selection of people I really enjoy. Stayed late. We all stayed late enough that we were essentially escorted out by the staff at closing. Returning home, I fixed drinks for Max and myself with the last of some Siberian vodka that Ivan had brought back as a souvenir last winter. And then, drunk and on a comedown, I told Max I did not feel certain of continuing on with him. I said that I hoped he would move in January, that, returning to Toronto in September, I’ve always been certain he would have to. He asked, what if I stay? I said, in that case, I would leave the apartment. I told him that I didn’t have any desire to take our lives and put them in a common direction. I told him that we need different things from people, and this incompatibility was too significant to bridge. I told him that even if I could change, he didn’t make it so I wanted to. I said I thought of him as disloyal and I didn’t trust him not to betray me the moment he feels mistreated. This is the only time he objected and said that my saying so hurt his feelings. I told him all I’d been thinking and he asked, “But it doesn’t matter to you what we have?” I: “What do we have? Conversations. And if we weren’t together, we’d have them with someone else.” Ultimately after all this I gave him a long, tender, concerted blow job. We spent yesterday apart, but we talked a little after a show in bed, and this morning over breakfast I read him translations of Italian idioms involving food. Acknowledging everything that had happened the night before, we still spoke of travelling together to Italy someday.

  * * *

  Life has been consistent for a few days. I’ve been opened up to this relationship since I voiced my fears about it. I realized that what I was telling this man is that I’m too doomed not to move on from him because I’m built that way. But why move on? To what? To another I’d have to move on from, whom I wouldn’t love like I love Max? Confessing that all actions feel like burdens can suddenly dispel those very burdens. Ate at his mother’s and it felt like no particular thing this week, for instance. A great deal of my stress feels relieved. Surprise, surprise, the day I was on speed I had these crystal-clear revelations about life, which I didn’t manage to articulate on paper, but they’re still in my head, I’m sure. I think I’ve just accepted a whole lot of my life at once in a lovely way. Not worried about losing my life. Surprise, surprise! It’s always your life! There’s no decision you might otherwise have made!

  I’ve chosen optimism: I’m not so doomed that I can’t sustain intimacy. I’ve chosen to trust him, to trust that he won’t abandon me once he’s gotten what he needs. I’ve chosen that touch, love, and support can be the baseline of life from which everything else jumps forth, and love stops being difficult the moment you commit yourself to it. You say: the knowledge that I’m with him: that’s where it starts. And it’s a wonderful thing. I’m right: my life won’t be what it was anymore. I’ve tried so hard to keep some semblance of my former life beneath the one I’m building with Max now, so that in case we split, I’ll be able to return to it, but that won’t happen. Even if we come a
part, my life will come out the other side, changed.

  * * *

  What should I know already, goddamn? That I should trust my instincts, because they change less than they gather evidence.

  * * *

  After the time I told Max I didn’t want to be with him, drunk and high on Dexedrine, I told him again, sober, and have since repeated it. It’s difficult, as I feel extremely low and so am still affectionate with him. In light of this, he has called the whole thing “very silly.” However, I am resolute. I’d prefer to eliminate the attachment to him from my life and repopulate that space with all that had once been there, even if at this time of the year what is there is stillness, darkness, and old TV shows I already know I like. He’ll keep thinking it’s impossible in the context of my attraction to him or my care for him, but this is how the lover interprets the beloved: everything is a ruse except love. Everything else is some conspiratorial charade. Everything else is something to get to the bottom of. But: no: I melt before touch, but I am certain I don’t want it from him in my future. And now that I’ve made it clear to him, my feelings will not vacillate again.

  There is a sort of eroticism I share with Max beyond anything I’ve had before. Freud has written that the sexual relation brings us back to a childlike place, and I’ve always thought of this as ridiculous. But now I see it. Near him, I hardly feel our bodies as separate, and I feel permitted to be at play with them. I am relaxed enough near him that my mind is free to roam in senseless and infantile ways, and I play it out with him physically. He does, too. I think he’s better acquainted with his giddy unconscious. Being with him is to behave without a layer of conscious self-surveillance. Must be what happens when you spend so much time with someone that your mind hardly processes them as a separate being anymore. It would happen were I to share this—intimacy—with any number of people. It doesn’t tell me that Max is right for me.