Opportunities

Now that I am unattached, I am trying to take advantage of the opportunities that were closed to me before. I could not, for example, go to my (male) friend's house and brainstorm ideas for a twisted web video when I had a relationship to maintain. I could not entertain a daytime fantasy of a horribly cliched trip to Italy when I had to budget for two people. I could not take in extra side work as a stitcher at the theater company where I spent much of my late teens because of nagging concerns that Gino would need me for something. I cannot say that I would not happily give up doing all of this if he called me, told me let's call this off and move back in together as husband and wife, but it is nice to fill up my time with something other than eating Twizzlers and watching Snapped.
Dating is an opportunity I am not really that jazzed about, truthfully, and it seems to be the only one that most people think of, not counting my close friends. My best friend Najwa asked me what I want the other day. -As in, out of life? I asked.
-Yeah, like, what do you want to do now?
Who knows what I want out of life? I don't even know if I want to eat dinner later or if I just want to drink bourbon and watch Alien again. I have a few short-term goals, but that is as far ahead as I can think right now. One thing I want is for my stomach to stop feeling like it is full of needles. Then I want to get comfortable with not having anyone to answer to and no one to take care of. Then I want my own place to live. Then, just maybe, I might date.
My co-worker friend Christina said to me the other day, -You were born to be a mother. You know you want to meet someone to have babies with.
I do, but what if I don't? I have seen so many supergirls, women who should be treated like queens and who have achieved far more than the idiots who overlook them, get passed over for one arbitrary reason or another. What hope do I have, with my okay looks and my jokes that are only funny to some and the emotional weight of a failed relationship hanging from my neck like a cement block? I might never find the right person or have children, and that won't be the end of the world. I will do other things. I will be happy no matter what happens, and I know that is true. Even if Gino had not decided to end our marriage, we might never have had children. He was not ready, at 31, to give over as much as a person needs to give over when a child is brought into a marriage. He still would need, I imagined, to be the most important person, the only brand that matters, in the relationship. I opined that he would be ready when he was around 50 years old, that being an old dad would be much better for him than trying to force himself to be a young dad. I, on the other hand, feel more than ready for children. I have felt ready for a while, despite knowing all that I now know from girlfriends about what having a new baby is really like. I was even, I am ashamed to admit, contemplating trying to get pregnant soon. I had brought it up with Gino over Valentine's Day, and he pouted and slouched like a teenager. This made what I had suspected abundantly clear: he was not mature enough to give me what I wanted, and this meant we might never have children. I was coming around to this reality when Gino told me it was over.
I feel relieved by these truths just as often as I feel sad and angry about everything else. Gino had released me, from an uncertain future that probably would meet a dead end eventually, and a marriage that was skewing one-sided. Once I was by myself again, I wasn't yearning for how things had been recently, but how things were during the good years, when we were not dependent on anyone else and we were so in love it hardly made sense to us. That kind of love is unrealistic even when it really exists. I loved him so much, was so taken with him, that being away from him for a few days was agonizing. I had never felt this strongly about anyone, it was an intensity of feeling I could not look at for too long or else it would burn my retinas. I longed to be back there, with my 22-year-old self, falling in love with him. I did not want to go back to how things had been just recently, with no concrete plan for the future, no projection of how long we would be living with his parents, and no motivation.
He seems motivated as all-get-out now that I am out of the picture, and that gives me an ache in my guts like nothing else. What hurts is seeing him look happy, appear as if he is ten pounds lighter and three inches taller just because he has gotten me out of his life. I tell everyone that I want him to be happy, and I do, but not yet. I want him to be miserable and hate himself, to feel the full weight of being unloved. I am not above wanting him to suffer just a little more than I am. If I was a better person, I would be able to let go of this, but I am not, and I realize that now. For now, I just want to imagine that he feels worse than I do, and that he regrets letting me go. I know it's not true, but it could be.
The truth that is staring me right in the face is that this is going to be much, much harder for me than it is for him. Of course it is. Loving someone who doesn't love you is, if not the hardest thing, to live with, then it is at least in the top five. He will, of course, have an easier time recovering because he has already fallen out of love with me. I have not gotten there yet. He can already go out and have sex with someone else and not feel so twisted up and sad that he wants to hide inside of his own skin, because he won't be trying to replace me with someone else. I can't move on yet because my love for him is not dead yet. Love is like a plant when it is well-tended. If I have kept it thriving for seven years, it won't just die because I ignore it for a few days. It needs to be locked up in a dark closet, watered with bleach, set on fire and then abandoned until it shrivels and fades. I haven't been able to kill it yet.