mardi, le 08 septembre 2009
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
~Charles Baudelaire
Today The Princess and I have taken to bed.
The pain in my back makes movement near impossible and I decided to force my back to rest. The Princess delights in my decision. She doesn’t have to lie on a narrow, hollow couch to be close to me, she can curl up right next to me and do what she does best: heave huge big, sighs in the big, big bed.
I try to force my mind between the pages of a book, but it keeps hopping from colour to colour of the carefully painted stripes on my bedroom walls and from there it jumps to the ceiling to play lavish games amongst the ornate designs.
And my mind wanders til it finds the thing it likes to wonder about most: L’homme.
In the fighting weeks of earlier this year, I’d often accuse L’homme that he drinks too much. He told me one day that a very clever and important geneticist once diagnosed him with Tourettes Syndrome and one of the disorders associated with Tourettes is an excessive desire to drink. I think he called it being a hydrophiliac. But that means getting sexual excitement from water. Is that maybe why L’homme often wanked in the shower?
Anyway, at the time I did some rudimentary searches and didn’t find anything to substantiate his claims. Besides, to me this just reeked of shifting responsibility, of finding a way out. If he was that concerned about the Tourettes diagnosis, I would’ve heard about this years ago. And like he blames his broadband bill on hacking, he could blame his excessive drinking on a syndrome that resulted in involuntary actions.
What is true though, is that individuals with Tourettes often experience a host of additional behavioural problems and herein I think may lie more truth.
I’m not going to try to label the personality of L’homme. He is too much a mixture of sensitivity, of caring, of intelligence, of wit, of an ability to make me laugh and then an ability to be unbearably cold, distant, cruel and even malicious.
I wonder whether L’homme felt that while I provided all the money, all the comfort, all the ease of a beautiful artistic home, I also gave him a sense that he was in control. No need for him to take responsibility, not need for him to be involved, no need for him to participate. Easy come, easy go, he can just go with the flow. But when the recession hit our household, he needed to take some control over his own life, some responsibility and I very strongly sensed that he resented me for that.
Does the easy life suppress his own disorders, and when unease sets in, does he become diseased? His inability to maintain enduring relationships has in the past surfaced in times of unease, as has his marked proneness to blame others, the others usually being me.
Yes, I was partially to blame for the financial recession we were in, but so was he. And his irritability with me increased, it became palpable and I became the reason for his unease. And he cunningly and manipulatively blamed me for the satisfaction he was finding in his increased drinking, increased porn site surfing until I believed I was not good enough.
And given this belief about myself that I’ve carried around for so long, I find it hard to make the mental switch that L’homme’s leaving had nothing to do with me. I did not loose my mind, I did not go crazy, all I am guilty of is of not being able to maintain him in the lifestyle of ease he had become accustomed to. Surprisingly, eventually even he realised his ongoing threats to sue me for that, were wearing a bit thin.
Is it true then, that in the final analysis, when financial discomfort replaced financial comfort, it gave rise to all L’homme’s unease and he fell prey to disease and he lost his mind and he went crazy and with callous unconcern and with total lack of empathy for my feelings, he simply had to leave?
My poor darling ill at ease, riddled with disease, L’homme!! And the saddest part for me, is the constant refrain in my head: Oh my love, my old, my sweet, my gentle love. From year to year as all the seasons fall, I love you more you know, I love you … still
(The Princess happily sharing a day of forced bed rest.)
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