Madness

I love, love, love it when just the right song comes to me to mark the day, and today is one of those days:

I, I can't get these memories out of my mind,
And some kind of madness has started to evolve.
(Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma...)
And I, I tried so hard to let you go,
But some kind of madness is swallowing me whole, yeah
(Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma...)

Some kind of madness has swallowed me whole over these last, oh, I don't know, handful of years now, maybe? And that's the madness of being completely in love with someone who claims to be completely in love with me and then when I ask him to marry me or move in he says no thanks, I think I'll move back to where I came from. And that's really just the beginning of the madness. Then you have last Christmas, when he got back in touch and said he wanted to get back together and move back to Wisconsin. So what's my response? I buy him a plane ticket to visit for his birthday, he comes, we all love seeing him, and then shortly afterward, he becomes less available again, until eventually, we agree to break up, because it's not working for either one of us. But by that point, I've already bought plane tickets for the three of us to visit him in August, you know, because my kids have been counting on having this East Coast adventure with this man, whom they love, whom they thought was going to be their Stepdad. So we go, and not surprisingly, I'm still just as crazy about him as I ever was, even though, while we were broken up, turns out he slept with someone else, and that hurts. When we leave, I suggest we no longer be in contact, but then I don't stick to that, because I just find my feelings for him so confusing and confounding. I start this deep healing work, and he's the one I want to talk to about it, because he's so totally awesome about all of it. He always has been, since the beginning, and he helped me work through major residual trauma from the abuse I suffered in my childhood. So I do call him, and he's there for me, and each time that happens my heart leaps up and says: "Yay! He is your person. He wants to be your person. You weren't wrong about him. You are going to get to be with him again. Of course you are! How could it happen any other way? You've worked so hard and waited so long and the two of you are so good together in so many ways -- how could it be otherwise?" And then the same thing happens that has always happened with us: he becomes less available, I say I need more, he says he can't give me more, rinse, repeat. So I decide we can't talk anymore and so we don't but I still find a way to restart the cycle over -- this time by texting him about the vision that I have during a big crying jag last weekend. The vision is basically making it clear to me that he's just not choosing to take the plunge with me so I point that out to him, as if, I don't know, if he realizes that he'll suddenly decide to take the plunge? Nope. He barely answers, says he'll get to it later, but then doesn't, so I ask him about it in a few days, and he says he can't take the plunge until he knows he can stand strongly on his own two feet. Do I take the hint now? I do not. This tenaciousness that I've got going for me, it serves me very well in some settings, but not so well in others. The length of this paragraph is proof of that. Anyway, I try again to say come back to me, I love you, work on your stuff here, work on it with me, don't turn your back on our love, please. And then FINALLY, he answers with enough clarity that:

I have finally seen the light,
And I have finally realized
What you mean.

He tells me he's doing what he can, but working his way back to us isn't that.

Ouch.

Oh, and he also said he loved me.

The parentheses in the next verse were there, with the exception of the ones I added to the last two lines:

But now I have finally seen the end (finally seen the end)
And I'm not expecting you to care (expecting you to care)
But I have finally seen the light (finally seen the light)
I have finally realized (realized)
I need (something more than) your love
I need (something much more than) your love...

And as difficult as that realization is, the clarity of his statement is a gift. As my therapist would say, it leaves me with a choice: Do I want to continue to pine after a man who isn't working his way back to us?

I do not.