I had decided about a week after my first venture into the world of dating after the (unofficial) end of my marriage, ended in spontaneous combustion I was not even going to try again for a good long time. While certainly was mentally and emotionally prepared to be with someone again. I wasn't prepared to be again not with someone, if that makes sense. Although on the other hand, how many people are ready for a relationship to end when it does? I suppose spontaneous combustion actually isn't the right metaphor. That implies there was a large dramatic end. There wasn't. She just choose to disappear like fucking Houdini with no word of explanation or even goodbye.
So I closed the doors, but forgot to lock them. I told myself I wasn't again going to talk to start talking to girls for the purposes of dating anymore. Then, right before I started my crappy food service job, I got a message off a dating site. I rationalized. She messaged me, so I'm not doing the starting, so it's okay. We talked, we made plans to go out, we had a very good time. I was smitten with her amazing one dimpled smile and enthralled by nearly three hours intelligent conversation. We went our separate ways and talked some more, including the possibility of going out again before she fed me some standard rejection line about "not having time to date, but we can still be friends."
I tell her that's fine, as if I had a choice in the matter, not expecting to actually hear from her ever again. But I did, that Sunday night via text message as I was parked in front of the house of Ms. Houdini, pondering knocking on her door or other such foolishness. Just was I needed to push me back into sanity. I did hear from the girl with the smile again and again, on a near daily basis now, for several months later. Perhaps this one does really want to be friends?
After actually having seen the microscopic size of my food service pay check, I shut down my denial, I again decided dating is not for me. It's expensive and I can't afford it. So I revised my rules to include not asking women out because I can't afford it. Which lasted all of a day, until again I was contacted on an online dating site by a beautiful woman asking to buy me dinner. I didn't contact her and I won't be paying. Somehow they keep finding loop holes, and I keep going for it.
We go out to dinner where she's loud, very funny, mildly obnoxious and slightly inappropriate. I've met the female version of me. We go out for coffee. Nearly six hours after it began, we finally call it a night. I'm awestruck, terrified and confused. I ask myself if I can date myself? I usually like to be the biggest personality in the room, and it's clear she does too. I'm not sure if we'll compete or compliment but in the end I decide there's only one way to find out. So the next week I cook for her, we watch a DVD and play Super Mario Brothers. It's sounds like a terrible date, but for my broke ass it's perfect and besides Super Mario was her idea, not mine.
I see her again, and then again, and I'm enjoying just being with her, but I soon realize that it's not quite clear if we're dating, or just hanging out. I ponder and plot the best way to approach this awkward subject when she brings it up first. Neither of us are sure what we want, so we decide not to decide. Over the next two months we reach the same conclusion at least twice more, never crossing that line, but never backing away from it either. I meet her friends, she meets mine. I call her the "Girl I Might Be Seeing." She calls me her "Boyfriend Type Person." Vague titles for an ambiguous relationship, yet I'm enjoying her company, and for the now, that's all that matters.
Just as important, if not more so, she was able to give me a tool I'd been looking for. The ability put into words what I hadn't been. An abstract thought that had been bouncing around my head not yet forming a complete sentence. Life isn't graded on a curve. Sure I could go around and tell everyone my sad sob story of unemployment, depression and the failure of my marriage and get by on sympathy alone, but to the rest of the world I just look like a slacker and a fuck up. Maybe I am, even when graded on a curve. But it's all I've been able to do lately though ... Survive on sympathy. But really what has surviving like that gotten me, except once mind blowingly drunk? The rest of the world isn't going to grade me based on a curve, I need to stop doing so as well. I know this may plunge me deeper into my misery in the short term, but I feel like in the long run, this will serve me much better.
When I was a child the Never Ending story was about as cool of a movie as there was. A boy hero, a flying puppy dragon thing and big titted statues that shot freakin' laser beams out of their eyes. As an adult things change, and the harsh reality of the world sets in. You know what happened to Falcor? He was recycled into the dog car in Dumb and Dumber.
It goes something like this. There's a whole universe, a whole damn book going on inside a mind. But it's slipping away, giving way to the Nothing. It's nothing specific, not even emptiness. It's the Nothing. Fighting fights, winning some, losing others, but the Nothing still consumes everything. Seeking help from the weary and experienced who doesn't fear death because at least dying is something. And the quest to stay ahead of the Nothing goes on until the world implodes and all that's left is a single grain of sand, and it's not even clear if it's reality or fantasy. That's how the only way I know to describe a real depression to someone who hasn't lived it. The movie is a thinly veiled metaphor for depression.
I know this about depression and I don't know how to overcome it on a long term basis. A few days I feel like I win the fight, some days I feel like I lose. Mostly I feel like it's almost a draw. The bottom line is, working is not working for me. Food service hours are wild and unpredictable. One week I can barely get twenty hours, the next I'm pushing fourty. One night I'm closing, the next opening, then a three hour middle of the day shift then nothing for four days. I can't budget for the wild swings in hours. My schedule and sleeping and eating patterns are erratic. I'd been very stricic about those to keep my depression in check. I don't see my children the way I used to. Don't get me wrong, being out among people does wonders for me. Compared at least to living in the middle of no where with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Spending time with coworkers, most of whom are at ten years or more younger and still in high school and college hardly passes for socialization though.
My work performance is erratic. Some days I'm just thrilled to be out of the house. Some days going to work feels like a smack in the face reminding me of who I once was and what I've lost. I used to be someone. I used to be important. I used to be paid more than twice this. I used to be a husband. I used to a father who tucked his kids into bed every night. I used to know the last name of the person I talked to most every day. It's hard to take pride in a job well done when your pride has been stripped away to nothingness.
I hope this poor attitude is going unnoticed at work. I may not mentally be able to give it my all, but I thought I'd at least be able to hide it. I was wrong. I get a talked to separately by two different supervisors, within the last ten minutes of one shift. I want to tell them to cut me a break. I'm tempted to tell them that it's an accomplishment I even got out bed that morning. But they don't care, they don't want to be the ones viewed as a slacker for letting me slide, they're doing their job. I'm not. Maybe I do just have enough pride left that I'd rather fail than have my life graded on a curve again.
Still, even if I was over-performing, I can't pay the bills on this meager, inconsistent salary. I'm stuck in this odd middle ground between being poor enough to receive government aid and being able to afford the things that keep me alive. I get no aid, but I cannot afford to live. One month my soon to be ex-wife makes the house payment for me. Before you mistake that for generosity, it's subtracted from her half of the credit card bill we created together. Not to mention her name is still on the mortgage. Soon after I cash out my 401k, my last stash of cash, just to pay bills. I am afloat, for a few months at least. But I still have negative cash flow.
The Girl I Might Be seeing offers a solution in that her employer is hiring. While it won't replace the other job, it will get me to the break even point as a second job. She gets me the interview, which goes terribly, but I'm hired anyway. I think only because she's the best employee there, and any "friend" of hers might just be as good as her. I reflect on the judgement involved in working with someone you might be dating and decide that as long as neither one of is the boss of the other, it won't be a big deal. I also decide I'm too broke to make any other decision. I come in for my orientation. An hour after I leave she calls me to tell me about her promotion.
I now work for company that does telemarketing of internet advertising to lawyers and whose owner and CFO are former car salesmen. It's the three circles of employment hell in one convenient package. Some days I get Matlock on the phone and he needs his secretary to turn his computer on for him, mostly I get hung up on by secretaries and paralegals. I can handle the rejection, hell I'm an expert on that by now. But telemarketing is stressful. Make sales or you're useless. I feel like I'm terrible at it and that every day could be my last. I'm told by a coworker this is par for the course, so I try not to think about it.
I go to lunch one day, head out the back door to walk to the store for some grub. I walk through my new employer's parking lot, which conveniently bordered by the building I worked in two years ago before this nightmare began. The irony isn't lost on me. This tall imposing industrial building of my former employer dwarfing the small nondescript office of my new one.
During my walk to the store I see a former co-worker cooking lunch on the grill for my old office mates and I decide to stop and catch up. He asks where I'm working. I point. He asks if I like it. I shrug, "It's a job, and I earn a paycheck." He asks if my wife is working. I tell him with a grimace that she moved out over a year ago. After a moment of awkward silence another former coworker appears in the door and greets me, unaware the bombshell I just dropped. I'm told that he felt really bad when I left because he liked working with me, and he didn't even get a chance to say goodbye. He offers me a burger, for some reason, as a token of his appreciation of the five years we worked together and disappears back inside for a bun and assorted condiments.
The first coworker is still outside grilling, he looks at me thoughtfully and asks "So how much of you two splitting up do you think was because you lost your job?" A deep poignant question I've asked myself a hundred thousand times and was still completely unprepared to answer. I think he wanted me to crucify my former boss, I'm not sure. I mumbled some answer about how we had more than our fair share of problems and the job loss just made everything worse and took away opportunity to fix them. It was the politically correct answer, I don't know if it was the truth or not.
It wasn't a fair question. If I'd been better at my job, would I still be married? Would I still get to see my kids every day? Was it one project that cost me that job? Was it coming in late once? What tiny mistake did I make that pushed me from national-award winning employee, to completely expendable, costing me everything? Costing me my life and my dreams .. what was it? What one thing could I have done different to stop the demonic domino effect that's become my life? Not because I want to or even could fix anything. It's too late for that anymore. I just don't want to make the same mistake twice . . .
The second co-worker returns with the hamburger. At first I think about how I worked for that damn place for five years and a hamburger is the only token of appreciation I ever got. Then I think better of it and realize that as a spontaneous gift from someone I hadn't seen or heard from in two years, that burger tasted pretty damn good. It was nice to know someone actually gave a shit, that I was missed and even remembered.
During the months since our one-and-done date, the girl with the amazing smile and I talk on a near daily basis. We're roughly in the same place in our marriages; over in every way except on paper. We talk about our kids. We talk about dating again for the first time and how different it is outside of college, with children and after an marriage. We talk about who we're dating and we talk about how hard it is to trust again but at the same time you so want to skip all the getting to know you phase and just go to where you're comfortable phase. I wonder if that's where I went wrong with the magician. We talk of the pains of rebounding, dating and relationships in general. It's nice to be able to really relate to someone again, even if only as victims of the same unhappy fate. We talk and talk, totally intimate, totally honest and totally electronic. It's fulfilling, yet a little hollow because of the chosen method of communication. We talk of missing having conversations with out words, only a grin or a sideways glance. How comforting it was to have that, even if you were miserable.
I guess I still have that, my ex can still read me like a book. She's known about every date I've ever had since we parted ways just by looking at me the next time we traded kids. She even knew, with just a look, when the magician disappeared and then again when Girl I Might Be seeing finally decided that we weren't a couple. I think she even tried to talk to me once about her relationship issues with her beau. I didn't take the bait. I'm glad we're still friendly, but I do not want to be friends with my ex. Not now, maybe not ever. I offer her what little bits she wants to know about my life, because I see little point in hiding them since she still can read me like that, but I offer none without solicitation.
Speaking of solicitation, the telemarketing job does offer me one thing, other than a salary. It offered me the mental freedom from feeling like the food service job was the end of the world. My mood at that job improved and so did my work ethic. I was starting to enjoy the work, it showed, At least I thought so. Apparently I was wrong as I was cut to one meager shift a week. I am again desperately looking for work. I thought I was finally starting to fill in the hole I'd been living in, but instead I still merely slowing the downward spiral.
I'm feeling low about this and the end of that non-relationship when I called my kids the next day. I ask my five year old daughter about her day and she insists that I first tell her about mine. This makes me smile. We talk and she winds up crying, sad because she misses me and scared because she's moving an hour away next week. I want to tell her how much I miss her too. I want to tell her I'm scared too. But I don't and I can't. I'm Dad. I'm supposed to make everything okay. I just don't how to do that anymore. All she wants is to be held and told everything will be alright. Daddy wants that too sweet-pea . . . Daddy wants that too.
This is my life now.
*hug*
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