Willie Nelson, “Always on My Mind”
I want to be protected now. I want to be shielded from all of this. Ever since I found out about the speed at which your name changed from Jae Ehrich to Jae Ehrich-Meyer I feel like someone has been punching me in the heart. 12 days this has laid on me and I wonder at all of it. I wonder how it could hurt so bad even though I knew you had joined a cult in part due to the spiritual propaganda of a shared therapist. In large part due to the fact that you have toiled in life to suppress the endless rage your family seeded in you. You have long required a dollhouse to hide away from your humanity in a time of grief.
At some point I became aware that your intent had strictly come from a desire to humiliate and frighten me. I keep hoping you just morphed into a different person. A person wounded by their deceptive corrupt family. A person protected by me somehow, even though I always thought it was the reverse.
But it’s been how I hate myself that matters. And you knew that. You knew you would wound me by turning ALL your promises into lies and treating me like a stalker after 15 years of marriage. I did everything you asked and still you did this. The promises of friendship and shared holidays and a clear-minded negotiation of our separation. You said you didn’t lie, you just didn’t know what you could afford. As if that was the lie that mattered. I didn’t care. I knew you couldn’t afford it and I told you as much the last time we spoke. But you promised a kinder parting and served me with a summer sleeping on an air mattress on a floor next to a giant rat doorway. It was probably for the best that my surroundings reflected my feelings.
I lived in terror that entire summer and ignored your pretentious hateful emails trying to push me into a negotiation that absolved you of everything, including your humanity. “Nickel and diming” me you called it. You became so surreally Dickensian I was embarrassed to tell anyone because I believed I had deserved this on some level. I never included friends in our dialogue. I honestly couldn't believe I had been married to such a zombie for 15 years. It was too much to absorb. And I liked your memory much better than what you had revealed yourself to truly be. These days my friends look shocked when I even acknowledge your existence. I paint you as a mythical Hobbit I once loved and leave it at that. The fantasy alive in my mind, if dead in my heart.
That first year of our separation, all I could think about was meeting your family that first Thanksgiving and how reckless and cruel they were. My first instinct was to bolt. I knew then and there would be a price I would pay tying myself to someone from a family such is this. A family truly incapable of even the most basic etiquette towards your new partner. There would be something in you I couldn’t help. I knew it then and I relive it now. Was it all worth it to watch you revert into the needy addictive thing that your entire family is? Snorting religious and relationship drugs like a crazed zealot. I don't know yet. I keep hoping the fantasy will dovetail with the loss of it and give me some solace about the choice I made to give my reedy heart to a being from such a foul tree.
I was told an argument, that I was certainly not solely at fault for, about money, prompted an apparent breakdown. The email looked like your therapist and cult-friend had written it for you. That was the first step. Telling me there was no contact between us on my last spring break. And then I flew back to school and you crashed all our accounts. You said something hostile about credit card use which had been negligible other than the trip to Europe, that YOU insisted on, and a dinner out for a friend dying of cancer who had lost her home and everything she owned. Literally.
You enacted a malicious deception and you had no qualms at all about your actions. You waited until I left the state and told me that you were never speaking to me again in the "foreseeable future" and that you would give me nothing you had promised, materially or personally. That you had put my things in storage units, claiming you were careful, though I discovered many things were broken and missing pieces. That you were being the conscious citizen in our break-up. That you were faithful to reality and I was no more. And I knew it was right for us to stop talking. I had no contention about that. Though the total removal of any genuine civility or honesty mixed badly with your insinuative gas-lighting. I discovered that you had in fact been paying close attention to your parents' unending battle tactics in a war never won.
Apparently, I had only earned deception and I had no right to expect any respect. Because of an argument you couldn't handle, I had no right to any sincerity after 15 years. You were them. You weren’t the victim in Great Expectations… you were the Ehrich-Cotter perpetrator you’d waited your whole life to become. Conjoined of a cynical self-hating patriarch and a mad abused matriarch. I did this. I must accept that my need to leave a marital prison did not mix well with the particular cocktail of social imprisonment that resides on Tory Lane.
The last I heard from Perez Ehrich, I expressed my shock at your sudden desire to eradicate me by shutting me out and throwing my things out of the house. In his "I'm being so sneaky" tone he accused me of cheating on you. He basically told me what all infidelity-laden Ehrich's must now believe, that I cheated. He honestly didn't believe that you would have behaved this way unless that was the cause. He also unintentionally revealed that you had been lying to him about the treatise we had made... You lied to your father to implicate me. He would have sided with you even if you had been truthful. Letting everybody think that I had done things I hadn't was a hard lesson about what a total and complete asshole you had resigned to becoming. That you are.
It was irrelevant but it hurt and terrified me that I had laid myself vulnerable to your faux honesty all those years. That you were just lying in wait beneath all that friendly goop you use to manipulate people. I knew it was possible but I thought love mattered. It turns out your abandonment narcissism ("I am the only one in pain") mattered more. So was it love? When the goop washed off I was treated with the identical apathy that was the ill-concealed hatred that you festered toward anyone you believed you'd earned the right to harm with impunity. I was your mother suddenly and utterly. Except you became more vain and made more of a pretense in your indifference toward me. You started a war trying to find the way to hurt me most and believed my angry response justified your actions. You wanted my anger so you could feel superior. Jae Ehrich, forever childish before understanding. That's how little our love breaking meant. You needed to exact a price and pull your prize and sob to your friends of what a monster I'd been. How was I fooled by you for so long? How could I be so damaged as to allow for this?
And now I have to accept that on many levels you didn’t love me or see me at all. And that’s what sits. I now know that’s what sits because when I saw the picture of your wife, I felt nothing at all. I haven’t seen a real picture of you in years, which was no doubt intentional and presently a relief. But when I saw her I felt nothing. I realized that even if I had ever really been in love with you (and it wasn’t part of some desperate lonely ehrich-gas-lighting) I wasn’t at all anymore. And I got stupid and sent you this:
“I am sorry for everything that led to this moment. Gerry was dead for 4 minutes. Brehan's mother was murdered. I am heartbroken at your diligent forgetfulness of everything and your abdication of the barest notion of our once eternal family ties.
I know you are not who i knew, but what transpired is still crippling... for both of us. You have remarried in barely the time i've had to begin grieving your loss. Your work-around for what is eternally true shocks and burns. Remember me honestly, if nothing else. It is hard to feel I meant this little.
Mazel tov on your new journey. I hope you will be happy. I wish you all the best.”
And when I said I was sorry in the beginning, I meant I was sorry. And when I said I was heartbroken, I meant I was heartbroken. And when I said I was grieving, I meant I was grieving. And when I said I felt shocked and burnt, I meant I was shocked and burnt. And when I said remember me honestly, I meant, do what you will but don’t make it false. And when I said Mazel Tov, I meant Mazel Tov.
And you wrote this:
“I am so sick of your anger. What claim do you imagine you still have on me, Meg? We broke up. I cannot help you. Unless there is something that you would like to discuss without attacking me, please stop contacting me.
Jae”
But I had written you about the family things. And they weren’t angry. And you ignored them totally. More lies from the desk of Jeannette VW Ehrich. Ahem, Ehrich-Meyer. What I said upset you because it was honest and not an attack. And I felt pain because you have worked so hard to teach me to loathe you by movements. You wanted me to hate you when I don’t. You wanted me to feel rejected because I rejected you. And I’ve wanted to forgive you but rejection is different than betrayal and it’s taking longer to see your betrayal as anything other than it was. And in March 2014 you initially denied your promises and then half-acknowledged them (after you'd ruled out a legal battle) and just said you "didn't know before" that you wouldn't be keeping any of them. And you discarded me with your things. You made the body of us into lies. And my favorite cats died and I never got to say goodbye. Is it any wonder I felt raw anger towards that which I believed I once loved?
I went to a favored card reader some time ago. I asked about you. She laid the cards and didn’t even ponder them curiously, as she typically did. She did something she had never done before. After laying the cards she immediately swept them off the table and snorted angrily, quipping in a disgusted tone, “She’ll get what she wants.” And she looked at me with pity and sorrow, like she knew what I would find out... that you’d barely let the corpse cool. That what you really wanted more than truth was to revert to false ideological safety measures to cope with the rest of your corporeal life. That these things would hurt me to know because even if you despise me, I will always care for you. That damn woman always seems know things she couldn’t possibly know.
I guess I am mostly indifferent to your anger now. It hurts but I’m learning I didn’t deserve what you did to me. And while my vitriolic response was unfair, the way you literally wanted to destroy me was more unfair. I'm not "in" love with you anymore and even though I hurt, that’s a relief. But your response to my grief, the first thing I’ve said to you of any substance in many years, is your true reveal. And your hasty marriage and reaction to my hurt about it, leaves you looking absurd and hung up on what we were more than I am. I guess I’d rather hurt for a moment now and live the rest of my life without your petty hatred. I’m contented for the moment to accept that while you never really saw me, I saw you.
You tried to take my belief away. I believed in you. I have to live with my poor choice and I will likely never fully recover from the deception. I think you chose me because you thought such a crippled sad person could never leave. That's what Liz basically saw. I think it shocked you when it became clear I would have to. I think your father's desperate solitude came knocking on the hollow log that all of this turned out to be. And now I must expect everyone to be as ruthless and inhumane as the only person I was sure I was in love with. I don't know where I'll be when I see the other side of this but I hope it's in this life.
When I sob for missing you, I know I miss the fantasy. I don't know what happened to you Jae, but it's not my fault. It never was. Thankfully my meditated heartbreak email made you show your hand and remind me what a unconstrained mess lies inside your pretend containment. This wasn't my fault. You told me I was to blame for everything in every way you could, and I wasn't. I kept trying to defend myself by attacking you back and I didn't need to. Everything you said after a certain point in our relationship was meditated falsehood. I know beneath it all it's because you always blame yourself for everything. Yet it's no excuse to vilify me. There never was a good excuse for that. This wasn't my fault. I don't need to feel guilty because of the things you told me I was. I'm not the things you told me I was. Not any of them. I just need to keep reminding myself of this when the fantasy of "our meaningful past" predates on my heart. You create your own hurt Jae. Your post-Meg choices illustrated how much this is true. I don't need to regret someone who now pretends they never wanted me at all.
I may be flawed and sad and crazy and dysfunctional and most of the horrible things you call me to the people in your world. But I still know I'm not hopelessly addicted to a lie about what happened. I tried kindness and I tried honesty and I wanted to say goodbye for the right reasons. I may be lost because I'm confused. But I know I'm not vacant. I know I'm not a sad little wealthy kid sitting by the pool alone thinking hurting the people that loved me will get me out of the trap my family set for me.
