Coming Out of the Dark

My husband has been subletting on the sunnier coast for just nearing six weeks now. I haven't written much about it because, frankly, I haven't known how the hell to talk about it. When he visited LA in March to explore his career options, our lives took a sharp turn toward what is commonly referred to by our actor friends as The Inevitable: the sometimes-hard-to-swallow reality that the big pool of work lies out west while the cultural and intellectual baby pool we really wanna congregate in floats smack dab on this lean and leggy east coast isle. That sharp turn was both unexpected and exciting, but we knew things were never gonna be the same and that eventually, some kind of really hard decision was gonna have to be made about place or career or both.

Shortly after the March trip, we decided to pool every financial and emotional resource we had to send him back there as an all-out immersion experiment...just to see what would happen if he...lived there, for a time, as an actor, undivided. You can read his blow-by-blow at CouldYouPleaseJustNot. Below is my east coast version of that all-out immersion experiment.

It's no secret that I've taken a pretty bumpy ride to Psycho Town this summer, visiting my relatives on the dark side often and with gusto, downing vodka sodas, even digging deep to dust off the old agoraphobia. I picked a fight with our creepy neighborhood cross-dresser after he tossed an empty cup into a flowering bush, audibly sobbed my way through a documentary about modern China's stranglehold on peasant farmers, spent an afternoon detailing the back panels of my bathroom door with a bleach wipe, spent all day in the dark watching Michael Jackson's funeral, and peeled, and peeled, and peeled hardboiled eggs. When my sister came for a visit she complained that I'd become too controlling about the way the bathroom hand towels were folded. I laughed at her reflection in the mirror as I picked away at a microscopic eyebrow hair with a pair of tweezers. Those goddamn things, they'll make you crazy.

After that battle royal with all my filth and fury reached its zenith, I sat stunned in the muted mustard hues of my psychopharmacologist's office, where she inquired in her usual cool, anonymously eastern European way, "what ees zees depression of which you write on zees intake questionnaire?" We made a subtle medical adjustment to my chemical makeup. But I know there's no kind of gel-coated cocktail for what truly ails me. Uncertainty.

I walked down Park Avenue after the appointment thinking that it isn't at all being alone that's been hardest about my husband being gone. In fact, it rather suits me in some ways. It creates a wide open internal space in which those pithy little obsessive demons can emerge and thrive inside me. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. They rear, they terrify and then I can purge them. But what's caused all this utter insanity is not that he's gone. It's that that there seems so much attached to his being gone: possibility, upendedness, alpha, omega, beginnings, and endings. It's so weighted, his absence. But rather than grounding me in anything I could hang onto and derive some meaning from, it instead sent me surging straight up into the stratosphere without a capsule. I've been Major Tom, looking down at the life I had, watching it get smaller and smaller, seeing nothing ahead but a big, black, starless sky.

Perhaps I've broken through the ozone or something. Or at least begun to. I'm feeling ready to harness all this intensity, all these feelings of directionlessness and kid fears and use them to, I dunno, make some discoveries. I don't wanna pick fights with the creepy cross-dresser anymore. I don't wanna peel eggs on my porch in the rain or be obsessively tidy. I don't even care about getting blonder (okay, that might be a stretch). I have no idea what we're going to do about LA. I have no idea where we're supposed to be or what the right decision is about anything. I think we did the right thing by forcing change where we could, by surging forward in spite of having no bona fide evidence we should, but I don't really know that we did. What I want most to do is just say that. I. Do. Not. Know. I don't know, I don't know, I don' t know. I'm thinking the more I hear it, the less like a life sentence it feels. The more like...a second skin. Something I can breathe in.

So, there it is. Some tiny little shred of it. As it is today but will not, in any way, ever shall be.

Amen.