Bridges Burned

Faith, you're driving me away
You do it everyday
You don't mean it
But it hurts like hell

My brain says I'm receiving pain
A lack of oxygen
From my life support
My iron lung ~ Radiohead

Sometimes, you go through periods in your life that you know you'll look back on and say "that's when things really changed for me." I feel as if one of those times has been happening over the last two weeks, as if the changes I've been sensing would come, particularly in the last two years, have combined, amplified and blown up. Now, there is no going back. The way is shut.

If I had to define a starting point, it would be the fall of 2004. It was that point that I knew things needed to start changing in my life. I had nowhere near the clarity I have now, just a sense that I would need to move first, and worry about where I ended up later. I focused on something I could have a reasonable expectation of being able to actually change: my job.

I'd spent the better part of the previous decade being a secretary. For me, the work was mind numbingly boring. But in looking back, I see that with a depression that was at times, untreated, not well managed, or both, this was a job I could easily handle. I needed a way to make a living that I could "phone in" in terms of the mental and physical energy it required.

Eventually however, even that aspect lost any measure of compensation. I realized that I was in a fur lined rut. I wanted more out of life. I wanted more money, more options and a sense that I was going somewhere instead of just doing something to pay the bills until my "big break" [whatever that was] happened and my real life began.

So I began a new career in 2005, and worked my way through that, trying to cope with my weight, sleeping problems, undiagnosed depression, and just learning a whole new way of working. It was tough, and I didn't solve everything, but I made it to the other side.

Then in 2007, I auditioned for a play and got back into acting after a hiatus of over ten years. It was a wonderful experience and I felt as if I had found some lost part of myself.

This time also had its losses. In early 2008, my friendship of over 11 years with The Duke ended. I think I can safely speak for both of us when I say that due to a constellation of events, things had reached a natural end. Time passes, things change. As it is, we both have our viewpoints on the matter and what I suspect are different opinions on why our friendship ended. So be it. None of that changes the fact that we had a lot of good times together. It was what it was and things now are what they are.

So on it goes. I've been slogging away. Trying to take care of myself. Trying to make progress. Trying to let go of the vestiges of the last ten or so years and stop living in the past. Renegotiating my relationships, seeing things for what they really are.

Then in the last couple of weeks we had a major launch which was grueling to say the least. I wasn't sleeping well at all. The Marine was out of town working and I missed him terribly. Ragdoll was very very sick, in and out of hospital and I was very very worried. The battery on my car went. Then my Dad went in for his hip surgery, which fortunately he got through. The late arrival of a heatwave was splitting my brain in two.

Towards the end of last week, I was exhausted. I'd pretty much fucking had it. Then Thursday night, the bomb dropped. An internet search on a whim, lead me to find out that my first serious boyfriend, my first...well...everything, had died on December 29th of last year.

I've referred to him here only once. We were together for about 18 months. I can't begin to summarize what it was here, and I don't know if I would want to. Like any relationship, it had its good and bad points. But the bad unfortunately outweighed the good, for both of us. Long term, assuming things had remained unchanged, we never would have lasted. We were simply incompatible in a lot of meaningful ways. He had a quick anger and a selfish streak. I was too devoid of healthy boundaries, simply too new to relationships and in some respects had the instinct to withdraw when I needed to do him the courtesy of being honest. In my own ways, I too was selfish.

But fundamentally, being away from home was killing the Maritimer's soul. I've never met someone from either coast who liked living here. There's something about growing up by the sea and not surrounded by so many people that gets in the blood. When the Marine and I went to Martha's Vineyard, I got a glimmer of understanding of what had drawn the Maritimer back home, why he found the middle ground of the country intolerable.

I still remember the Maritimer leaving. He was taking the train back, and he joked at the time that it would be a lot more romantic saying goodbye at the train station than at the airport. The night before he left, I wrote him a card and enclosed in it a ring to remember me by. I'd purchased it at the Globe Theatre in London when it was still being built in the mid-1990s. It was a gold plated replica of a ring found in an excavation of the original Rose Theatre site. In old French it said, PENCE POUR MOYE, DV [Think of me, God willing.]

The ring represented to me, something that was an important part of my soul, as well as a beautiful momento of what had been one of the nicest trips I've ever had. The ring meant a lot to me and the Maritimer had meant a lot to me. I wanted to give it to him because despite how much he had hurt me at times, he had also made me incredibly happy. As Alistair MacLeod so aptly put it, "we are all better, for having been loved."

The morning of his depature, the Maritimer opened the card and saw the ring. He teared up a bit as he read the card. Finishing, he put the ring on his pinky finger and declared he'd wear it until the day he died. I drove him to Union Station and we said our goodbye at the platform entrance. I don't remember exactly what was said between us, but I do remember him saying "Please don't cry or I'll lose it too." He walked up the platform entrance, turned at the end, looked back and waved to me, forcing a smile. I never dreamed that would be the last time I would see him.

For a number of years we phoned each other, the frequency relenting as time passed and we settled into our respective lives. I thought at times about just packing up and moving to the east coast, knowing it would end in disaster, but contemplating the thought anyway. Our last phone call wasn't a good one. By then, the Marine and I were together and had bought a house. Any civility the Maritimer had been maintaining dropped.

I still remember the sarcastic hiss of his voice when he said "Congratulations." My Christmas card that year was returned with the words "wrong address" scribbled on the front in what looked like the Maritimer's writing, though I couldn't be sure. Any semblance that we could remain friends was gone. I felt hurt and angry, on the most basic level, as if there was some expectation on his part that my life stop in his absence, when he wasn't exactly living like a monk. He after all, had left me.

To be sure, I called his number. It was out of service. I then called a friend of his and confirmed he had moved. She gave me his new number. I went through the motion of writing it down and after hanging up, discarded it instead of putting it amongst the scraps of paper where I had written down his other numbers and addresses.

I nursed a lot of anger for a while. Petty, silly snippets of thought would enter my mind, stupid self-centered things like "well if I ever visit Halifax I'm not looking him up.", "If I got famous, he'd probably blab about our sex life.", "he probably pawned that ring." I'm ashamed of myself now for being so shallow. Another part of me felt that he perhaps didn't even want to talk to me, given our last exchange and that's why he didn't get in touch again. I feel like a fool.

I suppose I had always maintained a fantasy that the Marine and I would visit Halifax one day, and somehow I'd find the Maritimer. We'd have an awkward moment, then laugh, then hug and catch up on each other's lives over coffee or beers, a new, different friendship beginning, all the old hurts melting away and he and the Marine exchanging quips and cracking each other up.

It was this vision that made me search for him on the internet now and again, but I never found him. He was a Luddite at heart, and I regretted discarding his info. There were always so many phone listings with his name that I was too intimdated to work through them all. Last week, I once again typed in his name and "halifax." The first result to come up was a memorial concert at a local pub to honour the sudden passing of a local bartender with the same name. And in that moment I knew, because the Maritimer had loved music so much. I searched around a bit more for definitive proof, trying not to jump to conclusions. Then I found a web page talking about the concert with his picture.

I am not as unmoved as I initially thought. Since the shock's worn off, I have been incredibly sad, fumbling emotional loose ends, crying wretched deep sobs when I have moments alone. What I have found the most heartbreaking though, was that the web page I found with his picture also linked to a video of him on youtube from 2007. It's from a DVD, and he's reading the rules for a drinking game. On his right pinky finger, is a slim gold ring. He deserved more credit than I gave him. I perhaps meant more to him, than I gave myself credit for.

And so a door is closed. No semblance of the previous era in my life remains, nothing of what I might have been trying to hang onto is here anymore.

Things have really changed for me.

The one consolation I take from all of this, is that had I not had my relationship with the Maritimer, my relationship with the Marine may never have happened. Having not had any experience at a real relationship, and the very great joy it is capable of bringing, I may never have had the courage to take a chance and ask the Marine to dinner. He might have slipped through my fingers. And for that, for having the Marine in my life, I am so immensely grateful to the Maritimer and the fact that at one time, I had him in my life too. What a blessing he gave me, that when love came around again, I knew. By God, I knew.